Dr Moya Catherine Costello

Appropriately for a book by a visual artist/writer, Imants Tillers's Credo is beautifully designed (by Jenny Grigg): it looks small, spare, neat; has a sense of breathing space from the wide margins on the pages, the modernity of the Tiempos Regular font and the brevity of the essays; and its cover is a pale cultured-butter colour with embossed gold (reminiscent perhaps of Eastern European Christian art iconography) for title, publisher's logo and author's name. [...]potential provocations include the following: simulation (apropos of Giorgio de Chirico's paintings) is 'the quintessential quality of Australian life and culture', as in Australia 'the experience of works of art through mechanical reproduction always precedes their direct experience'; 'There can be no doubt that the only original contribution Australia has made to the history of world art in the twentieth century is Australian Indigenous art ... While Tillers notes in his preface-as-overture that there is 'no overarching theme, no grand narrative' in these collected fragments, the dissection of Australian painting, and more broadly Australian culture, and the discussion of his own work process (quoting, repeating, masking) capture a reader in a to-and-fro journey between interconnections which are most often repetitions, but which are more than that latter word implies - that is, the repetition expands on the thing or it has the thing reviewed in a different context, much like his (re)use of his own canvas-board paintings.

The special issue of TEXT on writing and researching (in) the regions provides a robust portrait of the ways in which regional Australia is imagined, produced, and negotiated by writers and scholars working in a range of settings broadly understood as regional. The writing and research here gather around a range of themes: writing (in) the regions; teaching (in) the regions; and publishing (in) the regions. Together, these works contribute to the ongoing negotiations around how to understand, interpret, work within and nurture regional writing, teaching and research.

This paper is a small case study with a brief description and evaluation of regionally based, largely extracurricular professional writing activities by staff, and the opportunities provided to students in the Writing Program, School of Arts and Social Sciences, Southern Cross University. There may be a perception or assumption by some students that creative-writing opportunities are limited in the region, in terms of number and variety, or difficulty of access. This may be due to their own limited experience of the ‘writing world’, which is directly tied to the student cohort demographics. One of our concerns is to prepare students for the rigors of a professional life of writing or other related fields in a literary industry. We provide our students with professional training or work experience opportunities: to read, to write, to publish, to be a publisher/editor, to work in a literary industry context. As well, Hartley (2014: 2) argues ‘for building on regionalism’s concern for place, space, and identity’. Writing and literature are key ways to explore and develop regional specificities. We think that the Northern Rivers is generating a regional literature, a literature of the Northern Rivers Gothic. As teachers, mentors, and residents in a regional area, we recognise that one of our tasks is to help students make connections to existing networks of opportunity, or create them ourselves, through teaching about the literary industry, participating in festivals, holding readings, providing information about publication and competition opportunities, celebrating achievements and engaging in regionally based creative research.

Review of:

Offshoot: Contemporary Life Writing Methodologies and Practice
Donna Lee Brien and Quinn Eades (eds)
UWA Publishing, Crawley, WA 2018
ISBN 9781742589626

Staying: A Memoir
Jessie Cole
Text Publishing, Melbourne VIC 2018
ISBN 9781925603507

Our sense of history, aesthetics, place, and identity is stimulated by a wine-bottle label. The label offers a small, focused narrative through applied design elements. Labels tell stories, stimulate emotions, and (re)make a culture. Here we present a sense of the poetics of wine labels, and of their contribution to a pöiesis of an emerging Australian terroir. We select a set of Australian wine labels that speak of an Australian history of winemaking, Australian graphic design development, and of the pöiesis of Australian place and identity. Terroir has come late to Australia as a New World wine producer. The “terror” in our title comes from “messing” with the venerable term. Australian wine labels develop a sense of an Australian terroir by identifying grape with place; a winemaker or company's passions, predilections, and practices; and viticulture. An Australian terroir is to be cautiously but continually negotiated and determined: always in the “making.”

This paper discusses an instance of, or an attempt at, interspecies communication, collaboration, or convocation. I am writing dried specimens in the Southern Cross Plant Science Medicinal Plant Herbarium, Southern Cross University, Australia. Wendy Wheeler describes ecocriticism, developed late last century, as a “new critical formation” responding to environmental crises. The paper will briefly allude to these crises, and ecocriticism and its cognates, and suggested procedures for action. The paper’s primary concern is wrestling with how to do interspecies communication and collaboration as such action. As Martin Harrison asks: “What are the necessary criteria for a writing which … fulfils an ecological requirement?” I consider Harrison’s, Ryan’s, and others’ suggestions of criteria, modes and procedures. I discuss using the frame of ekphrasis and the genre of the prose poem in my investigation of writing the more-thanhuman. I contest arguments about dealing with dried specimens as a limited sensory experience. And I consider the interdisciplinarity of this instance of creative writing with science.