Editorial
fourW thirty-four
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David Gilbey, Editor of fourW and President, Booranga Writers' Centre
Language
played huge part in the recent unsuccessful Voice Referendum – Indigenous and
non-Indigenous language, political and legal language, television, radio and
social media language, crowd-rallying and door-knocking language – it was a
Babel of competing voices, cacophonous and contestatory. Maybe 2023 Miles
Franklin Award-winning novelist Shankari Chandran was prophetic in Chai Time
at Cinnamon Gardens when one of her protagonists writes, pseudonymously in a
much-followed social media post about a challenge to ‘mainstream’ Australia’s
idea of what it means to be Australian: ‘… It reminds us that we are all
immigrants on stolen land …’
I’m writing
this editorial from Japan, having just attended the 17th Japan
Writers Conference in Nagoya where, at the declaration of the Voice
Referendum’s ‘No’ vote many delegates expressed surprise: an American quipped,
“Welcome to Trump Towers!”; a Brit added, “Just like Brexit!” and a Japanese
poet asked wryly, “Are Australians racist, too?”
The language
of the Uluru Statement from the Heart, like the Voice referendum itself,
invites Australians to ‘walk in two worlds’ – something ‘we’ were unable to do,
so ‘we’ said ‘No’. The Statement’s language is multi-layered, mixing poetic,
legal and political registers: maybe the rejection not only shows Australians’
unacknowledged anxiety of occupation but some uncertainty about how to read
poetry. The Statement is framed by Aboriginal language: both ‘Uluru’ and
‘Makarrata’ are words that inscribe worlds of Indigenous cultural awareness.
The first sentence positions the reader in language that is documentary and
historical (‘the 2017 National Constitution Convention’), cosmic (‘from all
points of the southern sky’) and corporeal (‘from the heart’). Throughout the
Statement, the language veers between scientific, social and hortatory
registers, requiring readers to acknowledge ‘spiritual’ ancestors alongside the
‘thereto … therefrom … thither’ of legal discourse. It presses a case based on
demonstrable inequalities and incarceration and makes an ethical and
administrative appeal for fairness. The Statement relies on a closing metaphor
of an invitation to a journey towards ‘a better future’. It’s a carefully
constructed manifesto poem, at the same time strikingly clear and memorably
complex – it speaks in several voices. Maybe it wasn’t Tik-Tok enough …
fourW
thirty-four anthologises
new work from seventy-six writers from all over Australia and from overseas: more
than twenty stories and more than fifty poems, including pieces by two of our
2023 writers-in-residence, Judith Beveridge (an edgy, tensile ‘hymn’ to
mountain goats) and John Stephenson (a retro-speculative satire on AI).
The winner
of this year’s Booranga Prize for Poetry goes to Linda Albertson for ‘Some Woman’, a sculpted dramatic
monologue which negotiates several registers between celebration and cynicism
as a woman explores the meaning of her decorated, scarred body. The
short-listed poems were 'Pneumatic: Eight 'Sigh'-ku', by Lachlan Brown; ‘The
Baby Locket’ by Cary Hamlyn; ‘Chinese New Year, Gangtok’ by Mark Macleod;
‘Gimcrack’ by Neill Overton and ‘Midnight Trolleybus’ by Jena Woodhouse.
This year’s Booranga Prize
for Prose goes to Christopher Scriven for ‘So much depends’, a finely-crafted,
playful homage to William Carlos Williams using a bookmobile librarian (is
she?) to refocus a sense of the minutiae of life, love and death in a small US
town. The short-listed stories were ‘The Thing about Things’ by Jane Downing;
‘Carrot’ by N. G. Hartland; ‘Underground’ by Coco X. Huang; ‘Down the Line’ by
Karla Portch and ‘Birthday Girl’ by Jennifer Severn.
I know you
will enjoy reading these diverse, multi-layered & polyvocal writings. And
these celebrated pieces are just a few of the gems in our ‘treasury of
literature’. I’m looking forward to meeting as many of the writers as are able
to come to one of our launches and having ongoing and online conversations
about this terrific collection. I hope, too, that the writers are happy with
the glittering company they find themselves in.
I want
particularly to thank Juanita McLauchlan for the use of her striking and
thoughtful artwork. Earlier in the year Booranga collaborated with the Wagga
Wagga Art Gallery in convening an ekphrasis workshop in the context of an
exhibition featuring work by Nicola Dickinson, Hayden Fowler and Juanita. It’s
fair to say Juanita’s work particularly affected the participants and she was
moved by the writers’ responses. Her use of stitching, weaving, possum fur,
blankets, eucalyptus leaves gave us a strong sense of country, time,
colonisation – to use the title of one of her works – of ‘Everywhen’.
As well, I’d
like to thank our designer Adam Bell for his fine sense of the significance of
small details and textures of this year’s cover in making meaning and having
impact – as well as his clever, attuned shaping of the writers’ words to the
pages of fourW thirty-four.
I’d like to
express my gratitude to Booranga’s Business Manager, Greg Pritchard for
communicating with writers and collating the work for the selection committees
to read through the submissions – it’s an intricate and tricky task!
To my fellow
selectors: Claire Baker, Maurice Corlett, Jan Pittard and Ian Stewart – thanks
for your willingness to take on the – mostly pleasurable, I think – processes
of reading and rating the submissions. I appreciate your commitment and
kindness and I value your insights and judgements.
Finally, our
collective thanks go to Booranga’s esteemed Artistic Director, Kathryn
Halliwell for keeping the yacht fourW thirty-four in trim, responsive to
the winds, whether tacking, pitching or yawing.
David Gilbey
October 2023
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