Long Paddock for Southerly 80.1: First, The Future

Southerly 80.1 cover, a black bird, wings outstretched, against an ochre and sepia toned backdrop

After pestilence, after pain, after wholeness, after emptiness, after life, after death, after a long hiatus, Southerly is back. ‘First, The Future’ is co-edited by guest co-editor K.A.Ren Wyld and new Southerly editor Roanna Gonsalves. We strongly affirm the crucial importance of imaginative labour and imaginative literary production i.e. the narrative and non-narrative literary forms of fiction, creative nonfiction and poetry, as well as of literary scholarship, in the passing down of knowledge between generations, as our world continues to deal with the fallout of colonialism, of genocide and war, of climate change and of AI.

This issue emphasises the value of the work we do as writers and scholars of literature, work that helps us to survive, to comprehend the past, to question power, to understand difference anew, to encounter our world again, through the words of another. We seek to valorise this unquantifiable yet priceless work of the imagination through literary production by providing a platform for Australia’s most insightful writers and thinkers to share their words with the world. It is through knowledge created by the spoken word and the written word that we have come through our shared pasts into our contemporary moment, and so we hope together in solidarity to consider freshly, first, the future.