A long time ago I picked up a copy of
Christopher Koch’s award winning novel The
Doubleman from my parent’s shelves. It was the first time I had read about
Tasmania in a book for adults, and it shifted everything for me. The place
became imbued with more magic, more story and more depth, it allowed me to
better understand the community I had grown up in. It didn’t stop me fleeing
the island at the age of 18 though, for what I thought would be juicier territories.
They were juicy, though I’m glad, that when I crawled home with a broken heart,
for what I thought would be a mere pit stop, I stayed.
Christopher Koch is heir to a long line of
writers hailing from Tasmania. In fact, the longest in Australia. Henry Savery,
a fascinating character transported to Van Diemen’s Land for forgery, wrote the
first novel in the federation. Quintus
Servinton is a rather stodgy, thinly veiled autobiographic work. The first
novel written by a woman in Australia, Mary Grimstone’s Woman’s Love also was penned here. There are 40 000 years of
stories that precede them; stories of our first inhabitants, written in stone,
in country, in memory and in voice.
Tasmanian writing was not prolific in the
early twentieth century, and as the state headed towards an economic downturn
and only 50% literacy, a shocking figure that is true still today, many voices
became disenfranchised and lost.
Publishers seemed to disappear too, but
with the inception of Island magazine
in 1979 (formerly The Tasmanian Review),
the importance of local story, local content and local publishing became valued
again. Island mainly published local
work for local readers. Over the next three decades the purview of the magazine
changed, but the value of publishing local work meant that a new generation of
Tasmanian writers, many of whom are now recognized internationally (think
Amanda Lohrey, Richard Flanagan, Peter Conrad, Carmel Bird, James Boyce, Pete
Hay) had an outlet for their words and stories.
The arrival of Mona changed so much;
including the way we see ourselves. Creatives, who have always existed on this
island were all of a sudden in an international spotlight, and for many
Tasmanian writers, came the realization that their work sat comfortably
alongside its national and international partners.
‘Slush’ is the unfortunate term for
unsolicited submissions sent to a publishing house. About five years ago I was
wading through slush for Island on a
flight home to Hobart on an autumn afternoon. It was a luminous afternoon, one
where I could see the late afternoon light illuminating the Hazards. I was
nonplussed; some stories were good, some mediocre, many bad. I read a story
from a chap in London who had been emailing me for some time. It was so good I
grasped the stranger next to me and gushed and blathered about this exceptional
story. It was written by Tadgh Muller, of South London, formerly of Tasmania,
son of Mrs Muller, who my mother taught with at a local school. That
information came later. We began a correspondence and before we knew it,
Transportation Press and a collaboration between Tasmanian writers and London
writers was beginning, our first publication, Island and Cities, launched to a crowd of hundreds in Tasmania and
a new publishing house, with a clear bias towards Tasmanian writing, with
international collaborations was born.
Transportation Press published the next
international collaboration, The Third Script,
with exemplary short stories from Tasmania, alongside work from the UK, and
writers from the cradle of civilization, from a literary culture thousands of
years old, Iran. We are now placing ourselves firmly in an international space
with our first competition, Smoke, a microfiction competition and are planning
our third anthology, working with writers from Iran, Tasmania and the world’s
biggest market for English language books, India. It’s an incredibly
exhilarating space, a slow burn and an opportunity for Tasmanian writing to be
shared around the world. It also gives Tasmanian writers the opportunity for
creative partnerships around the world. Entries for Smoke close on April 30.
The ability to tell your story is crucial
to an awareness of self and of community. To read stories is to foster empathy
and understanding, to be entertained, transformed and transported. In a state
that is finally, deservingly in the international spotlight, yet also a state
with a two tiered economy and the shocking figure of 50% functional literacy, to
have our stories told and the written word celebrated for all its glorious
power is crucial. Transportationpress.net
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