Roanna Gonsalves and guest co-editor K. A. Ren Wyld, Southerly Volume 80 Number 1: First the Future
After pestilence, after pain, after wholeness, after emptiness, after life, after death, after a long hiatus, Southerly is back. (Page 6)
It has indeed been a long hiatus. Soon after Volume 79 Number 1 appeared in 2019 (my blog post here), the editors started a Go Fund Me page. Vol 79, Nos 2 and 3 were squeezed out by guest editors – one devoted to writing by refugees in 2021 (my post here), and an online-only issue of Covid-related work in 2022 (my blog post here). And then silence!
So welcome back, Southerly! And how good that Roanna Gonsalves is the new editor. I’ve heard her speak a number of times on Writers’ Festival panels, where she has been smart, generous, and always interesting.
There’s lots of good stuff in this re-birth issue:
- a brief intellectual memoir from Barry Corr, a self-described ‘grumpy old man, highly averse to writing about himself’, who doesn’t mentiopn that his daughter is brilliant poet Evelyn Araluen
- a wonderful conversation on First Nations poetics, interspersed with actual poems, featuring Natalie Harkin, Kirli Saunders, Elfie Shiosaki and Ellen van Neerven
- a poem by John Kinsella in which he reveals that he has read Lord of the Rings well over 30 times
- a poem by Omar Sakr whose title, ‘Walking to day-care in the genocide’ captures its piercing grief
- a wonderful family memoir by Angelo Loukakis about growing up in a Greek migrant family in Sydney
- Louise Adler on the implications of recent political interference in the arts – a speech given long before such interference led to her resignation as director of Adelaide Writers’ Week
- a prose poem by Eileen Chong incorporating myriad internet memes
- and more, much more, making up 172 rich pages.
There is more passion in these pages than you might expect in a literary journal. So much so that it feels at times like a group therapy session for very real pain, rage and despair created by the Israeli genocide in Gaza, and the ongoing genocidal treatment of First Nations people on this continent. It’s a rough ride at times, but a necessary one, and one that there are powerful forces in this country and elsewhere doing their best to prevent.
Not everything is rage and grief. There’s also a powerful thread laying out work that needs to be done. Elfie Shiosaki for example, has done a lot of work the archives of Noongar country. She says on page 91:
During the [Referendum] campaign, I was reflecting on research I had done at the State Records archives in Western Australia, which included reading letters written by Noongar women calling for representation for Aboriginal people in Parliament since the 1930s and earlier. Their calls have remained unanswered for almost a century.
I want to live in a community that rsponds to what we have been calling for, for such a long time …
The aftermath of the referendum, I wanted to re-envision First Nations poetry as a practice of peacemaking. Regardless of the outcome of institutional processes, poetry continues to contribute to conflict resolution by healing unreconciled relationships in the present and unreconciled narratives of the past as well as imagining futures of peace.
Literature without truth-telling would be rubbish. Truth-telling without discomfort is bull. Three cheers for Southerly, first now, then the future.
No blog post by me on Southerly would be complete without mentioning that, as is only right in a university-based literary journal, there are one or two densely academic pieces that I tried and failed to read. But lest that be taken as me feeling inferior, I will also mention that, embarrassingly, Gandhi’s name is misspelled on page 64.
I am an Australian man of settler heritage. I’ve written this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation. I acknowledge Elders past and present of those clans, and welcome any First Nations readers and commenters.
Me fail? I fly! 