Long Paddock for Southerly 81.1: Ireland and Other Islands
This issue is a Festschrift for Professor Elizabeth McMahon, to honour her service to Southerly as its editor from 2008 to 2022. Alongside her dedication to Southerly, Professor McMahon has also long served the Irish community in Australia in myriad ways. It is fitting then that this issue also focusses on Ireland, engaging with our contemporary understandings of Ireland and Irishness and their entanglements with Australian life. This issue asks, what does it mean to be Irish, or of Irish heritage, or to be interested in Irishness, while living and working in Australia on unceded Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander land?
With this issue we introduce a slow-cycle, staggered, publishing timeline, where we will publish each issue’s open access, online works ahead of, or in concert with, or after the print issue. We are doing this to honour each online work, to complement the print issue, to offer our readers more access to the best new Australian writing through Southerly over a longer period of time, to offer Australian writers more opportunities to have their work published, and also to acknowledge and mitigate the precarious material conditions of the labour with which Southerly is published.
We are proud to launch the publication of Southerly 81.1 ‘Ireland and Other Islands’ with a tribute to the literary giant Lionel Fogarty (1958 – 2026), written by former Southerly editor David Brooks, as well as with Anne Brewster’s review of Miles Franklin Award shortlisted novel Discipline by Randa Abdel Fattah, and Jack Stanton’s review of When I Am Sixty-Four by Deborah Adelaide. You can also read a special preview of Emily Thornton’s essay ‘On Unceded Land: What My Mixed Aboriginal–Irish Ancestry Cannot Settle’ which will be published in full in our forthcoming print issue in October 2026.
Southerly 81.1: ‘Ireland and Other Islands’ will be released in and available for purchase from October 2026.
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A TRIBUTE
Lionel Fogarty (1958–2026), by David Brooks
ESSAYS
Read a preview of Emily Thornton’s powerful essay ‘On Unceded Land: What My Mixed Aboriginal–Irish Ancestry Cannot Settle’. The full essay can be read in our forthcoming print issue.
PREVIEW: Emily Thornton: “On Unceded Land: What My Mixed Aboriginal–Irish Ancestry Cannot Settle”.
REVIEWS
Anne Brewster reviews Randa Abdel-Fattah’s Discipline
Jack Cameron Stanton reviews Debra Adelaide’s When I Am Sixty-Four