Dr Moya Catherine Costello

Scorchers is the first ever pan-Australasian anthology of climate fiction writings. Including pieces both by some of Australia and New Zealand’s most celebrated authors, its sixteen contributors have responded to a deceptively simple provocation: How can writers—and by implication literature—respond within the short fiction format to the overwhelming reality of the climate crisis? The resulting collection of climate-fiction spans rural towns and futuristic metropolises, space stations and back gardens, familiar laneways and underground cities. Its themes of love, loss, despair and tentative hope transcend its immediate settings and speak urgently to the burning issue of our times.

Works by Paul Mountfort, Rosslyn Prosser, Emma Ashmere, Moya Costello, Owen Everitt, James George, Patricia Grace, Rachel Hennessy , Matthew Hooton, Witi Ihimaera, Mike Johnson, Carol Lefevre, Renee Liang , Tulia Thompson, Deborah Wardle, Sean Williams, Alison Wong.

These are stories rendered in miniature and moments inscribed with precise focus. Australia's best microwordsmiths offer journeys in words that will take you somewhere surprising. A stolen glimpse of a father dancing alone to music; Gothic landscapes on the New South Wales coast; incredible spectrums in the colours of butterflies; Aussie cricket and climate change; remembrances of an exiled home land or the awkward sexual politics at a funeral. These stories capture delightful and unsettling moments of estrangement, when the new becomes familiar and the ordinary, sublime.

Bibere vinum suae regionis [2], to drink wine from one’s own region, is an attempt to match the neologism ‘locavore’, local eater/local eating, with one for local drinker/drinking. In 2005, Olivia Wu (2005), staff writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, reported that three women had begun calling themselves locavores. Locavore was the New American Oxford Dictionary’s word of the year for 2007, ascribing invention of the term to Jessica Prentice (OUP Blog, 2006-2013). Locavore comes from the Latin roots of local (locus) and eating (vorare). But food enthusiasts don’t always include wine in their sense of the local. Below, we discuss an Australian example of this. To drink is bibere; I drink bibo. Bibendum is the gerund, drinking. We could suggest locabibo, locabibere or locabiber for local drinker/drinking.

Beaches are places of contact, play, confrontation and friction: first comers always arrive on a beach. After Europeans moved into the Antipodes, the coast was the first frontier to be defined. Flinders' circumnavigation in 1802 had mapped 'Australia', revealing the land as 'girt by sea', as the national anthem continues to remind us. All kinds of ideas about the coast, beaches, sea changes, holiday places and islands swirl and eddy in this unique collection of writing.