Category: Long Paddock

The Way We Live Now is a special issue of Southerly edited by Melissa Hardie and Kate Lilley. In the spirit of Lauren Berlant, this issue tracks “the unfolding activity of the contemporary moment”: “a stretch of time in which one moves around with a sense that the world is at once intensely present and enigmatic, such that the activity of living demands both a wandering absorptive awareness and a hypervigilance that collects material that might help to clarify things” (Berlant, Cruel Optimism 4). The diverse work offered here, in Southerly’s first online-only issue, gathers “Australian” writing produced in many…

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Long Paddock The Lives of Others is concerned with the debts and obligations that accompany the passing of the generations. “For no one bears this life alone” is how Hölderlin describes the mutuality that binds us to our forebears. Each of the contributors to this issue of Southerly endeavours to understand the ways in which this mutuality guides out actions and behaviours. What forms of writing and memorialisation can assist us to acknowledge the unfinished nature of the relationships that link the present to the past, the living to the dead? Is there a way to answer the phantom’s call…

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This issue of Southerly pays tribute to David Brooks, who is retiring as editor after two decades’ stewardship. It includes poetry, fiction, essays and memoir that interweave readings of David’s work with accounts of the various literary communities that David has worked in over four decades from Canberra to North America, Perth, Slovenia, Sydney and now, Katoomba. Together, these pieces create a world of a very specific kind, one populated by words and word people and the currents between them in specific times and places. They also enable us to draw out recurrent themes and practices. The issue is a…

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The theme of this issue, Mixed Messages, relates in the main to a thread running through the essays, all of which engage with texts that challenge the limits of genre. These challenges include the status and influence of what might be termed a secondary genre deployed by writers whose renown is based on another form: Brigitta Olubas considers the short fiction of novelist Shirley Hazzard; and Cheryl Taylor introduces the poetry of novelist Thea Astley. Kate Livett delves into the mixed media, specifically music and photography, at the core of Helen Garner’s The Children’s Bach, and Peter Kirkpatrick examines the…

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This issue of Southerly captures a snapshot of Australian writing today. Stories from writers just starting out on their long apprenticeship are placed side-by-side work from Australia’s finest essayists, writers and poets. This rich and expansive issue asks what it means to write in a contemporary Australia fraught with inequality, divisiveness, and the unrelenting exploitation of country. In a special collaboration with Sydney Story Factory, which runs workshops for young and marginalised writers, this issue of Southerly includes short stories that demonstrate the vibrancy and the vision of Australia’s up-and-coming writers. Including essays from Caroline Lefevre and John Kinsella, poetry…

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Questionable characters are the characters we can’t define, forget, resist or feel entirely comfortable with. They challenge out values and beliefs and surprise us with new imaginings of ethos. This issue of Southerly draws together a rich and eclectic range or essays, poetry and fiction. Luigi Gussago argues that Peter Carey’s histories present a challenge to the univocal false-consciousness of Australian colonial history, while Debra Adelaide’s Reading Australia essay on Thea Astley’s Drylands argues that Astley draws “text, author and reader into an embrace so intimate they are barely distinguishable”. The detective fiction “pot-boilers” of Shane Martin, AKA George Johnston,…

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Persia is the name of an ancient civilisation, a cultural zone, and an aesthetic imaginary. It has long fascinated Western travellers, scholars of cultural dialogue and mystical poets. This issue of Southerly is an intervention in how Persian culture and poetics are perceived and adopted in today’s Australian and global literary scenes. How do contemporary Australian poets and scholars respond to the Sufi ghazals of Hafez of Shiraz? What has been the understanding of Afghan cameleers according to the discourse of Australian national identity? How are the questions of gender and identity addressed by contemporary Iranian writers? And what are…

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This intriguing issue presents essays, memoir and creative work by disabled and non-disabled writers on the subjects of disability and of the interrelation of writing and disability. Blind writer and critic Amanda Tink discusses the impact of Henry Lawson’s deafness on his style and created world. Ben Stubbs walks the streets of Adelaide blindfolded to learn more of the sightless city. Deaf author Jessica White discusses the deafness of Maud Praed. Josephine Taylor writes an incisive essay on Vulvodynia. There are discussions of visible and invisible disabilities, of the poetics of disability, of disability and silence, of little known or…

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This issue of Southerly presents writing by musicians and writers who cross mediums to collaborate and experiment in the spaces between words and music, including Hilary Bell, Phillip Johnston and Jonathan Mills. It includes archivist John Murphy’s reflections on Peter Sculthorpe’s house and Joseph Toltz writes of the experience of researching musical recollections from the Holocaust, and presents some of these memories from survivors. Michael Hooper shows how listening to Elliott Gyger’s operatic adaptation of David Malouf’s Fly Away Peter also re-attunes us to the novel. Dick Hughes speculates on the (jazz) music of heaven while David Brooks keeps an…

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