Spring 2018 | 72.1

The name existed before the nation: Terra Australis, a southern land.

Terra Australis Incognito: unknown, a speculation, a proposition of Aristotle’s, and then Ptolemy’s, about geological balance, an expectation that the same amount of land must exist in the southern hemisphere as in the northern.

And the land, naturally, the continent of blue mountains, plains, sandstone monoliths, great deserts, and rainforests, existed well before the concept, before the name, before the nation. More than 60,000 years before Matthew Flinders’s anglicized appellation, Australia, permanently replaced the Dutch name, New Holland, the first people arrived in that vast place that had been walked and sung into being by their ancestors.

What we know as Australia remains a unique and surprising place, a western outpost, an eastern crossroads, a cultural hybrid that seems not unlike its native monotreme, the platypus—monstrous, wondrous, a mammal that lays eggs, then nurses its hatched young with mother’s milk, that secrets a powerful venom in the spur of its clawed, webbed foot.

Physically remote as any imagined paradise, Australia also seems, for Americans, strangely close-at-hand, is made to feel rather familiar, or at least sympathetic to us, culturally—despite its ties to Queen and Commonwealth—via our own thin version of a Dreamtime—film, television, etc. Its outlaws and outback feel like extensions of our own wild west. Or it’s like another California, with a similar surf and car culture, depicted as a tapestry of sunburnt images that somehow, frequently neglect the intensity of Australia’s Asian-ness, the diversity (as well as cruelty) of its immigration narrative, and the details of the modes of activism and persistence of those first people, who continue to suffer the deep inequities, the imbalances that are the consistent legacies of having been discovered by Europeans.

This issue of Western Humanities Review dives into the many aspects of this further west, a broad, diverse, and continental west-southwest (by our reckoning), with a portfolio of contemporary Australian prose poetry, graciously compiled by editors and poets Katharine Coles and Shane Strange. The portfolio features twenty-three voices that provide a very fine, if focused, glimpse of the aesthetic and cultural breadth of Australian writing, from the city to the red interior, from the past and future to the roiling present, that will bring readers a more nuanced impression of what, for many, remains incognito out there in that very large concept beyond the Pacific.

Further articulating the notion of the close look in this issue is the accompanying portfolio of photographs by Australian artist Carolyn Young (also featured on our cover), whose work performs a scientifically-informed inquiry into the long-term effects of European colonization on eastern Australian grasslands, the overwriting of millennia of indigenous stewardship. Young’s work, elegantly engaging both the intimate and the objective, is as interested in how we see as in what is seen, keeping us mindful of the impressions of bodies, past and present, on her still lifes and landscapes.

Also, we celebrate our 2018 Mountain West Writers’ Contest Winners, Alison Maeser Brimley in prose and Hollie Dugas in poetry, along with runners up in each category—Rachel Levy and jess nieberg (prose) and Tyler Goldman and Madelyn Garner (poetry). Congratulations to them, and many thanks to this year’s judges, Lily Hoang and Bob Hicok, in prose and poetry, respectively, for their generous work.