Edition 47
Looking West
- Published 3rd February, 2015
- ISBN: 9781922182678
- Extent: 264 pp
- Paperback (234 x 153mm), eBook
In Australia, the lure of bounty from mineral riches has drawn generations of fortune hunters to its western third. For some this was a stop on the road to a better place, for many a destination for new beginnings, but for its original inhabitants dislocation was inevitable.
In the 1980s Perth became a byword for ‘new wealth’. In the 21st century it has grown into a boomtown the likes of which Australia hasn’t seen since the 1850s. There is evidence this is starting to slow, but what will be left when the mining boom is subdued?
Western Australia is also huge and separated from the eastern populations by such a vast desert that it may almost be an island of its own. This creates unique issues and perspectives which challenge the ideas and presumptions of the rest of Australia.
Griffith Review 47: Looking West, co-edited by Julianne Schultz and Anna Haebich, examines booming Western Australia through essay, memoir, fiction and poetry by some of Western Australia’s most exciting and innovative writers.
Griffith Review 47: Looking West is a collaboration between Griffith Review and Curtin University.
Reviews
‘From intriguing images of the Carrolup Aboriginal Art Movement to making popular music in the west; from sharks and crocodiles to miners and migration, from the desert to the wetlands, and so much more, Looking West, turns the spotlight on the multi-textured stories and images of Western Australia. Through the work of some of the state’s most talented writers and commentators, it draws back the curtains to open up forgotten corners of history; record fierce struggle, celebrate achievement and challenges us to recognise the richness and diversity of the land beyond the Nullabor.’ Dr Liz Byrski
‘Following bestselling editions focusing on Queensland, New Zealand and Tasmania, heavyweight Australian literary journal Griffith Review finally turns its compound critical eye on WA with Looking West… Looking West is a multifaceted collection of essay, memoir, reportage, fiction, poetry and photo essay embracing everything from WA’s unique flora and fauna, mining, farming and the arts to our fear of sharks, Aboriginal footy players and homegrown crime fiction… There’s a terrific interview with Tim Winton by Madeleine Watts…’ William Yeoman, West Australian
‘These two editions of Griffith Review [Looking West and Tasmania – The Tipping Point?] are shot through with love, desperation and great storytelling.’ Chris Wallace, Canberra Times
‘It is an eye-opener to realize that the state is central to national prosperity…this is the message via memoir, essay, fiction and poetry… This portrait is loaded with insights into the politics, environment, geology,
history and creative impulses that inform the state. Also investigated are dishonesty and preservation; ownership and pillage; developments and the dispossessed; ingenuity and segregation; immigrants and Indigenous; and football and sharks. Be confronted by what you think you know about the state.’ PSnews
‘Through a rich array of contributions including essays and memoirs, fiction, poetry and a photo gallery, the book sets out to paint a picture of WA. Over 40 contributors, many from Curtin, provide rich insights into the history, environment, politics and creative impulses that inform the State. I believe this special edition will find a wide and appreciative audience who will revisit it again and again. It is a volume that invites and rewards re-reading, and I congratulate everyone who has been involved in its creation.’ Professor Deborah Terry, Vice-Chancellor, Curtin University
In the media
A number of contributors to Looking West have been interviewed about their essays.
Watch editor Julianne Schultz discuss possible futures for the boom state on ABC TV News Breakfast.
All over Australia – from the east to the west – crime writing is flourishing. But it’s in the states of Western Australia and Queensland where this trend has really taken hold. The two states share an unusual history of government secrecy and police corruption. Listen to David Whish-Wilson talk crime writing on ABC RN Books + Arts with Matthew Condon.
When Ashley Hay arrived on the Abrolhos Islands off the northern coast of Western Australia her head was spinning with the story of the infamous wreck of the Batavia, that occurred in 1629. But as she discovered there’s a whole lot more to this ‘cluster of tiny islands’. Listen to Ashley discuss her journey with Geraldine Doogue on ABC RN.
We often talk about the need to tell Australian stories on TV, in film and on the stage. Well The Noongar people of Perth and the surrounding country are finding new ways to tell their stories and to affirm who they are. They’re contributing to the Wirlomin Noongar Language and Story Project. Listen to the founder and chair of this project is the award-winning novelist Kim Scott, who explains it all on ABC RN Books + Arts.
Peter Newman argues that Perth has set national benchmarks for sustainable urban development on ABC RN Ockham’s Razor.
In this Edition
From the edge of the edge
GOING HOME FROM work on late afternoons in summer, I drive west between lines of flat grey bush straight into the glaring red sun that hangs just above the horizon. I’m driving to the edge. As the crow flies, I live five minutes from...
Open ground
Selected for The Best Australian Essays 2015 EVERY FEW MONTHS my mother flies north from Perth to Karratha with a prosthetic penis in her carry-on luggage. At check-in, she says, she watches the x-ray operator closely, anticipating their double-take. She suspects that one day her...
The limits of dominion
…We are, we often feel, living on the edge of something good. Nothing disturbs us. Winds from Africa and Indian waves bear each day to our long white shore only what we most admire: fashions, technology, and rich strangers, as neat as...
Finger money
Finalist in the United Nations Association of Australia Media Peace Awards 2015 in the Promotion of Indigenous Recognition Award category. Judges' comments: 'Finger Money’ is a credit to its three authors. By combining each author's expertise in exploring and investigating the scandalous and ongoing ‘stolen wages’...
Shifting focus
THE TYRANNY OF myopia continues to skew the chronicle of Australian art history. According to Edmund Capon in his ABC series The Art of Australia, and the interpretation of contemporary art practice in Melbourne and Sydney in Hannah Gadsby’s OZ, art ends at the...
The rise of a sustainable city
PERTH IS NOT high in the national consciousness, although its growth has sparked some interest. The latest Australian Bureau of Statistics projections about its population growth are remarkable – three million by the early 2020s, passing Brisbane later that decade, five million by 2050,...
The man without a face
BEFORE I WAS born, my family arrived in Western Australia from Europe and moved into a ramshackle brick house on three-plus acres in Kelmscott, then a semi-rural locality on the outskirts of Perth. The property featured an orchard that ran down to a wide...
How to eat a wilderness
LATE JULY 1923, Newdegate district, Western Australia. It is not a sublime landscape, but beauty may yet be found in its intricate, fragile detail. The slender trunks of the merrit mallees glow pink in the light of the rising sun. Yellow-throated miners chase noisily...
Ghosts of the water dreamers
WHEN HE VISITED Perth in 2012, Arizona water specialist Robert Glennon remarked: ‘I expected a dry city on the driest continent would be at the cutting edge of water conservation and instead I’m hearing stories about groundwater wells in everyone’s backyard and everyone has...
A very striking parasite
I RECENTLY EMAILED a photo of the Western Australian Christmas tree, Nuytsia floribunda, to a Chinese friend in Nanjing. In uncharacteristically gushy fashion, she wrote back rapidly, ‘I like these yellow flowers. They are very beautiful like gold, like honey. I want to eat...
Not so easy
A YOUNG MAN – scarcely more than a boy – stands on a rock beside the deep sea. A whale surfaces next to him, almost within reach. I can’t say if the boy knows the whale, but he knows of the whale: all his...
The native seeds of Augusta
‘MUCH TO MY surprise in Dec last I received a particularly choice box of seeds, and your polite note, requesting a return of the Native seeds of Augusta,’ wrote Georgiana Molloy on 21 March 1837, in her first letter to Captain James Mangles, an...
Possessed by mining
‘I AM SO sick,’ my friend remarked, ‘of hearing about the fucking mining boom.’ It was 2009, and for the past few years mining had seemed omnipresent in the texture of both our everyday lives and the wider world. I was working as a...
Ancient treasures
FROM A SCIENTIFIC perspective, Aboriginal people entered the landmass of Sahul (greater Australia) more than fifty thousand years ago and were in the Pilbara region of Western Australia by 42,000 BP (Before Present). There they etched marks and images into the region’s hard rock...
Lustre
lustre: radiance or brilliance of light THERE IS ANOTHER boom-and-bust resource industry in the West, one with a long and near-forgotten history. The exploitation and artistic use of the pearl shell Pinctada maxima, one of the largest and most lustrous nacre-producing bivalve shells found along...
In flight
ON 9 APRIL 2013, a boat carrying sixty-seven asylum seekers from Sri Lanka made its way undetected through several levels of surveillance and border security to sail straight into the port of Geraldton. It was lunchtime, around 1 pm, and café-goers at the local...
Hidden
IT IS EASY to hide people in the vast expanse of Western Australia. The state stretches thousands of kilometres, from the sweltering north to the cold winds of the rugged south, and extends to remote islands far off the coast such as Christmas Island...
Big time unna?
Our 1985 season did not start well. We lost every game until about halfway through the season. This was not to say we did not have a good side, we did. It was just that the other three teams were better. As a means to try and spark a winning streak, Quiny got us all together one night at training. As we huddled together he promised us an eighteen-gallon keg (of Swan) if we won the premiership. We all started hollering like bastards, but deep in our hearts we knew that the contents of that keg were never going to pass our lips.
Like a tourist with benefits
I HAVE A friend who says she weeps every time the plane descends over her hometown of Johannesburg. She has been away from South Africa for forty years but she is brought to tears whenever she catches sight of the city she left at...
Creative Darwinism
This is my city and I’m never gonna leave it. Channel 7 News ad WRITING ABOUT MY experience of making music in Perth is a strange thing, because as soon as a ‘scene’ is bound and gagged by the written word it is finished, petrified, swept...
Monsters
We’re not just afraid of predators, we’re transfixed by them, prone to weave stories and fables and chatter endlessly about them, because fascination creates preparedness, and preparedness, survival. In a deeply tribal sense, we love our monsters. EO Wilson MY OLDER BROTHER took an interest in...
Calcutta
I’M PERCHED ON the western edge of Australia, looking out on the buoyant and impressive Indian Ocean. The vista, if I turn back towards my city, continues to be dominated by cranes. A city transformed by capital and mining; a population that has grown...
Might be rainbows
ON THE SOUTH-WEST boundary of Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park, in the centre of Australia, an unmarked red-dirt track turns left off the Lasseter Highway. For the few kilometres still within park lines it’s known as Docker River Road. Beyond that point it becomes Tjukaruru Road, leading to Western Australia through Aboriginal freehold land.
In 2006, as a member of the park staff, I occasionally had to go down Docker River Road for work. From the park boundary I would stare into the seemingly untouched red landscape, both delighting and recoiling at the expanse of land ahead. I had never ventured any further.
The worm in the bud
I’M SITTING IN the climate-controlled archival room at the Battye Library in central Perth, reading through old Police Gazettes. With a fifty-year buffer maintained to preserve the dignity of extant convicted criminals, the gazettes begin in 1905 and end in 1964. The journals record...
Playing with fire
WE SIT IN the shade on the back veranda of Mardoo cattle station sipping hot, sweet tea from pannikins. Ringer’s young sons are dragging tree branches along behind them, pretending they are trucks and fuelling up at termite mounds the fine colour of rust....
Mirror rim
Selected for The Best Australian Essays 2015 I THOUGHT BATAVIA was the story I was carrying on my trip to the Abrolhos in the first weeks of spring. You know the one – the Dutch East India Company ship that ran aground there in 1629,...
From now on
AT HOME IN Melbourne, they play kick-to-kick wherever they can: in the backyard, the hallway, at the park, on the MCG at full-time, walking down the street, in the aisles of the supermarket, in the rain, the wind, the dark. He tackles her to...
The quiet slave
Episode One: Near MutinyIn 1820, Alexander Hare, the owner of a household of slaves and an increasingly controversial figure among the British in the East Indies, abandoned his plantation on Java and sailed for Cape Town. After setting up a farm and working it...
Nullius
Leavings I: 1928THE CLEARING IS unknown to her, a flat irregularity in a broad swathe of rocky ground the men call ‘the wasteland’ – heavily wooded, sloping to the creek, destined to be left virgin. The boundary of the next block runs through a...
High school sewing
Wincey – but really – wincey, a baby word from a nursery rhyme is what was doled out by the metre.You could make a layette girls because who would know when you might need it? Strange shapes and sizes dolly small or too big...
The artlessness of internal travel
Going away enforced where I was.There was no here without there.The Canning River fed Bull Creekovershadowed by paperbarkswith its sharp white shore, a cul de sacfed from the Hills, up over the Scarp. Or far up the coast, a new home,the Chapman River ate sandstoneand...
Deep: Indian Ocean view from the Blue Duck Café, Cottesloe
The sea rolls flat, pleasant and blue under a warm sun. In the distance, ships glide easy toward the horizon. An occasional white-crested ripple breaks the bland surface. Seabirds and swimmers enjoy meeting the friendly edges of the ocean.But further, deeper, who knows what...
Droughtbreaker
No sooner resolved neverto write another linethe habit of resolutionbeing so strong,the air turned suddenlysweet outside her window –the longed-for stirring slow-starthesitant splutter, first rain’srustling pitter over pear treeseucalypt and star-studded stephanotis,gripping her round the heartdeep into wakening dark wherethe canny chortle of enchantedmagpies...
Featured Contributors
Amanda Curtin
Amanda Curtin is a writer, book editor and adjunct lecturer at Edith Cowan University. She has published two novels,...
Kim Scott
Kim Scott is the author of five novels. His second, Benang: From the Heart, won the 1999 Western Australian...
Steve Kinnane
Steve Kinnane is a senior researcher at the Nulungu Research Institute, Notre Dame University, who has worked on Aboriginal...
Anna Haebich
Anna Haebich is a multi-award winning author whose books include For Their Own Good (UWAP, 1988) and Broken Circles...
