In the winter issue of Meanjin, some of Australia’s best writers, including Sophie Cunningham, Lucy Treloar, and Jennifer Mills, grapple with the climate emergency and our relationship to place in these days of coronavirus and the summer that was.

One of the delights of a literary journal is the way that bringing pieces together can seem to prompt a conversation. Sometimes, however, this highlights a disparity. This issue’s cover essay, Lucia Osborne-Crowley’s ‘Depreciated: The Price of Love’, recounts, in the wake of a breakup, how the author subsumed her sense of self to the relationship in a way her partner did not. The gendered nature of this dynamic is ostensibly the essay’s focus, but I was left feeling impatient with the wan observations. Later in the issue, Elizabeth Flux’s ‘Call Him Al’ reads as a riposte: Flux has her protagonist undergo the transformation that Osborne-Crowley means to examine. The short story’s uncanny allegorical twist expresses much more that is vital, and it is aided by far greater technical assurance, imagination, and pathos. Meanwhile, high points of Peter Lewis’s analysis of how the web might evolve in Australia – including how Uber’s frankness about its non-compliance with the law has, thanks to a quirk of Australian common law, meant that a class action can be brought against them – are unfortunately overshadowed by the perplexing editorial decision to let stand a series of outrageous analogies to Indigenous dispossession in which tech titans are cast as colonisers and Indigenous Australia has ‘problems’.

And the standouts? Alexis Wright continues her remarkable exploration of sovereignty in literature, bringing to bear a cosmopolitan Indigenous worldview. Fatima Measham’s exquisitely written and researched ‘Time in the Antipodes’ is a meditation on time that blends the personal with the political, historical, and geological; it synthesises vastly different chronologies to contemplate the current moment, including time as hindered or facilitated by the state, time under capitalism and according to Australian employment laws, and time for the ecosystems that went under the flame this summer. Emerging writer Muhannad Al-wehwah’s memoir ‘Mixtape–Side A’ is a beautifully balanced piece that juxtaposes a history of cassette-tape manufacturing with their role in his childhood and the connection they provided to family in Australia, Palestine, and Lebanon.

One of the most bizarre as well as unfortunate deaths in literary history occurred when the playwright Aeschylus was struck by a tortoise dropped on him by a bird. Bizarre, that is, if we don’t consider what the bird involved was doing, which was clever as well as practical. From the bird’s perspective, the tortoise was being dropped on a convenient stone rather than the bald head of a Greek tragedian who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Jennifer Ackerman, a leading science writer, is the author of several previous books on birds. Not least among the virtues of The Bird Way is the wealth of Australian material, confirming that this country is an ornithological superpower. Birds are everywhere: we see and hear them even in the most densely populated cities. Notwithstanding human encroachment, birds remain the most spectacular form of wildlife in our daily lives.

First published as The Tasmanian Review in 1979 (soon after the Franklin River Dam project was announced) and renamed Island Magazine in 1981 (the year of the Tasmanian Power Referendum), Island emerged as one of Australia’s leading literary magazines, yet always grounded in a fragile environment. True to its ecological roots, this fortieth anniversary edition, put together by the new editorial team of Anna Spargo Ryan (non-fiction), Ben Walter (fiction), Lisa Gorton (poetry), and Judith Abell (art features), maintains a distinctly local focus while exploring new creative directions.

Over the past forty years, Island has published some of Australia’s most celebrated figures, yet its standing as a relatively small not-for-profit and print-only publication has made it an ideal nursery for emerging and marginal voices. Island’s precarious financial position was severely tested in 2019 when, like other highly respected publications, it was denied a renewal of multi-year state government funding, making the appearance of Issue 159 (made possible by a once-only government grant matched by an anonymous private donor) seem as miraculous as sighting a Swift Parrot among the blue gums on a winter morning.

Unsurprisingly, the contents of this issue cohere around a common theme: that when productivity becomes our only framework for assessing value and usefulness, our ecological and cultural survival are similarly endangered. Sam George-Allen’s essay on the simple, life-affirming joys of starting a garden from scratch (‘Principles of Permaculture’) is contrasted with a bitter triptych of the mechanised capitalist psyche in Andrew Roff’s story ‘The Lever, the Pulley, and the Screw’. The profound grief evoked by Julie Gough’s installations on Aboriginal dispossession and genocide (Mary Knights) is mirrored in the repressed, wordless rage of a young man in Christine Kearney’s story ‘Stingrays’. Jonno Revanche’s essay on Kylie Minogue and Pip Smith’s story of an elderly baker explore the angelic and demonic aspects of embattled femininity, while poets such as Jake Goetz (‘Ash in Sydney’) and Toby Fitch (‘Pink Sun’) remind us how quickly last summer’s devastating bushfires slipped from the headlines. Such an eclectic, invigorating collision of perspectives leaves one hopeful that, just as public outcry against the Franklin Dam led to the creation of the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area (and Island magazine), audiences will unite to support the arts and the real people making them happen.

Queer memoir is particularly given to formal play, to unpacking and upsetting the conventions of genre in order to question women’s roles as both narrator and subject. Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2015) mixes scholarship and bodily transformation. Carmen Maria Machado’s In The Dream House (2019) unpacks the nature of narrative itself to reflect on an abusive relationship. Into this field comes Sky Swimming, Sylvia Martin’s ‘memoir that is not quite a memoir, more a series of reflections in which I act as a biographer of my own life’. For Martin, the critical distance of the biographer enables her to consider the resonances that exist between her own experiences.

Martin specialises in biography that casts her as a queer detective, uncovering the lives of women whose artistic and erotic lives have been lost to Australian literary and cultural history. She mines locations, documents, and works of art for the threads of suppressed stories, the subtexts and absences that expose the private lives of her subjects – writer Mary Eliza Fullerton, librarian Ida Leeson, and poet Aileen Palmer. Her process is consciously rooted in feminist modes of storytelling that give primacy and agency to the teller. In Sky Swimming, Martin turns these processes back onto herself in a collection of fifteen reflective essays, where her biographer’s interest in the landscapes and communities that surrounded her subjects extends to her own life.