While the current issues of both these journals use the similarities and differences among Australian places as their starting point, it’s obviously the heart of the whole Island project – a Tasmania-centric literary magazine with an established and respected presence on the national literary scene. The main feature of this issue is a group of four ‘essays’ originally delivered as conference papers at the ‘Sense of Place’ conference held at the University of Tasmania in April 2006. But a conference paper is by no means necessarily an essay, and these pieces’ origins show clearly in the published versions. The least successful is Sylvia Martin’s ‘Islands and Belonging: A Reflection on the Islands of Ibiza and Tasmania’, which doesn’t really get much further in its analysis than the observation that Tasmania and Ibiza are both islands, and which mixes up the literal and metaphorical senses of the word ‘place’ with a fine disregard for the difference. More successful is John Vella’s ‘Trailertrashed: Detritus-inspired Strategies for Interrogating Place’, a speculative argument about nature, culture, identity and garbage that rather strangely doesn’t mention either Mary Douglas or Julia Kristeva’s seminal ideas about rubbish, excretion and waste; and David Trigger’s ‘Whales, Whitefellas and the Ambiguity of Nativeneness’, a thoughtful piece on indigeneity and naming that takes as its starting point a white whale but, also strangely, doesn’t mention Moby-Dick. The best of these essays is an imaginative and skilfully written piece by Christine Dew on place, photography and experience, illustrated by the photographs – her own – about which she’s writing.

As usual in Island, there is a strong emphasis on imaginative writing, particularly poetry, with broad reviews coverage and a substantial number of new poems. John Tranter’s Urban Myths: 210 Poems and Les Murray’s The Biplane Houses are reviewed together, presumably an editorial decision whose implications reviewer Simon Patton takes implicit exception to. Patton argues that far too much emphasis is put on the personalities and personae of Tranter and Murray (including by Tranter and Murray) at the expense of their poetry. But linking their books together like this in a single reviewing space seems to demand both comparison and reiteration of their long ‘rivalry’ and has the effect of vacuuming up, yet again, the air that should have gone to their poems instead. Patton ends by asking ‘who wants another Personality? Isn’t it lucidity we hanker for?’ – a rather odd sequence of questions to which I would answer that they are not mutually exclusive and that the answer to the second question is ‘Not from poetry, no’.

There is also a satisfying twenty-two pages of new poems, including a beautiful and Japanese-style poem by Martin Harrison called ‘Plum Trees’ and S.J. Holland-Batt’s substantial and compelling ‘Circles and Centres’. Of the six short stories, the most successful is ‘A Bath With Alexander’, an intensely felt story by Rachel Quigley about the fraught and exhausting isolation of new motherhood.

Griffith Review, under the editorship of Julianne Schultz, just keeps getting better and better. This issue is organised around the trope of a ‘divided nation’, and much of it uses very specific reports back from different parts of the country to illustrate the growing sense of economic and social division and disunity in particular cities and communities.

Schultz has clearly put a massive amount of thought and work into commissioning and assembling the twenty-six different contributions (graphics included) to this issue. Considering how diverse the material and how genuinely inclusive the national coverage, it’s as well put together as an orchestral symphony. Schultz’s introductory overview summarises some of the social and economic change that Australia has seen in the last decade, and reaches some disquieting conclusions:

Social and economic division is something that can creep up unexpectedly … hard to predict, but impossible to ignore once it arrives. It can also be whipped up in a fury of rhetoric, ideology and spin … The naming and shaming of refugees, Muslims and Aboriginal people has proceeded with tacit, and at times explicit, political endorsement.

Actually, this is one of the most pointed bits of party-political observation here. While most of this issue is implicitly damning of the federal government’s policies and practices, its critique generally proceeds by quiet observation and analysis, via particular kinds of values, rather than by ‘rhetoric, ideology and spin’. Instead, there are individual voices, experiential anecdotes, testimony, photographs, statistics and reportage.

The essay highlighted as the feature piece of the issue is a good example of this measured, reasonable voice of social observation. David Burchell’s ‘Trying to Find the Sunny Side of Life’, a detailed and sustained essay on the Macquarie Fields riots of 2005 and their wider implications, concludes with a politically non-partisan (as distinct from ‘balanced’, which means something quite different and much less savoury) comparison of how the right and left view this highly intractable problem, showing the weaknesses of both positions. Burchell sensibly refrains from any ‘fury of rhetoric, ideology and spin’, leaving the facts to speak for themselves. This restraint sets the tone for the issue: though it’s an obvious subtext, the word ‘wedge’ gets used little, if at all, and abuse of politicians is eschewed in favour of sober, and sobering, analysis of policy and descriptions of policy outcomes.

With only a few exceptions, this issue is full of skilfully and imaginatively written pieces that engage with complex ideas in a lucid way and intersperse personal experience and individual viewpoints with carefully researched information, a blend of which Tracy Crisp’s lovely piece on the sociological and demographic quirks of Adelaide is a particularly good example. Reports come in from other cities, slanted this way and that, in particular a handful of essays on the specificity of place by three fiction writers: Lucy Lehmann on her changing relationship with Sydney; the always excellent Dorothy Johnston on what she calls ‘Canberra Gothic’; and Julienne van Loon on Perth’s Midland, where a huge population of ‘welfare-class residents’ lives in uneasy proximity to the fruits of the west’s development boom.

Other essays examine different factors in social division: the ongoing crisis in mental health care, the rancorous ‘multiculturalism versus assimilation’ debate, some difficult Aboriginal issues and the disappearance in recent years of the public momentum towards reconciliation. Very little of this issue makes for happy reading, but almost all of it is compelling, and it paints a comprehensive picture of how, here in the first half of 2007, the nation is travelling.