Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 1 SoutherlyVolume 79 • Number 1 • 2019 Southerly 80! Editor Elizabeth McMahon THE JOURNAL OF THE ENGLISH ASSOCIATION, SYDNEY BRANDL & SCHLESINGER Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 2 SOUTHERLY The Journal of the English Association, Sydney Volume 79 • Number 1 • 2019 www.southerlyjournal.com.au EDITOR Elizabeth McMahon FICTION EDITOR Debra Adelaide POETRY EDITOR Kate Lilley REVIEWS EDITOR Oliver Wakelin EDITORIAL ADVISERS Elizabeth Webby, Bernadette Brennan, David Brooks, Vivian Smith, Helen Tiffin, G. A. Wilkes, Mabel Lee, Lionel Fogarty, Ali Cobby Eckermann ADMINISTRATIVE AND TECHNICAL ASSISTANT: Jack Stanton PRODUCTION EDITOR: Angela Rockel Copyright of each work published in Southerly belongs to its author. No work may be used or dealt with except as permitted by law or licensed by its author. Applications may be directed to the author via the editors. Academic papers are refereed. PUBLISHED FOR THE ENGLISH ASSOCIATION BY BRANDL & SCHLESINGER PO Box 127 Blackheath NSW 2785 Australia • www.brandl.com.au Contributions, subscriptions, back issues — see page 228 ISSN 0038-3732 Print Post No. PP250003/0593 ISBN 978-0-6485232-5-3 School of Literature, School of the Arts and Media, Art and Media, UNSW Arts and Social Sciences Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences This publication is assisted by the Australia Council, the Australian Government’s arts advisory and support organisation, the New South Wales Ministry for the Arts, the School of Arts and Media, UNSW, and the School of Literature, Art and Media, University of Sydney. Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 3 CONTENTS EDITORIAL 6 POETRY jenni nixon: “what is old is new again” 23 Stuart Barnes: “Pork Chops” 25 Leila Lois: “Hêv” 32 joanne burns: “wrap” 33 Brownyn Lovell: “Fucking Lucky” 46 Colleen Z. Burke: “Winners and losers” 47 Sarah Hart: “Your Name Here” 59 Beth Spencer: “Explant (caveat emptor)” 69 Gavin Yates: “Napoléon” 72 Jane Gibian: “Less golden” 82 Anne Elvey: “Grevillea Robusta” 83 Dave Drayton: “the main artefacts are very archaic” 106 Jaya Savige: “Coonowrin” 108 Jocelyn Deane: “Staying in a place/England” 117 Marie Dustmann: “A well-appointed Road” 118 Kevin Densley: “For Bad Behaviour” 150 Grace Yee: “greener” 151 Tug Dumbly: “Biology” 171 FICTION Mandy Sayer: “The Dinner Party” 34 J. M. Donellan: “Progeny” 73 H. C. Gildfind: “All of this, everything” 110 David Dick: “Being Matt Preston” 119 Jack Cameron Stanton: “Goodbye, Lawrence” 164 NON-FICTION / MEMOIR / ESSAYS Michelle Vlatkovic: “Birralii Biyuu” 13 John Stephenson: “The Man Who Would Be Auden” 27 David Brooks: “A Bell Note” 49 Hannah Fink: “Editing Daniel” 61 Richard Nile: “Desert Worlds” 84 Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 4 4 SOUTHERLY Jumana Bayeh: “Australian Literature and the Arab-Australian Migrant Novel” 129 Alison Hoddinott: “Poetry and Musicophobia” 152 REVIEWS Roslyn Jolly: of James Halford Requiem with Yellow Butterflies 173 Jennifer Livett: of Andrew McGahan The Rich Man’s House 178 Margaret Bradstock: of joanne burns apparently 182 Michelle Cahill: of David Brooks The Grass Library 187 Frances Devlin-Glass: of Lynda Ng (ed) Indigenous Transnationalism: Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria 193 Leigh Dale: of Tony Birch The White Girl 199 Carole Ferrier: of Kathleen Mary Fallon A fixed place: The long and short of story 205 Kerrie Davies: of Jessica White Hearing Maud 210 Toby Fitch: of Dave Drayton P(oe)Ms 213 Oliver Wakelin: of Luke Carman Intimate Antipathies 217 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 221 o COVER Elizabeth Street, Sydney, 1939 by Dorrit Black (1891–1951). Colour linocut, printed in five colours on thin white paper. Art Gallery of New South Wales. Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 5 CONTENTS 5 and in the Long Paddock... Our website is http://www.southerlyjournal.com.au POETRY Toby Fitch: “The Or Tree, Chapter 5” Beth Spencer: “cool / green” Usha Sista: “Rice Burnt” Bronwyn Lovell: “Prayer for the girl who is not a feminist” Jonathan Dunk: “L’autre rive” Gavin Yates: “Autogenic” NON-FICTION / MEMOIR / ESSAY Emily Riches: “Resting Places” Mark Peart: “Swain’s Reappearance: Traces from the sodomitical subculture of the nineteenth century Sydney” Carole Lefevre: “The Blue Hour” FICTION Oliver Wakelin: “Dublin” Bon-Wai Chou: “Being Sylvia” Martin Kovan: “An Island Emissary” REVIEWS Jack Cameron Stanton of Huo Yan Dry Milk Angela Rockel of John Kinsella & Russell West-Pavlov: Temporariness: on the imperatives of place Beth Spencer: of Anne Walsh Intact INTERVIEWS Interview with Michelle de Kretser Margaret Atwood in conversation with Fiona Morrison Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 6 6 SOUTHERLY EDITORIAL Southerly has turned 80! This is a cause for great celebration: of the many, many writers whose poetry, fiction, essays and reviews have been published; of the generations of readers who have read that work; and the many who continue to access Southerly’s formidable archive from 1939 to the present. The themed content of this issue engages matters of anniversaries and commemoration, and what we might call octogenarity, to coin a term—the business of being in the decade of four score years. Hannah Fink’s essay “Editing Daniel” acclaims the life and work of “one of the greatest writers of Australian art history,” Daniel Thomas. Thomas, now 88, is “a colossus in our intellectual heritage”—and prolific. In addition to holding key curatorial and institutional roles, Fink documents that the bibliography of Thomas’s work she and Steven Miller have just compiled is 18,000 words long! Moreover, Thomas is still writing. His most recent work, published in 2019, is a “reflection on how he has been shaped by the place where he was born and now in retirement lives, on the western north coast of Tasmania near Port Sorell.” We are delighted to include an essay by the esteemed writer—and octogenarian—Alison Hoddinott, also 88, who meditates on music and literature from the perspective of a “tone deaf” reader and auditor. A great friend of Gwen Harwood, Hoddinott has written extensively on Harwood’s poetry, and records how music was a key point of difference Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 7 EDITORIAL 7 between the two friends. She continues with a rollcall of self-admitted “tone deaf” writers and the implications of this mode of hearing for their work. Richard Nile’s essay “Desert Worlds” narrates the experience of 20,000 Australian soldiers bound for the Western Front in 1914, who were “dumped on bare sand” at Alexandria, “two weeks and three and a half thousand nautical miles shy of their appointed berthing at Southampton.” Nile frames this discussion with two references to the inaugural issue of Southerly published in September 1939. First is the poem by S. Musgrave titled “Australia Deserta,” whose final stanza opens: “The sand has his own / Wave and motion,” “Rages the bed / Of the stony ocean.” The second reference is to A. D. Hope, who contri - buted an essay on psychoanalysis and poetry to the first issue, and at this time had begun writing his important and controversial poem “Australia,” which also focuses on perceptions of desert aridity: “They call her a young country but they lie / She is the last of lands, the emptiest, / ... the womb within is dry.” The men had voyaged from the driest continent on earth to the sands of Egypt and Nile’s essay sets out “the dirty business of Egypt” which was effectively “sifted from the sands of memory.” In his essay, “The Man Who Would Be Auden,” John Stephenson recounts a mini-literary hoax perpetrated on Clem Christesen (1911– 2003), “a founding editor in the great story of Australia’s literary journals.” Christesen, who edited Meanjin from 1940 to1974, was still “puzzling over his encounter” with “Auden” in Brisbane in 1944 some 50 years later when Stephenson interviewed him. Another addition to the long line of Australian literary hoaxes, the details are compelling as are Stephenson’s speculations on the “truth.” Connected to matters editorial and “the great story of Australia’s literary journals” is “A Bell Note” by recently-retired Southerly co-editor David Brooks. David sets out the current crisis for Southerly and Australia’s culture of literary journals. As I write, at least four of these, including Southerly, are in jeopardy. He also reflects on the experience of editing Southerly for nearly 20 years: publishing work not always to Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 8 8 SOUTHERLY your own taste; developing themed issues that address and welcome overlooked communities and foreground matters of natural and cultural urgency; managing literary disagreements; and finally, the experience of reading a new work that sounds the “bell note,” the “crystal chink” that very occasionally sounds in the encounter with extraordinary writing. As David writes: “If you published only works that struck this note, you’d produce very slim issues indeed.” In this view, he echoes R. G. Howarth, the founding editor whose initial editorial advocates this broad reach. Howarth writes: “The Editor ventures to claim that the present issue of Southerly, containing work by noted Australian writers, by beginners, by general practitioners—by almost every class of writer in fact—indicates the possibilities of development, if it may not show actual achievement.” Since that time, we would claim to have published much writing of “achievement” as well as “possibility,” though both continue to be valued. And who knows, another work may strike this note for a different reader. In any case, these bell notes are powerfully-felt reminders of the value of editing and producing literary journals.