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Island magazine, Issue 151

Island magazine, Issue 151

Madeline Wells
5/5 ( ratings)
Read Download
"I lost my way in the spaghetti junction of highway roadworks into which Melbourne’s M2 currently devolves and found myself heading away from my destination, towards Footscray. The family car was so full of belongings – garden tools, blankets, artworks deemed too sentimentally precious to leave to the removalists – that I couldn’t use the rear-view mirror. I doubled back, then tripled back, in an effort to recover the route. Eventually I abandoned the blue dot on Google Maps, always a crucial few hundred metres out when it comes to junction exits, and drove by a more Zen method: swapping to a compass app and heading due south, feeling my way to Port Melbourne and the ferry terminal.

Hours later, drained from the two-day drive down from the Blue Mountains, anaesthetised by several glasses of red from the Spirit of Tasmania’s bar, I lay on my bunk and tried to watch Zorba the Greek, a film which had languished in my hard drive for months and to which I had a long and nostalgic attachment. This time it struck me as absurd. A movie set on a sun-drenched Greek island but shot in black and white, in which Anthony Quinn’s Zorba capers like a demented monkey and the uptight Englishman, Alan Bates’s Basil, does nothing but smoke and stare pensively out the window of his cottage. Why had I chosen to watch a movie about a failed attempt at making a home on a beautiful island, anyway, on my way to live in Tassie?

We docked at Devonport under black skies. There was no dawn so much as a grudging and gradual cessation of night. I drove through squalls and navigated by the tail-lights of the cars ahead of me. It was like Dunkirk turned inside out, a lonely reinvasion of a storm-wracked beachhead by a book reviewer in an overloaded Citroen. Somewhere around Deloraine, however, the skies lifted, and I drove into blue day as if through a door. My final sprint was spent in a delighted perceptual stupor. Green fields shot birds from their hedgerows; cattle tracked my passage with small-town curiosity. Grand stone churches, modest cottages, Banjo’s bakeries in every town stayed still as I swept by. By the time I arrived at our new home, my pedal foot was in spasm and I was grinning like Zorba himself.

Three months later and I’m still grinning – the Channel at dawn is a show we could happily watch forever, and the small farm where we live is returning to life. The septic tank lends an ambiguous sweetness to the breeze, as spring temperatures rise. We are growing less bracken fern than when we arrived and a friend has several dozen out-of-season fat lambs to sell us, once they’re shorn. In some paddocks, the fences are more hole than wire and what remains is held up by blackberry and gorse. But, when you rise from your aching haunches and throw down your pliers, there is always the sea and the islands beyond. One morning last week, I drove back from the shop along the esplanade and happened across a sunbaking seal in the shallows. It lay there, smirking and rubbing its sleek tummy. I know just how you feel, I thought.

Local friends come to visit and keep their backs to the water. Look at the view! I say, and they make polite noises. Many others, we discover, have some handsome outlook of water, bush, farmland or sky. They have forgotten to be amazed. Before I, too, become habituated and unlearn this primary wonder, I believe it may be my obligation – and the task of this magazine – to remind you. The Bruny Island kids at our children’s school call where we are ‘the mainland’, which goes to show how a fresh perspective can upset received ideas in a trice.

This issue takes multiple perspectives – from novelist Heather Rose to a host of Tasmanian women of note; from would-be new arrivals like myself, Damon Young and Ruth Quibell; from creative artists across the island – and asks us to think again about what Tasmania’s various futures can hold, if only we can enable and encourage them.

A special note of thanks to Island’s splendid editors Judith Abell, Anica Boulanger-Mashberg and Sarah Holland-Batt, and the women who make it all happen, omnicompetent General Manager Kate Harrison and Managing Editor Vern Field, for doing more of the heavy lifting than usual to get this issue to print.

Editorial, Geordie Williamson, Island 151

FEATURES
The Writer is Present - Heather Rose and Benjamin Law
She'll Be Apples? - Polly McGee, Madeline Wells, Madeleine Habib, Lisa Singh, Lila Landowski, Miriam McGarry, Susan Fahey, Allison Black, Kym Goodes, Hannah Moloney, Kate Gross, Emily Bullock, Emily Ouston, Lucille Cutting and Yvette Breytenbach
The Radical Rationalist, Anote Tong - James Dryburgh

ESSAYS
How Do You Make Them Let You Belong? - Erin Hortle
On Moving to Hobart - Damon Young and Ruth Quibell
Tasmania: State of the Arts? - Melanie Tait
Always Light at the Tunnel's End - Nicole McKillop
The Fully Automated Luxury Communist's Guide to Tax Justice - David Quentin

ART
It is not for want / lack of trying - Dexter Rosengrave
The Art of Looking - Vivienne Cutbush
Making Time - Lucienne Rickard
The Poetic in the Sculpture of Bronwyn Oliver - Judith Bishop

FICTION
The Rescue - Gabrielle Lis
The Tale of The Last Unicorn - Carmel Bird
River Water - Susie Greenhill
Box of Bones - Stephen Orr
An Essay Concerning Animals - Charlotte Guest

POETRY
The Munchian O - Meredith Wattison
A Collective of Nouns - Damen O'Brien
Committee Meeting - Caitlin Maling
Aubade - Judith Bishop
27 Materialisations of Sydney Cloud - Toby Fitch
Snow Geese - Brett Dionysius
Elvis Gets His Gun / Foley Sci-Fi - Brian Johnstone
Reading Deformity - Andy Jackson
The Xenotext - Christian Bök
Language
English
Pages
128
Format
Paperback
Publisher
Island Magazine Inc
Release
November 27, 2017
ISBN 13
9780994490193

Island magazine, Issue 151

Madeline Wells
5/5 ( ratings)
Read Download
"I lost my way in the spaghetti junction of highway roadworks into which Melbourne’s M2 currently devolves and found myself heading away from my destination, towards Footscray. The family car was so full of belongings – garden tools, blankets, artworks deemed too sentimentally precious to leave to the removalists – that I couldn’t use the rear-view mirror. I doubled back, then tripled back, in an effort to recover the route. Eventually I abandoned the blue dot on Google Maps, always a crucial few hundred metres out when it comes to junction exits, and drove by a more Zen method: swapping to a compass app and heading due south, feeling my way to Port Melbourne and the ferry terminal.

Hours later, drained from the two-day drive down from the Blue Mountains, anaesthetised by several glasses of red from the Spirit of Tasmania’s bar, I lay on my bunk and tried to watch Zorba the Greek, a film which had languished in my hard drive for months and to which I had a long and nostalgic attachment. This time it struck me as absurd. A movie set on a sun-drenched Greek island but shot in black and white, in which Anthony Quinn’s Zorba capers like a demented monkey and the uptight Englishman, Alan Bates’s Basil, does nothing but smoke and stare pensively out the window of his cottage. Why had I chosen to watch a movie about a failed attempt at making a home on a beautiful island, anyway, on my way to live in Tassie?

We docked at Devonport under black skies. There was no dawn so much as a grudging and gradual cessation of night. I drove through squalls and navigated by the tail-lights of the cars ahead of me. It was like Dunkirk turned inside out, a lonely reinvasion of a storm-wracked beachhead by a book reviewer in an overloaded Citroen. Somewhere around Deloraine, however, the skies lifted, and I drove into blue day as if through a door. My final sprint was spent in a delighted perceptual stupor. Green fields shot birds from their hedgerows; cattle tracked my passage with small-town curiosity. Grand stone churches, modest cottages, Banjo’s bakeries in every town stayed still as I swept by. By the time I arrived at our new home, my pedal foot was in spasm and I was grinning like Zorba himself.

Three months later and I’m still grinning – the Channel at dawn is a show we could happily watch forever, and the small farm where we live is returning to life. The septic tank lends an ambiguous sweetness to the breeze, as spring temperatures rise. We are growing less bracken fern than when we arrived and a friend has several dozen out-of-season fat lambs to sell us, once they’re shorn. In some paddocks, the fences are more hole than wire and what remains is held up by blackberry and gorse. But, when you rise from your aching haunches and throw down your pliers, there is always the sea and the islands beyond. One morning last week, I drove back from the shop along the esplanade and happened across a sunbaking seal in the shallows. It lay there, smirking and rubbing its sleek tummy. I know just how you feel, I thought.

Local friends come to visit and keep their backs to the water. Look at the view! I say, and they make polite noises. Many others, we discover, have some handsome outlook of water, bush, farmland or sky. They have forgotten to be amazed. Before I, too, become habituated and unlearn this primary wonder, I believe it may be my obligation – and the task of this magazine – to remind you. The Bruny Island kids at our children’s school call where we are ‘the mainland’, which goes to show how a fresh perspective can upset received ideas in a trice.

This issue takes multiple perspectives – from novelist Heather Rose to a host of Tasmanian women of note; from would-be new arrivals like myself, Damon Young and Ruth Quibell; from creative artists across the island – and asks us to think again about what Tasmania’s various futures can hold, if only we can enable and encourage them.

A special note of thanks to Island’s splendid editors Judith Abell, Anica Boulanger-Mashberg and Sarah Holland-Batt, and the women who make it all happen, omnicompetent General Manager Kate Harrison and Managing Editor Vern Field, for doing more of the heavy lifting than usual to get this issue to print.

Editorial, Geordie Williamson, Island 151

FEATURES
The Writer is Present - Heather Rose and Benjamin Law
She'll Be Apples? - Polly McGee, Madeline Wells, Madeleine Habib, Lisa Singh, Lila Landowski, Miriam McGarry, Susan Fahey, Allison Black, Kym Goodes, Hannah Moloney, Kate Gross, Emily Bullock, Emily Ouston, Lucille Cutting and Yvette Breytenbach
The Radical Rationalist, Anote Tong - James Dryburgh

ESSAYS
How Do You Make Them Let You Belong? - Erin Hortle
On Moving to Hobart - Damon Young and Ruth Quibell
Tasmania: State of the Arts? - Melanie Tait
Always Light at the Tunnel's End - Nicole McKillop
The Fully Automated Luxury Communist's Guide to Tax Justice - David Quentin

ART
It is not for want / lack of trying - Dexter Rosengrave
The Art of Looking - Vivienne Cutbush
Making Time - Lucienne Rickard
The Poetic in the Sculpture of Bronwyn Oliver - Judith Bishop

FICTION
The Rescue - Gabrielle Lis
The Tale of The Last Unicorn - Carmel Bird
River Water - Susie Greenhill
Box of Bones - Stephen Orr
An Essay Concerning Animals - Charlotte Guest

POETRY
The Munchian O - Meredith Wattison
A Collective of Nouns - Damen O'Brien
Committee Meeting - Caitlin Maling
Aubade - Judith Bishop
27 Materialisations of Sydney Cloud - Toby Fitch
Snow Geese - Brett Dionysius
Elvis Gets His Gun / Foley Sci-Fi - Brian Johnstone
Reading Deformity - Andy Jackson
The Xenotext - Christian Bök
Language
English
Pages
128
Format
Paperback
Publisher
Island Magazine Inc
Release
November 27, 2017
ISBN 13
9780994490193

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