SOUTHERLY
1 / 2009
Animal
When it comes to relations with the animal realm, the Australian nation and its people have a troubled history and a deeply troubled present. Yet, and perhaps because of this, Australia has produced several key thinkers in the field of human/animal relations. Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation (1975) was as important to animal rights as Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch was to feminism, and came from and reflected currents of thought already established in this country by Richard Sylvan, Val Plumwood, Judith Wright and numerous others. This issue of Southerly focuses on The Animal in Australian Thought. It contains key essays on contemporary animal rights issues, veganism, and the animal in Australian poetry, fiction and philosophy, as well as an intriguing new interview with Brian Castro, and Southerly’s customary strong range of new Australian poetry and short fiction, and of reviews of recent Australian writing.
POETRY
Caroline Caddy: Magpies, Cricket, Written from the South Coast of Western Australia • Lawrence Bourke: The Naval Radio Towers at Belconnen • Adrian Robinson: Nullabor • Graeme Hetherington: Nemesis • Benjamin Dodds: Wyndham’s Crow • Louis Armand Sometimes, Apart in Sleep, by Chance • La guerre est finie • πO: Lyrebird, Captain Cook • Pam Brown: Country Town • Marvis Sofield: Rabbitting • Sam Byfield: Writing My Way Back To Her • Hector Kavanagh: The Money Flu • Alyssa Ryan: Flannery O’Connor, Georges Bataille • Adrienne Eberhard: Words for Love • Jonathan Hadwen: Auguries •
David Musgrave: Wet Season • Tracy Ryan: Frogmouth
FICTION
Jennifer Robertson: Party •
Anthony Gough: The Lizards •
Helen Gildfind: Adrian •
Colin Varney: Rhythm Section •
Teja: Alienation
INTERVIEW
Jacinta van den Berg: Interview with Brian Castro
ESSAYS
Ray and Carolyne Drew: The Harvest •
Helen Tiffin: Animal Writes: Ethics, Experiments and
Peter Goldsworthy’s Wish •
Dominic Hyde: Two in the Bush: The environmental philosophy of
Val Routley/Plumwood and Richard Routley/Sylvan •
John Kinsella: A Close Reading of John Boyle O’Reilly’s “The Dukite Snake:
A West Australian Bushman’s Story” •
Alan Gold: Destroying Species: A Literary Perspective •
Tracy Ryan: Cold Greed and Rankling Guilt: A Re-reading of
A. D. Hope’s “The Cetaceans” •
Yvonne Smith: Hunter or hunted? David Malouf’s
Poetic of the Human and Inhuman •
Coral Hull: The Greater Reality of Animals •
John Hadley: “We cannot experience abstractions”:
Moral Responsibility for “Eternal Treblinka” •
Andrew Game: Pecked, Naked and Stuffed:
Paul Wenz on the Suffering of Animals •
Bonny Cassidy: Fautrier’s Birds
REVIEWS
Marilla North on Brigid Rooney, Literary Activists:
Writer-intellectuals and Australian public life •
Marilla North on Jill Roe, Stella Miles Franklin: A Biography
ESSAYS
Chris Danta, Coetzee’s “Animal Afterlives
Teja, Identity Threat or The Terror of Veganism
POETRY
Mark O’Flynn, Vespiary
John Kinsella, Variation on Rilke’s “Sonnet to Orpheus 2, 4”,
and a translation of Leconte de Lisle’s “La Mort d’un lion”
FICTION
Michael Crane, Navel
REVIEWS
Saadi Nikro of Jad El Hag, The Myrtle Tree
Yvonne Smith of David Malouf, Ransom