Category: Long Paddock

“The War to End All Wars did no such thing and we find, in 2016, Australian personnel in multiple theatres of military engagement, a world riven with violent conflict and orchestrated cruelty, unprecedented numbers of peoples, and the all too familiar rise of the fascistic responses as imagined antidotes to chaos.” This issue of Southerly marks the centenary of World War I with a striking and thought-provoking collection of essays, memoir, short fiction and poetry on subjects ranging from individual experience of the Spanish Civil War, the war in Afghanistan, Vietnam, and the Iraq-Iran conflict of 1980-88 to imagined impacts…

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The Naked Writer 2 hones focus on the poet and author: their processes, habits and ambitions, and the intersections of their lives, and their work. The issue opens with David Brooks’ tribute to the remarkable woman of Australian letters, Veronica Brady. The issue also contains: novelist Fiona McFarlane’s reflections on reading Patrick White’s The Aunt’s Story; Kristina Olsson maps the writing of her acclaimed memoir Boy Lost; short-fiction writer Hayley Katzen meditates on writing, revelation and privacy; Shirley Hazzard specialist Brigitta Olubas reads the marriage of Hazzard and biographer Francis Steegmuller as a ménage à trois with Flaubert; and Joe…

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Elemental is concerned with our experience of the elements in an era of climate change. The four elements of classical thought (earth, fire, water, air) align with what we now call four states of matter and hence to what is termed the “material turn” in contemporary debates in the humanities. This material turn seeks new ways of understanding the physical world and is motivated by the urgency of shared vulnerability on the planet. In Australia this experience of extreme weather, including floods and fires, embroils the entire ecosystem including literary ecologies. This issue considers a range of Australian writers who…

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This issue considers how to think about the future in a time that doubts it will occur. It addresses the question of how culture retains its capacity to imagine possible futures in the face of multiple forces that threaten its existence: climate change, global war, the extinction of species. In local terms, Forward Thinking looks at how Australian literature imagines the world beyond present constraints and crises or as its impending corollary.           This issue of Southerly is available to purchase via our GumRoad site.   SHORT FICTION Amanda Hickie, Looting Lucy’s Adam Ousten, Chaos in…

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From the newest to the most established it would be an unusual writer who did not feel exposed – naked – at several stages in the creation and presentation of a work: when they sit down to the demands (so often their own demands of themselves) of the blank page or screen, when they first show the work to another, and when the work becomes subject to the comments and analyses of reviewers, critics, scholars. This issue of Southerly began to form around a handful of strong essays on Australian writers – Scott Esposito’s on J.M. Coetzee, Ann-Marie Priest’s on…

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The digital edition of Southerly 73.2 is available to purchase here. This link will take you to our old GumRoad storefront (an external site). Remaining issues will be moved to our own site, here, soon. The hardcopy edition of Southerly 73.2 is sold out. ESSAYS AND ARTICLES Melissa Boyde, Cultural Myths and Open Secrets John Bennett, Real Fables Angela Rockel, Owl POETRY Susan Adams, Slow Bleeding Chris Brown, The Nocturnal Ceremonies Michael Farrell, Character Alison Gorman, January Water Dragons John Kinsella, Birth on the Road to Gubbeen Frank Russo, Ponsonby Road Menagerie John Tranter, Lost Weekend in Boca Raton* Corey…

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