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Island magazine, Issue 150

Island magazine, Issue 150

Kit Scriven
5/5 ( ratings)
Read Download
"Remember when I was coming back from the Antarctic on that orange icebreaker, and a friend told me that he could smell home – Tassie. I told him that The Island just makes me feel so bloody sad and it rips up my insides and it’s not my home. He looked at me for a while and then said, ‘Tasmania’s not like that at all. What you need is a welcome to country."

These lines are from a letter by author Favel Parrett. She’s referring to the moment of return to Hobart from a journey made possible by the Australian Antarctic Arts Fellowship – she’d been researching the novel which would become 'When the Night Comes'. The question of why a Tasmanian would feel this way about her home state is answered by the pages that follow, though the fact that the letter is addressed to Truganini – famously and erroneously considered the last Indigenous Tasmanian, who died in Hobart in 1876 – is explanation enough.

What is it to be someone who inhabits in a place by virtue of the displacement and extirpation of others – others whose claim to that land is founded on thirty-five centuries of prior occupation? Parrett’s first instinct, described above, is anger directed within and without.

To dwell one must be content to linger in a place. In the German word Wohnen – to live – the idea of dwelling and being at peace are one. So, dwelling is a mental, even spiritual, condition as much as deliberate residence in a physical location: it is a state of mind. In 'Hey Truganini', Parrett describes, in prose at once garrulous and anguished, how knowledge of the past has made dwelling in Tasmania a form of torture for her.

Reading the letter again, I’m reminded of a newly published book. Sarah Sentilles’s 'Draw Your Weapons' is made up of hundreds of micro-essays which return again and again to the question of violence, depictions of violence, and how we should respond to such depictions. The photos of Abu Graib inmates, for instance; or postcards of early twentieth-century Southern lynchings. Should we look at them? Or do they only recall us to the futility of one person’s care arrayed against the evil of the world?

The Favel Parrett who begins this letter has absorbed the words and images that tell the truth of the Black War in Tasmania – the rapes and the murders, the separation of families, the forced incarceration, the corpses mutilated for science and souvenir – and they have poisoned the world around her. The natural beauty of Tasmania only returns the author to the ugly truth of what – and who – is missing from the picture. She walks along the beach at Great Oyster Bay, past the immemorial middens of that Indigenous gathering place, and can only imagine a large human presence expunged.

Sentilles acknowledges this feeling of hopelessness may be overwhelming. Still, she regards the unflinching gaze with which an author such as Parrett has looked back as necessary. To not look is to attempt to avoid historical or collective guilt; it is a bid to remain unsullied.

The question both writers explore is this: if one can’t look away – and yet to look is to fall into hopelessness because no effort of care or will will repair the wounds of the past – what is one then to do? The answer on both counts is the creative act. Here is Sentilles again, paraphrasing the American philosopher Elaine Scarry:

"Art – bringing a physical object into the world where previously there was not one – illustrates on a small scale what’s possible on a larger scale, Scarry noted. You take something from inside your mind and put it out into the real world – from my head to my hand, from my head to your hand – which means that what was inside your mind is now shareable. Imagining a city, you make a house ... Imagining a political utopia, you help build a country. Imagining the elimination of suffering in the world, you nurse a sick friend. Scarry called the creation of an artefact – a sentence, a cup, a piece of lace – a fragment of world alteration. And if you can make these smaller changes, she wrote, if you can alter the world in fragments, just think of what can be imagined together, what might be possible in a community: a total reinvention of the world."

Parrett has, in these pages, written an imaginary letter about a real woman and mailed it to readers’ heads. She recounts the violence perpetrated on Truganini and her people. She recalls the dispossession, the disease, the ignominy, the slide into despair that marked the Indigenous woman’s life at every point and which pursued her even into death, when the authorities refused Truganini’s request to have her ashes spread over the D’Entrecastreaux Channel and instead put her remains on show for the public.

All this the author relates and then surprises us – as Sentilles’s ultimately hopeful book does too – with a joyful conclusion. Parrett returns to Great Oyster Bay and this time feels genuine wonder at the physical beauty of the site. She permits herself to dwell, contentedly, in this place at the end of the world. No aspect of the past has changed – the horror remains – but Parrett’s state of mind has shifted. I would argue that it is the discipline and practice of her creative work, her fragments of world alteration, which have allowed the author to begin the project of reinventing the world.

It’s worth noting that Favel Parrett was first published in 'Island', as indeed were many other Australian novelists, short story writers, essayists and poets, whether from Tasmania or the mainland. And since this is our sesquicentennial number, it’s an opportunity to reflect on the role the journal has played over time in creating a community of artefact-makers. We’ve included essays by one of the founding editors, Andrew Sant, short fiction by another foundational figure, Amanda Lohrey, and memoir by yet another past editor, Cassandra Pybus.

These are just three of many who have, over the past three-and-a-half decades, sought to curate those artefacts made of word, image or idea – fragments collected in the hope that through them this particular island might come to know itself: and, by knowing itself, find the means to begin to change it, or ourselves in relation to it, so that we might all properly dwell.

Editorial, Geordie Williamson, Island 150

ESSAYS
On Getting Lost; On Settling Down - Andrew Sant
Learning to See - Tegan Bennett Daylight
Keeping On With It - Brad
The Past is Never Dead: It Isn't Even Past - Cassandra Pybus
Hey Truganini - Favel Parrett
Chanting of Crickets, Ceremonies of Cruelty - Behrouz Boochani

ART
Poets and Painters - Celebrating The Big Punchbowl - Delia Nicholls
Tiefenzeit - Tricky Walsh
Fall of the Derwent - Justy Phillips and Margaret Woodward

FICTION
The Married Man - Rodney Hall
Poems from Another Planet - Kit Scriven
Corrango - Jennifer Mills
Petrichor - Chris Womersley
The Labyrinth - Amanda Lohrey

POETRY
Eggs - Paul Hetherington
Crows, Calling / Flying Foxes, Wingham Brush / Fogbow, Scotland - Judith Beveridge
The Gearing - A Frances Johnson
Bronze with Two Ears / Shimla is a City Full of Ghosts - Mindy Gill
This is What You Have Done For Me - Stuart Cooke
Ulysses' Canoe / Age 22 - Arturo Desimone
Language
English
Pages
128
Format
Paperback
Publisher
Island Magazine Inc
Release
August 28, 2017
ISBN 13
9780994490186

Island magazine, Issue 150

Kit Scriven
5/5 ( ratings)
Read Download
"Remember when I was coming back from the Antarctic on that orange icebreaker, and a friend told me that he could smell home – Tassie. I told him that The Island just makes me feel so bloody sad and it rips up my insides and it’s not my home. He looked at me for a while and then said, ‘Tasmania’s not like that at all. What you need is a welcome to country."

These lines are from a letter by author Favel Parrett. She’s referring to the moment of return to Hobart from a journey made possible by the Australian Antarctic Arts Fellowship – she’d been researching the novel which would become 'When the Night Comes'. The question of why a Tasmanian would feel this way about her home state is answered by the pages that follow, though the fact that the letter is addressed to Truganini – famously and erroneously considered the last Indigenous Tasmanian, who died in Hobart in 1876 – is explanation enough.

What is it to be someone who inhabits in a place by virtue of the displacement and extirpation of others – others whose claim to that land is founded on thirty-five centuries of prior occupation? Parrett’s first instinct, described above, is anger directed within and without.

To dwell one must be content to linger in a place. In the German word Wohnen – to live – the idea of dwelling and being at peace are one. So, dwelling is a mental, even spiritual, condition as much as deliberate residence in a physical location: it is a state of mind. In 'Hey Truganini', Parrett describes, in prose at once garrulous and anguished, how knowledge of the past has made dwelling in Tasmania a form of torture for her.

Reading the letter again, I’m reminded of a newly published book. Sarah Sentilles’s 'Draw Your Weapons' is made up of hundreds of micro-essays which return again and again to the question of violence, depictions of violence, and how we should respond to such depictions. The photos of Abu Graib inmates, for instance; or postcards of early twentieth-century Southern lynchings. Should we look at them? Or do they only recall us to the futility of one person’s care arrayed against the evil of the world?

The Favel Parrett who begins this letter has absorbed the words and images that tell the truth of the Black War in Tasmania – the rapes and the murders, the separation of families, the forced incarceration, the corpses mutilated for science and souvenir – and they have poisoned the world around her. The natural beauty of Tasmania only returns the author to the ugly truth of what – and who – is missing from the picture. She walks along the beach at Great Oyster Bay, past the immemorial middens of that Indigenous gathering place, and can only imagine a large human presence expunged.

Sentilles acknowledges this feeling of hopelessness may be overwhelming. Still, she regards the unflinching gaze with which an author such as Parrett has looked back as necessary. To not look is to attempt to avoid historical or collective guilt; it is a bid to remain unsullied.

The question both writers explore is this: if one can’t look away – and yet to look is to fall into hopelessness because no effort of care or will will repair the wounds of the past – what is one then to do? The answer on both counts is the creative act. Here is Sentilles again, paraphrasing the American philosopher Elaine Scarry:

"Art – bringing a physical object into the world where previously there was not one – illustrates on a small scale what’s possible on a larger scale, Scarry noted. You take something from inside your mind and put it out into the real world – from my head to my hand, from my head to your hand – which means that what was inside your mind is now shareable. Imagining a city, you make a house ... Imagining a political utopia, you help build a country. Imagining the elimination of suffering in the world, you nurse a sick friend. Scarry called the creation of an artefact – a sentence, a cup, a piece of lace – a fragment of world alteration. And if you can make these smaller changes, she wrote, if you can alter the world in fragments, just think of what can be imagined together, what might be possible in a community: a total reinvention of the world."

Parrett has, in these pages, written an imaginary letter about a real woman and mailed it to readers’ heads. She recounts the violence perpetrated on Truganini and her people. She recalls the dispossession, the disease, the ignominy, the slide into despair that marked the Indigenous woman’s life at every point and which pursued her even into death, when the authorities refused Truganini’s request to have her ashes spread over the D’Entrecastreaux Channel and instead put her remains on show for the public.

All this the author relates and then surprises us – as Sentilles’s ultimately hopeful book does too – with a joyful conclusion. Parrett returns to Great Oyster Bay and this time feels genuine wonder at the physical beauty of the site. She permits herself to dwell, contentedly, in this place at the end of the world. No aspect of the past has changed – the horror remains – but Parrett’s state of mind has shifted. I would argue that it is the discipline and practice of her creative work, her fragments of world alteration, which have allowed the author to begin the project of reinventing the world.

It’s worth noting that Favel Parrett was first published in 'Island', as indeed were many other Australian novelists, short story writers, essayists and poets, whether from Tasmania or the mainland. And since this is our sesquicentennial number, it’s an opportunity to reflect on the role the journal has played over time in creating a community of artefact-makers. We’ve included essays by one of the founding editors, Andrew Sant, short fiction by another foundational figure, Amanda Lohrey, and memoir by yet another past editor, Cassandra Pybus.

These are just three of many who have, over the past three-and-a-half decades, sought to curate those artefacts made of word, image or idea – fragments collected in the hope that through them this particular island might come to know itself: and, by knowing itself, find the means to begin to change it, or ourselves in relation to it, so that we might all properly dwell.

Editorial, Geordie Williamson, Island 150

ESSAYS
On Getting Lost; On Settling Down - Andrew Sant
Learning to See - Tegan Bennett Daylight
Keeping On With It - Brad
The Past is Never Dead: It Isn't Even Past - Cassandra Pybus
Hey Truganini - Favel Parrett
Chanting of Crickets, Ceremonies of Cruelty - Behrouz Boochani

ART
Poets and Painters - Celebrating The Big Punchbowl - Delia Nicholls
Tiefenzeit - Tricky Walsh
Fall of the Derwent - Justy Phillips and Margaret Woodward

FICTION
The Married Man - Rodney Hall
Poems from Another Planet - Kit Scriven
Corrango - Jennifer Mills
Petrichor - Chris Womersley
The Labyrinth - Amanda Lohrey

POETRY
Eggs - Paul Hetherington
Crows, Calling / Flying Foxes, Wingham Brush / Fogbow, Scotland - Judith Beveridge
The Gearing - A Frances Johnson
Bronze with Two Ears / Shimla is a City Full of Ghosts - Mindy Gill
This is What You Have Done For Me - Stuart Cooke
Ulysses' Canoe / Age 22 - Arturo Desimone
Language
English
Pages
128
Format
Paperback
Publisher
Island Magazine Inc
Release
August 28, 2017
ISBN 13
9780994490186

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