Rounds of unshucked applause bursting from the silt; for the festival heat, as though the sun has scraped back this tide; for the cast-away tyres and steps in a dark, treeless wood; for the fluttering white hedges shifting borders by the hour;

Island has a distinct focus arising from where it is published, and it continues to publish, champion and develop Tasmanian writing and ideas. But the magazine has been defunded by Arts Tasmania, and it will suspend publishing if extra support isn’t forthcoming.

I have been without any work for a long time and the listless days are heavy for being so bare: days when I’ve carved no steps into the story’s pages, days when I’ve annotated no clocks, written no words above the straight lines of minute hands and hours.

We are all Superman. It’s great! When the world needs saving we zip to a phone box and get changed into our tights and capes as quickly as we can. There aren’t so many boxes these days so we have to queue, and it’s kind of creepy that you can see right in, but we get used to it, and if we’re at home we figure that there’s no written rule and so we just get changed in the bedroom and get out there to save the world as quickly as possible. We grab the evil genius who is plotting against the world, grip his wrist and frown with determination as we deliver him to the authorities.

Most critiques of awards like the Vogel centre on the age restriction. My argument relates to a much broader issue, and one that these earlier critiques assume: the persisting myth that the Vogel sets up a literary career.

Discourses of privilege are widespread in Australian literary circles, but this rarely extends to simple, old-fashioned geography. I find this surprising. It’s no secret that there can be snobbishness towards art from the regions; geography and class can be closely related. One need only consider the loaded nature of the word ‘provincial’, or attitudes to certain suburbs in any given city.

The first door is split directly from the centre of a swamp gum and is blocking up its home, swaddled in the bush. The timber’s grain ploughs its length and a fist of brass knocker presses its knuckles from the centre of the wood. As I float down the sandstone path, dressed as a vampire, the eucalypts in flower swirl all around me and their scent rains down and the sound of their smell is a bright and comforting chime of sweet wetness. And yet I am frightened – for a long time I’ve been unable to sleep.

I called her in the middle of the night and waited for her to answer with no voice at all, with a voice that I didn’t know and hadn’t heard in years, with a voice from a phone book or a gentle collision in the street, and the dark inside was strong and the grass outside was weeping with dew while a light frost had honed its edge on the corners of the lawn in the shadow of the night now night, and there in my hand was an old-fangled phone with its dirt-cream body like a shack-town sink and its dial all hurried and laboured.

I’ve been so bored with realist Australian fiction; sleepy stories that perhaps have one eye open, but aren’t looking at anything worth seeing. I’m guilty of it too. You should see the piece I’m working on at the moment; it’s terrible, and leaves me wanting to turn the pages inside out. Still, I summoned the nerve to plead for something different.

And can it be our voices need consoling, well we only link our voices at footy, guess he’d never been, corporate projection

Where no farmers had ploughed the trees or settled seeds to graze the soil, where the folded arms of scrub bar gullies, where the wide buttongrass plains swelter under peaks of old quartz ...