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ISLAND  Stories. Poems. Essays. Art.

171

featuring award-winning essays from the

ISLAND NONFICTION PRIZE plus NEW SHORT STORIES AND POEMS THE AESTHETICS OF DE-EXTINCTION and CAN ARTS REPLACE MINING?

ISLAND

Managing Editor Jane Rawson Nonfiction Editor Keely Jobe Fiction Editor Kate Kruimink Poetry Editor Kate Middleton Arts Features Editor Judith Abell Proofreader Sabine Borgis

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q Stories. Poems. Essays. Art.

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For all enquiries, email admin@islandmag.com or phone +61 (03) 6234 1462. ABOUT ISLAND Island is a not-for-profit magazine of essays, short stories, poetry and arts features. Since 1979 we have been celebrating ideas, writing and culture from our base in Hobart, Tasmania. We value variety and excellence, publishing new, emerging and established writers from mainland Australia and overseas as well as from Tasmania. We advocate for excellent writing and for the joys and benefits of reading.

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Cover image: Amber Koroluk-Stephenson Escape Artist, Portrait of an Australian Painted Lady oil on linen, 60 x 55 cm, 2024

SPECIAL FEATURE

Island Nonfiction Prize 2024 Judges’ report

WINNER Fucking with Chineseness

Jessica White

Writing Task 1

Interior Topographies

Anne Elvey

Amber Koroluk-Stephenson

City of Yes and No

with an essay by Briony Downes

Beyond care and maintenance: arts-led recovery in Queenstown

Featuring art from PressWEST and The Unconformity

Steve Brock

Petra White

Land/Body/Heart can i have some of your religion

Suri Matondkar

Izzy Roberts-Orr

To self

Emma Bugg with an essay by Hannah Stark

James Salvius Cheng

Swimming Lessons 32

A moment to reflect

Miriam Jones

A necessary evil

Gan Ainm

The breath goes now

As if to purpose 45

Adrienne Eberhard

Jenny Sinclair

A story-shaped life

Arts features

Sleep

Cherry Zheng

SHORTLISTED seeing Ningaloo

Poetry

Literacy feature Seeing the world differently

Josh

Liam Ferney

Fiction Milk tea

The waitresses 50

Melanie Saward

First breath

Daniel Ray

For want of natural snow

102

Miriam Webster

You I mourn like plants mourn their roots

Boy Skipping

SPECIAL FEATURE 82

Todd Turner

A limpet named Desire

Nilufar Shah

Any other substance

Tim Slade

Mikaela Nyman

In Each Form I am a Self They Can’t Know John Kinsella

110

Katherine Nicholson

109

Margaret Scott Young Writer’s Fellowship pomelo Yulan Jack

ISLAND NONFICTION PRIZE

E N N I

Fucking with Chineseness Cherry Zheng 4

hàohuá couldn’t pronounce his own name. ‘Shāohuààà,’ he said, like Ron Weasley trying to make feathers fly. It wasn’t for lack of trying. He had taken to speaking at a plodding pace in order to be understood. For me, sitting beside him, this was the aural equivalent of a very slow flogging. ‘I want to understand China,’ Shàohuá said in Mandarin. Blond-haired and baby-faced, he was an international relations major who had just completed an internship at the UN. His name in English was Shane. Five years ago, back in New York, Shane’s Chinese teacher had given out Chinese names like participation trophies to his entire beginner class. Now Shàohuá was in Shane’s LinkedIn name, his business cards and his Tantan profile. Shàohuá was the name I thought of when I saw him in the classroom corridor, proclaiming that he had already been to karaoke with the locals. ‘Not only we must face the human rights disputes,’ he continued, ‘but also we must consider–’. ‘Incorrect!’ chirped Liú Lǎoshī, standing on her tiptoes to tap the sentence structure at the top of the board. She wore a plaid skirt and copper-blonde plaits. Her handwriting sprinted across the green. Liú Lǎoshī looked like a middle-schooler but wrote like a calligrapher. ‘“We must not only face the human rights disputes, but also consider…”. Now finish the sentence.’ Shàohuá groaned at himself. ‘We must not only face the human rights disputes, but also consider opportunities for cooperation, such as in doing business.’ Dirt formed a vignette frame around the classroom window. Outside, the sky was bleached as white as a hospital sheet. It took me a moment to identify a perfect round hole in the middle of the pane as the sun. It would be my turn soon. And I had spent all night revising vocab lists, not political opinions. ‘Excellent! What about you, Yǐnlì?’ said Liú Lǎoshī, pouncing on my lapsed attention. ‘What do Australians think?’ ‘I’m Chinese-Australian,’ I spluttered. Fluorescent lights bounced off fluorescent tiles and slapped me in the eyes. Becoming the token Australian was a new experience. It gave me an uncanny feeling of stage fright. What I really wanted to know was, ‘What does Liú Lǎoshī think?’ She was studying for her Masters at Peking University, the top university in the country, and had tried to relate to us by reciting Dickens and Shakespeare in Mandarin. Beneath Liú Lǎoshī’s fluttery professional bearing, I realised she was trying just as hard to impress us – the students – as we were trying to impress her.

Interior Topographies Amber Koroluk-Stephenson Essay by Briony Downes

Amber Koroluk-Stephenson’s painting practice is well known for its distinctive blend of real and artificial landscapes and interiors. Dream-like images populated with objects loaded with cultural meaning – rubber gloves, flowers, architectural structures – are all pieced together with meticulous precision. As the title of Interior Topographies suggests, this body of work takes a more personal turn. Partly based on KorolukStephenson’s feelings of ambivalence towards motherhood, Interior Topographies unfolds as a visual roadmap filled with signs and symbols relating to femininity, domesticity and body autonomy. During the development of this body of work, KorolukStephenson spent time thinking about the traps of femininity and how beauty is idealised in art history, mythology and popular culture. In Gravity of Love (Madonna and Child), a pair of cones protrude from the wall of a pastel yellow interior. They refer to a bra originally designed by Jean-Paul Gaultier in 1987 and later incorporated into the costuming for Madonna’s groundbreaking 1990 Blonde Ambition tour. Contrasting with the softness of a fluffy yellow chick, the pointy cones flip the maternal expectations of the breast to one of power and protection. As Liam Hess writes in Vogue, ‘The cone bra grabbed the public’s attention for the way in which it rebelled against the narrow definition of the beautiful female body that, for so many centuries, had been dictated by corsetry’s body-morphing strictures’.1 Describing the bra as defiantly aggressive, Hess goes on to say, ‘In place of the soft curves the corset was supposed to shape, the female anatomy became a spiky, phallic weapon, one that Madonna celebrated by exerting her dominance, sexual or otherwise’.

Striving for dominance and autonomy over our own bodies has been the concern of women for centuries. Despite laws instructing women to follow rules and regulations set by (predominantly male) lawmakers, throughout history women have been secretly helping each other remain autonomous, particularly when it comes to birth control. In the 12th century, German nun Hildegard von Bingen studied herbal medicines that aided in the termination and prevention of pregnancies. Plants like pennyroyal and Queen Anne’s lace – depicted by Koroluk-Stephenson in Remedy (Queen Anne’s Lace) – were often used for these purposes. Going even further back in history, the ancient Egyptians advocated the use of douches and suppositories to avoid pregnancy, allowing women choice and autonomy despite the dire physical risks. Focusing on the physical form of the anthurium flower, Koroluk-Stephenson likens its heart-shaped petals to female genitalia and its protruding central stem to a phallus. In Captive, the anthuriums are held tightly by red thread, a visual embodiment of the fear of being bound to the domestic duties associated with motherhood. In Love Lock, a pair of anthuriums are taped to the walls of a domestic interior, with a ladder propped in one corner and a door leading to another room, the contents of which remain unknown.

Interior Topographies

City of Yes and No Steve Brock Saturday 14 October 2023 Wake up on Saturday morning and wonder at the direction life has taken. Read Schuyler’s ‘In earliest morning’ from his collected purchased from Ken at the EAF. No trace of this other than $61 pencilled faintly in the top corner of the flyleaf. I think about a story my father told me. On his way to a bookshop he saw an old man with the gait and bowed legs of a horseman. Followed him down Rundle Mall and was delighted when he walked right into RM Williams. As a kid what struck me most was that my father found joy in visiting bookshops. I plan my day around a visit to a shop I don’t get to now, much since it moved from the market to Adelaide Arcade. And while I can no longer follow my father’s steps I’ve become more aware of his signature gait in my own walk. Like this Saturday morning which begins with a stroll to the polling booth and I’m trailing behind the family making up this poem as I go along wondering at how the big issues of our time are boiled down to a Yes and a No.

Steve Brock’s poetry has been published in journals in Australia and overseas including Antipodes, Australian Book Review, Meanjin, Quadrant, Poetry NZ and Westerly and in translation in journals in Spain and China. Steve has published four collections of poetry including Live at Mr Jake’s (Wakefield Press, 2020) and Double Glaze (Five Islands Press, 2013) and is the co-translator from Spanish to English of the anthologies Desarraigo: 18 Poetas Transfronterizos, (Nautilus Ediciones, 2021) and Poetry of the Earth: Mapuche Trilingual Anthology (Interactive Press, 2014).

Sleep Petra White

Feeding my drowsing infant at zero-hour, when frost climbs the green stems of snowdrops that I will show to her in the morning, like a mother who points to the stars, as if to show for the first time their existence, revealing little by little the world, as if she tugged it on strings, and the bright indolent infant brightens in the knowledge of the world, and soon grows to outshine the mother, who gives her bit by bit to the world, with wishes, costly clothes, love that stands up on its little paws before the bitterest wind, like Coleridge wishing all seasons be sweet to his son. Downstairs, across the dock, the woman we step past each day on our way to Tower Hill Station, sleeping in the underpass is surely cold awake, guarding with her life her life. From her darkest eyes drips dark knowledge, quite enough to feed my infant, who must be fed, like a creature of this world, on knowledge, and suffering. As if there was no other way to master those fine shadows that make firm the human soul. The silent frost, a morning apparition, slowly makes its way around the grounds of this soul-filled estate, and she wakens warm in my hands, red-faced and lovely – gentle light, snow drops, sweet seasons.

Petra White is an Australian poet living in Belfast. She is the author of six poetry collections, most recently That Galloping Horse (Shearsman, 2024).

For want of natural snow Miriam Webster

102

FICTION

During days of dark mornings I lost my job and gained my leisure. News of my redundancy appeared in my inbox with an innocuous subject line. I read the email and felt hopeful. Seven am, the business crowd, phone screens casting haloes.

People kept asking what I was doing with my time and I told them I was working on my novel. But mostly I just sat on the back step smoking cheap imported cigarettes. The long white cylinders had blue and silver foil at the tip. On the one hand, this seemed luxurious and made me feel rich. On the other hand, I guess you could say I was suffering from writer’s block. I had to admit that unemployment didn’t suit me; without the temporal stipulations of the working week, it was hard to regulate my hours. I felt truly redundant, like an idea or technology that had once been popular but had now become outmoded. Radio, communism, girdles, vol-au-vents.

At first I was like, yes – this will be amazing. This is how I’ll finish writing my novel. —————— During days of dark mornings I lost my job and gained my leisure; it was autumn but not early, just before the chill arrived. I read the email in the kitchenette between classes, poring over the missive like divination, a portent cast in instant grinds. Again I read it in my office, at lunchtime, eating a California roll. Wiping mayonnaise from the corner of my lip I smiled drily and began to pack my things without a word. Later that night I spoke to my father on the phone. He asked me what I was thinking of doing next and I said, I’m thinking of using this time to finish my novel. He said it sounded self-indulgent. I said the problem was not that writing got called a leisure activity but that people, in general, did not have enough leisure.

—————— I guess you could say I was sitting on the back step chasing a sensation. I had nowhere to put all my nostalgia. Instead I just bought cheap imported cigarettes from a shop around the corner. The man who sold them had a face impressed with wrinkles, a pink-lit aquarium and an ancient dog with three brown teeth. You had to ask for the smokes as if they were illegal, surrounded by stacks of coloured vapes. Then the man would disappear into a back room for quite a while.

—————— —————— Later that night I spoke to my father on the phone, but the voice I heard belonged to my friend Van. He asked me what I was planning on doing next and I told him I was thinking of using this time to finish my novel. Van said it was a good idea. For a while now Van had been thinking that the problem was not that writing got called a leisure activity, but that people, in general, did not have enough leisure. Actually, Van was in a similar boat. He’d recently been made redundant from his job as a ski instructor because the ski resort he lived near had closed for want of natural snow. People kept asking what he was planning on doing next and he said he was looking forward to finishing his screenplay, an Australian epic about men who wrangled brumbies in the Victorian Alps.

Then I would disappear into a mood like a room for quite a while. I covered myself in foil when I craved a sense of luxury. Whenever I opened my laptop and moved the cursor over my manuscript, I had the distinct impression I was doing something shifty, indulging a perversity. —————— I had the distinct impression I was doing something shifty, maybe even something illegal. I was the man with the ancient dog and crinkled face selling covert cigarettes in a shop meant for vapes. ——————

——————

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ISLAND

ISLAND Stories. Poems. Essays. Art.

171 CONTRIBUTORS GAN AINM LIAM ROSS BAKER STEVE BROCK EMMA BUGG JAMES SALVIUS CHENG BRIONY DOWNES ADRIENNE EBERHARD ANNE ELVEY LIAM FERNEY BELINDA HALL YULAN JACK MIRIAM JONES JOSH JOHN KINSELLA AMBER KOROLUK-STEPHENSON JOY MACKEY EMMA MAGNUSSON-REID SURI MATONDKAR MICHAEL MURUSTE KATHERINE NICHOLSON MIKAELA NYMAN DANIEL RAY LEIGH RIGOZZI IZZY ROBERTS-ORR CARL ROSS MELANIE SAWARD NILUFAR SHAH JENNY SINCLAIR TIM SLADE POLLY STANTON HANNAH STARK TODD TURNER MIRIAM WEBSTER JESSICA WHITE PETRA WHITE CHERRY ZHENG

VOL.171 3/2024 AUD $19.95

Image: Amber Koroluk-Stephenson Escape Artist, Portrait of an Australian Painted Lady oil on linen, 60 x 55 cm, 2024

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