Dear Austlit listfolk,
A couple of notes on today’s ‘Island’ launch if anyone’s interested.
Richard Flanagan commented on Rodney Croome’s four year’s editorship, saying he had no doubt that “without Croome there would be no ‘Island'”, and that he gave ‘Island’ a Tasmanian focus while other journals were in danger of “dying a contagious death of fashionable similarity”.
Pete Hay said a case could be made that Tasmania has not been particularly well served by its intellectuals but that Croome’s editorship is important in that in a reflective and and creative way, he looked at the fundamental question of what it is to be Tasmanian, providing a journal which sought to interpret Tasmania for Tasmanians. He called ‘Island’ “a crucial cultural entity, the single most important interface between Tasmania and the rest of Australia”.
Croome was gracious, suggesting that without the efforts of (previous) deputy editor Fiona Cooke, “the magazine would definitely have died”. He recalled an interview with Anne Warburton four years ago when he began with the magazine. “It was one of Annie’s questions from out of left field. Will you make ‘Island’ more political?” What a strange question, Croome thought. “It’s always been fairly political, I won’t change that”. He began looking through previous issues of the journal … and now, at the end of four years, he’s come to the conclusion that there was far less gay writing published during his editorship, than before.
Russell Kelly takes over as stand-in editor in a move that may become permananent.
Ralph