Conversations

Vol. 5 No. 2 Summer 2005

The diversity of styles and subject matter represented by the contributions to this issue testifies to the journal's continuing development and the growing interest shown in it by the local, regional and national literary communities.

The selection of poetry in this issue includes new work by John Stokes, Joy Hooton, Robin Wallace-Crabbe, Carolyn Leach-Paholski and Peter Rose. In autobiography, Bruce Bennett's exploration of his relations to the Western Australia of his childhood is sustained by evocative literary references. Robert Brunton, author of Golden Pavilions, describes his struggles with the process of writing and his approach to joining fact and fiction. Ainslie Gaye Murray's drawings of Belaau - the little bamboo houses built in the fields by Indo-Fijian cane farmers - are accompanied by Murrary's colourful and compassionate narrative of her journey through the impoverished farming areas surrounding Labasa town.

In fiction, Subhash Jaireth's Heidegger's Hammer winds its way through the narrator's memories of his friendship with a Russian potter fascinated by the hammer in Heidegger, while In Maxine McArthur's elegant and subtly erotic "The Legacy of Master Li", an eminent scholar moves toward a confrontation with the truth that could bring about either his downfall or his resurrection.

This issue also includes Inga Clendinnen's lecture " In search of the "Actual Man Underneath": A.W. Martin and the Art of Biography", delivered at the The Australian National University on 4 May, 2004 and sponsored by the History Program, Research School of Social Sciences.