There is the usual mix of poetry, short fiction, reviews, and essays, but it is the essays that set the tone, and this is unfortunate, as they are more academic than literary, and too often heavily fortified with citation and theoretical armour, even when the idea in play is a seductive one.

The reviews and poetry are excellent as usual – with a spiky, Greer-like sally from Jennifer Maiden and an incantation of childhood from Michael Sharkey standing out. Poets and reviewers thrive in almost any terrain, but short fiction, and not just here, seems to have lost the will to live these days, though some lassitude may have seeped into these stories from the surrounding academese.

The ‘keynote’ essay on ‘Island Futures’ by Elaine Stratford, which opens proceedings, for instance, takes most of the wind from Southerly’s sails before it even casts off. Later on, Joseph Cummins has a great story to tell about the Drones and the convict archipelago, Guantánamo, and Moreton Bay – the sort of thing Greil Marcus would revel in – but it stays frustratingly classroom-bound.

It needn’t be this way, as David Brooks shows in a scholarly yet readable piece about islands, early anthropology, and the birth of modernism. Fiona Richards, who is comprehensive and beguiling on Randolph Stow’s islands, achieves that great thing in a literary essay: she makes you want to read more of his work. There is more than enough challenging, enjoyable work here, but it is a shame that the beguiling islands promised in McMahon’s introduction never quite materialise.