The images of Eliade’s paintings and sculptures that accompany his writings affirm this ferocity of feeling. Among the most captivating is Satellite #1. A first glimpse suggests an aerial landscape, a scene of salt lakes and desert. But the painting’s sanguine hues and molten forms also evoke a heated psychical inscape. It is curious how, in Eliade’s paintings, the colours of Australian geology become inseparable from those of the internal body: the sandy white veins of rock could well be gristle or fat. A similar visceral force is conveyed in the photographs of Eliade’s sculptured torsos. While ‘stilled’, the figures’ virtuosic lines of motion haunt the space around them.

Equally compelling are Gary Haigh’s black-and-white photographs. The images are of supposedly ‘banal’ objects, though they are anything but. The elegiac tone of three of the four photographs is created by the suggestion of a fleeting human presence. Most captivating is an image of a chair covered by a white sheet and placed before the dark foliage of an empty garden. There is a spectral quality to this sight: we see what is missing. The associations are of the recently deceased, whose faces are covered by a similar mode of drapery. But the image evokes more than this generic absence: one is not simply ‘gone’ but gone from somewhere particular. There is a moving precision to the specificity of place – the covered chair – that is not inhabited.

Haigh’s photographs set the more disjunctive theme of the fiction. Despite the editorial claim, the most memorable stories are those that focus on an experience of being disconnected. In Jane Downing’s ‘God’s Holding Paddock’, a feisty elderly narrator grapples with the slow erosion of memory. However, her memory loss is of a specific kind: she is forgetting words. The beauty of this story lies in its attention to the materiality of language. For this elderly woman, words are things – the stuff of her independence – and she revels in them while she still can. Also memorable is Mike Amato’s ‘Subway Station’. Set in New York City, this story scarcely leaves the underground. Amato captures the discordance that defines urban connectivity. His characters are the subway’s familiar strangers, their lives fleshed out from stolen glances. Guy Kelly’s ‘The Waterway’ also stands out. An epistolic address to a dead brother, this suspenseful and well-crafted piece recounts the ill-fated tum of recent events and a young man’s attempt to reclaim his life.

The essays of Island 108 are sobering in comparison to those of Etchings 2. When reading them. one might want to keep Tranter’s and Eliades’ spirited advocacy of art’s importance in mind. This issue of Island is concerned with art’s political status. In ‘Considering the Art of Giving’, Saul Eslake decries the comparatively low rate of donations to the arts vis-a-vis general philanthropy. The motivations for giving are varied. Giving is ‘a way of expressing one’s identity’: it is also a way of connecting with the community, with a view to achieving some desired outcome’. Eslake contends that both these motivations – plus many others – can, and should, be satisfied through the support of the arts.

Natasha Cica’s polemic ‘No Left Turn’ takes issue with the stultifying conditions of Australian writers. A paucity of income, coupled with a lack of exposure and recognition, leave Australian writers with a ‘common sense of disappointment’. Cica suggests that there is an imperative for art to be politically efficacious. While compelling, Cica’s argument seems to play into the hands of the enemy. A loud political message becomes art’s reason for being and its sole criterion for evaluation – whether or not it is deemed ‘good’. Cica does not consider the possibly less instrumental, less calculable, but no less tangible, benefits of art. On this front, her essay sidesteps its most compelling question – why is it that we are so wary of what is deemed ‘difficult’?

But one would not recognise this dour climate in Island’s fiction. The trophy is Ben Goldsworthy’s ‘The Bending of the Smoke’ – a lyrical story about a mute child growing up in a house of secrets. Miranda Siemienowicz’s ‘Lion’s Breath’ is also entertaining. Scopophilia takes on a new dimension in this story, where men eat women instead of just watching them.

One would have to go fishing for any political messages encrypted in the poems of Island 108. Among them, Karen Knight’s ‘Brown Trout’ is a highlight. The poem’s taut lines literally ‘wind-up’ the trout’s last viscous breath: ‘the baritone slurp / of your dying as you mouth / our thick, human air.’ Less successful is Alan Gould’s ‘Futures Exchange’. Here, Gould seeks the future in the lines of a palm. But if the future is to be anything like what we read in the lines of the poem, it does not bode well. Automated repetition would be my prediction: the poem is governed by an irritatingly rhymed iambic jingle. More peculiar is Andy Kissane’s ‘Meat Matters’. Kissane’s triadic homage to meat closes with a bow to ‘The Humble Sausage’. Reflecting its constituent ingredients, the poem is composed of (barely masticated) poetic scraps, and makes mincemeat of many of the greats, including Wordsworth (‘I wondered lonely as a sausage’), William Carlos Williams (‘so much depends/ upon/ a red frank-/ furt ‘) and T.S. Eliot (‘In the room the women come and go/ Munching on Cotechino’). This canonical dig might be a poem about sausages, but it is a sausage of a poem. Nevertheless, Island 108 is certainly something to get your teeth into.