2008

SOUTHERLY 1 / 2008

Sister Arts

This issue focuses on the interconnections between literature, visual art and music in terms of collaboration, shared intensities, radical and defining differences. The essays consider a range of writers: Shirley Hazzard, Rosemary Dobson, Eleanor Dark and Dorothy Hewett and identify the large range of ways their writing takes on forms beyond or outside the accepted limits of literature. The issue also includes essays by practitioners reflecting on cross-genre connections in their own work, and others still on the role of book illustrations in the economy of literary readership and circulation. One of these essays analyses the nature of “gift” promised by the gift-book genre; the other, on the declining readership of Mary Grant Bruce’s Billabong series across the twentieth century, provides the cover of the issue. Much of the fiction and poetry included in the issue takes up the theme of artistic cross-over: from the literary articulation of musical experience to the dialogic connections and tensions between visual art and poetic form. The issue also contains non-themed work including exciting new fiction and poetry from established and emerging writers, and a reviews section.

POETRY
Jessica Wilkinson: Shoot the birds • Andrew Taylor: Dust • Bai Juyi (772–846) Grass • Jia Dao (779–843): Visiting the Hermit • Stuart Cooke: Berlin World • Angela Rockel: How I tell the Huon valley • To find a working definition of blessing • David Gilbey: Death and the Motorway • Kevin Gillam: east of then • Juned Subhan: Autumn • Carol Jenkins: Let the loneliness roll in • Jan Owen: Milady Propinquity • Robert Drummond: Approximately

FICTION
Jennifer Livett: The Commandant’s Letter • Kristel Thornell: Miramare Park • Amanda Curtin: Live Forever • Stephen Orr: Dr Singh’s Despair • Perle Besserman: Marriage and Other Travesties of Love

ESSAYS
Brigitta Olubas: Visual Art and Bourgeois Forms in Shirley Hazzard’s Fiction • Hazel Smith: Morphing writing practices and feminist experimentalism • Robyn Emerson: Requiem for A Little Bush Maid • Helen O’Reilly: Linda's Linoleum: Visual Imaging in Eleanor Dark’s Prelude to Christopher • Kate Livett: The Gift of Wisdom: Animals and Aphorism in Contemporary Gift Books • Jasna Novakovic: The dialectic of myth and politics in The Knight of the Long Knives by Dorothy Hewett • Elizabeth Allen: The Ghost of Icarus • Raffaele Marcellino: Music and words – siren and muse

REVIEWS
Kristen Lang of Nicolette Stasko, Glass Cathedrals: New & Selected Poems and Dennis Haskell, all the time in the world • Ann Penhallurick of Vanessa Berry, Strawberry Hills Forever • Anne Brewster of Anita Heiss, I’m not racist, but... • Laura Joseph of Libby Robin, How a Continent Created a Nation • David Brooks of Vrasidas Karalis, Recollections of Mr Manoly Lascaris and Didier Coste, Days in Sydney

SOUTHERLY 2 / 2008

Little Disturbances

Fifty years ago Grace Paley published The Little Disturbances of Man, a collection of short stories about the turbulent relationships between men and women. A truly good short story is a little disturbance, something that stays with you long after the last page is turned. For seven decades, Southerly has provided readers with innovative, thought-provoking and even disturbing short stories; and it has provided the publishing starting point for many emerging writers.

This special issue devoted to the short story continues that tradition. It includes new and familiar authors – Sunil Badami, Craig Cormick, Ross Duncan, Kathryn Heyman, Sharon Kent, Paddy O’Reilly, Adrienne Sallay, Mandy Sayer, Michael Wilding, and many others – in a collection that is varied and full of surprises.

Little Disturbances is dedicated to Pat Skinner, a prolific short story writer and Southerly’s editorial assistant between 1997–2008.

EDITORIALS
[Debra Adelaide, John Dale, David Brooks]

Pat Skinner Buffer Zone
Claire Aman Jap Floral
Sunil Badami The Drought
Helen Barnes-Bulley Jack and the Three Sisters
Chris Brophy Like a Diamond
Clinton Caward The Valley of the Single Fathers
Julie Chevalier The Library is a Social Institution
Jennifer Compton Landscaping
Craig Cormick And Still the Blizzard
Michael Crane Double Exposure
Ross Duncan The Overcoat
Jeremy Fisher How to Tell Your Father to Drop Dead
Geoffrey Gates The Renaissance Builders
Kathryn Heyman I Hope That I Don’t Fall in Love with You
Sharon Kent Coming Down the Mountain
William Lane The uncanny in Barbara Baynton’s “Scrammy ’And” and Christina Stead’s “The Triskelion”
Kirstyn McDermott Indigo in Absentia
Angela Meyer Dark Roots: An Interview with Cate Kennedy
Derek Motion The Shakespeare Title
Paddy O’Reilly How to Write a Short Story
Paddy O’Reilly The Word
Chris Raja Drew’s Seizure
Adrienne Sallay Virgin Sock-Washers and Tweed Jackets:
The Short Story in the 1970s
Mandy Sayer The Drovers’ Wives
Michelle Sim Winter
Warwick Sprawson The unremarkable road across a featureless plane
Michael Wilding Advice to Young Writers

REVIEWS

Bryant George of Anthony Lynch: Redfin,
and John Clanchy: Her Father’s Daughter

Shalmalee Palekar of Stephen Muecke, Joe in the Andamans
and Other Fictocritical Stories

SOUTHERLY 3 / 2008

By gathering together some of the best papers from two recent landmark conferences, the Christopher Brennan/Stéphane Mallarmé “Double Exposures” colloquium at the University of Sydney, and the A. D. Hope Centenary conference at the Australian National University, this invaluable issue offers a stimulating reconsideration of the work of two of the most important figures in Australian poetry, and an absorbing array
of present and future directions in Australian literary criticism. Essays by leading Australian scholars and commentators are presented side-by-side with papers from scholars from France, England and the United States. It contains the by now celebrated exchange-of-papers between John Kinsella and Henry Weinfield concerning the reading of Hope’s
“The Death of the Bird” (an exchange already the subject an ABC radio documentary), and important new papers by
Kevin Hart, G. A. Wilkes, Katherine Barnes, Didier Coste,
Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Santosh Sareen, Wallace Kirsop and many others. It also contains the winning entry from the 2008 Harold Tribe poetry award, Brian Castro’s recent Blaiklock lecture on mourning, and much, much more.

POETRY

Craig Powell, Poems from a Marriage
(Ascent; The Widower at Easter; Edwin)
Michael Sharkey, Anger
John Kinsella, Canto of Antipodean Emergence
Canto of Boiling Blood
Anthony Lynch, Back Beach, Point Lonsdale
Bruce Dawe, Remembering a Friend
Carolyn Gerrish, View from the Moon
Michelle Cahill, In My Father’s Absence
Geoff Page, Piano Bar
Jill Hellyer, Schizophrenia
Margaret Bradstock, Antarctic Circle, The Butterfly Effect
Andrew Slattery, Kalle Metro Graveyard

FEATURES

Winner of the inaugural David Harold Tribe Prize for Poetry:
John Bennett, Kitchen Music
2008 University of Sydney Blaiklock Lecture:
Brian Castro, Arrested Motion and Future-Mourning:
Hybridity and Creativity

ESSAYS

Henry Weinfield, “Thinking out afresh the whole poetic problem”: Brennan’s Prescience; Mallarmé’s Accomplishment
Chris Wallace-Crabbe, A. D. Hope: The Wicked Little Poems
Katherine Barnes, Hearths and Windows: Christopher Brennan’s Interlude Poems and the Question of Modernism
Ruth Morse, Elegies for Odysseus: Mimicry, Pastiche, Poetry:
A. D. Hope and Derek Walcott
G. A. Wilkes, False Starts and Winding Ways:
Christopher Brennan’s “Vigil”
Kevin Hart, Blanchot’s Mallarmé
Henry Weinfield, A. D. Hope’s “The Death of the Bird”: Between Romantic Symbol and Modernist Anti-symbol
John Kinsella, An Uncanny Reading of A. D. Hope’s
“The Death of the Bird”
Michael Ackland, “What a history is that? What an enigma...?”
Imagination, Destiny and Socialist Imperatives in
Christina Stead’s Seven Poor Men of Sydney
Helen Hewson, “Music ever!”: John Shaw Neilson’s
encounter with Paul Verlaine
Wallace Kirsop, Christopher Brennan’s Reading
Didier Coste, Sidere Mutato: Three Ways of Being Difficult
(Mallarmé, Brennan, Hope)
Ann McCulloch, A. D. Hope, the Life and the Art: “Let it Rip”
Santosh K. Sareen and Ipsita Sengupta, The Craft of Making and Breaking: Responses to Tradition/s in
A. D. Hope and Agha Shahid Ali

REVIEWS

Emily Finlay, of Didier Coste, Days in Sydney
Robin Marsden, of C. J. Brennan, ed., From Blake to Arnold: selections from English poetry (1783–1853)

And in the Long Paddock

ESSAYS

Andrew Game, Crossing Intercultural Boundaries:
      The Reception of Paul Wenz in Australia and France
John Hawke, Post-Symbolism: James McAuley and A. D. Hope
John Kinsella, A Neurotic Reading of C. J. Brennan’s “The             Wanderer”
Tracy Ryan, “The living hyphen”: France and Australia in two       novels by Marion May Campbell
David Wells, A. D. Hope and the Poetics of Acmeism

REVIEWS

Craig Billingham, of Michael Brennan, Unanimous Light,
      and Alison Croggon, Theatre
Siang Lu, of Fiona McGregor, Strange Museums
Adrian Robinson, of John Watson, erasure traces collected             works vol. 2, and Kerry Leves, A Shrine to Lata Mangeshkar
Elizabeth Uhlmann, of Toni Jordan, Addition