Editorial 'fourW thirty-four'

 

Editorial   fourW thirty-four

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 17^th 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