Read Island Magazine, #150

Island Magazine, #150

Unknown Author

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Description:"Remember when I was coming back from the Antarctic on that orange icebreaker, and a friend told me that he could smell home – Tassie. I told him that The Island just makes me feel so bloody sad and it rips up my insides and it’s not my home. He looked at me for a while and then said, ‘Tasmania’s not like that at all. What you need is a welcome to country."These lines are from a letter by author Favel Parrett. She’s referring to the moment of return to Hobart from a journey made possible by the Australian Antarctic Arts Fellowship – she’d been researching the novel which would become 'When the Night Comes'. The question of why a Tasmanian would feel this way about her home state is answered by the pages that follow, though the fact that the letter is addressed to Truganini – famously and erroneously considered the last Indigenous Tasmanian, who died in Hobart in 1876 – is explanation enough.What is it to be someone who inhabits in a place by virtue of the displacement and extirpation of others – others whose claim to that land is founded on thirty-five centuries of prior occupation? Parrett’s first instinct, described above, is anger directed within and without.To dwell one must be content to linger in a place. In the German word Wohnen – to live – the idea of dwelling and being at peace are one. So, dwelling is a mental, even spiritual, condition as much as deliberate residence in a physical it is a state of mind. In 'Hey Truganini', Parrett describes, in prose at once garrulous and anguished, how knowledge of the past has made dwelling in Tasmania a form of torture for her.Reading the letter again, I’m reminded of a newly published book. Sarah Sentilles’s 'Draw Your Weapons' is made up of hundreds of micro-essays which return again and again to the question of violence, depictions of violence, and how we should respond to such depictions. The photos of Abu Graib inmates, for instance; or postcards of early twentieth-century Southern lynchings. Should we look at them? Or do they only recall us to the futility of one person’s care arrayed against the evil of the world?The Favel Parrett who begins this letter has absorbed the words and images that tell the truth of the Black War in Tasmania – the rapes and the murders, the separation of families, the forced incarceration, the corpses mutilated for science and souvenir – and they have poisoned the world around her. The natural beauty of Tasmania only returns the author to the ugly truth of what – and who – is missing from the picture. She walks along the beach at Great Oyster Bay, past the immemorial middens of that Indigenous gathering place, and can only imagine a large human presence expunged.Sentilles acknowledges this feeling of hopelessness may be overwhelming. Still, she regards the unflinching gaze with which an author such as Parrett has looked back as necessary. To not look is to attempt to avoid historical or collective guilt; it is a bid to remain unsullied.The question both writers explore is if one can’t look away – and yet to look is to fall into hopelessness because no effort of care or will will repair the wounds of the past – what is one then to do? The answer on both counts is the creative act. Here is Sentilles again, paraphrasing the American philosopher Elaine "Art – bringing a physical object into the world where previously there was not one – illustrates on a small scale what’s possible on a larger scale, Scarry noted. You take something from inside your mind and put it out into the real world – from my head to my hand, from my head to your hand – which means that what was inside your mind is now shareable. Imagining a city, you make a house ... Imagining a political utopia, you help build a country. Imagining the elimination of suffering in the world, you nurse a sick friend. Scarry called the creation of an artefact – a sentence, a cup, a piece of lace – a fragment of world alteration. And if you can make these smaller changes, she wrote, if you can alter the world in fragments, just think of what can be imagined together, what might be possible in a a total reinvention of the world."Parrett has, in these pages, written an imaginary letter about a real woman and mailed it to readers’ heads. She recounts the violence perpetrated on Truganini and her people. She recalls the dispossession, the disease, the ignominy, the slide into despair that marked the Indigenous woman’s life at every point and which pursued her even into death, when the authorities refused Truganini’s request to have her ashes spread over the D’Entrecastreaux Channel and instead put her remains on show for the public.All this the author relates and then surprises us – as Sentilles’s ultimately hopeful book does too – with a joyful conclusion. Parrett returns to Great Oyster Bay and this time feels genuine wonder at the physical beauty of the s...We have made it easy for you to find a PDF Ebooks without any digging. And by having access to our ebooks online or by storing it on your computer, you have convenient answers with Island Magazine, #150. To get started finding Island Magazine, #150, you are right to find our website which has a comprehensive collection of manuals listed.
Our library is the biggest of these that have literally hundreds of thousands of different products represented.

Pages: 128

Format: PDF, EPUB & Kindle Edition

Publisher: Island Magazine Inc

Release: 2017

ISBN: 0994490186

Description: "Remember when I was coming back from the Antarctic on that orange icebreaker, and a friend told me that he could smell home – Tassie. I told him that The Island just makes me feel so bloody sad and it rips up my insides and it’s not my home. He looked at me for a while and then said, ‘Tasmania’s not like that at all. What you need is a welcome to country."These lines are from a letter by author Favel Parrett. She’s referring to the moment of return to Hobart from a journey made possible by the Australian Antarctic Arts Fellowship – she’d been researching the novel which would become 'When the Night Comes'. The question of why a Tasmanian would feel this way about her home state is answered by the pages that follow, though the fact that the letter is addressed to Truganini – famously and erroneously considered the last Indigenous Tasmanian, who died in Hobart in 1876 – is explanation enough.What is it to be someone who inhabits in a place by virtue of the displacement and extirpation of others – others whose claim to that land is founded on thirty-five centuries of prior occupation? Parrett’s first instinct, described above, is anger directed within and without.To dwell one must be content to linger in a place. In the German word Wohnen – to live – the idea of dwelling and being at peace are one. So, dwelling is a mental, even spiritual, condition as much as deliberate residence in a physical it is a state of mind. In 'Hey Truganini', Parrett describes, in prose at once garrulous and anguished, how knowledge of the past has made dwelling in Tasmania a form of torture for her.Reading the letter again, I’m reminded of a newly published book. Sarah Sentilles’s 'Draw Your Weapons' is made up of hundreds of micro-essays which return again and again to the question of violence, depictions of violence, and how we should respond to such depictions. The photos of Abu Graib inmates, for instance; or postcards of early twentieth-century Southern lynchings. Should we look at them? Or do they only recall us to the futility of one person’s care arrayed against the evil of the world?The Favel Parrett who begins this letter has absorbed the words and images that tell the truth of the Black War in Tasmania – the rapes and the murders, the separation of families, the forced incarceration, the corpses mutilated for science and souvenir – and they have poisoned the world around her. The natural beauty of Tasmania only returns the author to the ugly truth of what – and who – is missing from the picture. She walks along the beach at Great Oyster Bay, past the immemorial middens of that Indigenous gathering place, and can only imagine a large human presence expunged.Sentilles acknowledges this feeling of hopelessness may be overwhelming. Still, she regards the unflinching gaze with which an author such as Parrett has looked back as necessary. To not look is to attempt to avoid historical or collective guilt; it is a bid to remain unsullied.The question both writers explore is if one can’t look away – and yet to look is to fall into hopelessness because no effort of care or will will repair the wounds of the past – what is one then to do? The answer on both counts is the creative act. Here is Sentilles again, paraphrasing the American philosopher Elaine "Art – bringing a physical object into the world where previously there was not one – illustrates on a small scale what’s possible on a larger scale, Scarry noted. You take something from inside your mind and put it out into the real world – from my head to my hand, from my head to your hand – which means that what was inside your mind is now shareable. Imagining a city, you make a house ... Imagining a political utopia, you help build a country. Imagining the elimination of suffering in the world, you nurse a sick friend. Scarry called the creation of an artefact – a sentence, a cup, a piece of lace – a fragment of world alteration. And if you can make these smaller changes, she wrote, if you can alter the world in fragments, just think of what can be imagined together, what might be possible in a a total reinvention of the world."Parrett has, in these pages, written an imaginary letter about a real woman and mailed it to readers’ heads. She recounts the violence perpetrated on Truganini and her people. She recalls the dispossession, the disease, the ignominy, the slide into despair that marked the Indigenous woman’s life at every point and which pursued her even into death, when the authorities refused Truganini’s request to have her ashes spread over the D’Entrecastreaux Channel and instead put her remains on show for the public.All this the author relates and then surprises us – as Sentilles’s ultimately hopeful book does too – with a joyful conclusion. Parrett returns to Great Oyster Bay and this time feels genuine wonder at the physical beauty of the s...We have made it easy for you to find a PDF Ebooks without any digging. And by having access to our ebooks online or by storing it on your computer, you have convenient answers with Island Magazine, #150. To get started finding Island Magazine, #150, you are right to find our website which has a comprehensive collection of manuals listed.
Our library is the biggest of these that have literally hundreds of thousands of different products represented.

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Island Magazine, #150

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