Island Magazine, Issue 147

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Why do we make art? Why are we drawn to art that is made? These are the simple yet enormous questions addressed by a new exhibition curated by four scientists and humanities scholars at the Museum of Old and New Art , opening in November and introduced in characteristically droll, oblique and provocatively intelligent fashion by David Walsh in this issue of Island ...

Indeed, if you wish to ponder the mysteries of the human mind, it’s worth checking out another essay in this issue. Author and academic Anthony Macris’s perplexed and wounded account of the period during
which his teenage son Alex, who has autism, was placed on a medication regime designed to dampen the aggression occasioned by hormonal changes during puberty, and perhaps to soothe the existential frustration felt by a boy growing into manhood without the means to express himself. It’s a story narrated with a clinical eye but a breaking heart: the drugs have terrible side effects; they make bad matters worse and eventually threaten Alex’s life ...

In this issue, we also bring you the winners of the 2016 Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize, generously supported by Chris Pearce and Janet Grecian of the Hobart Bookshop since 1999, and judged by Island Poetry Editor, Sarah Holland-Batt, with poets Kent MacCarter and Michael Farrell. Congratulations to Stuart Cooke for In Memory, and to second prize winner, Kate Wellington for Correspondence. Enjoy.

Editorial - Geordie Williamson

ESSAYS
Art and Deception - David Walsh
We Exiles - Firas Massouh
Feeling Exile - Margaret Barbalet
Selling the Farm - Nicole Gill
For Sale - Ruth Quibell
A Second Life - Monna Mirkazemi
The Medication Trial - Anthony Macris

ART
Maps to a Crossroad - Selena de Carvalho
Live Site Catalyst - Lucy Bleach and John Vella
Field Lines: Cameron Robbins - Michael Stratford Hutch

FICTION
Pengüino - Sarah Klenbort
Landscape within Landscapes - Ben Walter
Like Bears - Grant Stone
Raper Street - Colin Varney
Scatter - Erin Hortle

POETRY
In Memory - Stuart Cooke
Correspondence - Kate Wellington
Poppies / Honeyeater - Fiona Wright
Foraging for idiom - Anna Kerdijk Nicholson
No Glutamate - Ian Gibbins
Out of town parents - William Fox
Travelling to my mother last century - Anne Kellas
The Flattened Fifth - Geoff Page
Not to be Reproduced - Daniel John Pilkington