To this day, issues of the body and of parenthood present challenges to women’s autonomy, a question that pervades this issue. ‘Childless: Adoption in Australia’, by Samantha Young, documents the maternal and paternal trauma wrought by forced adoption practices in Australia until the 1970s. ‘This Much is True’, by L.M. Robinson, recounts the author’s late-term abortion of a severely disabled baby, and is filled with remorse for a compromise no mother should have to make. Sam Cooney’s ‘Tears Will Bedew, if Wigs do not Bestrew’ argues that sport’s social function is its construction of gender difference (and inequality).

‘The Letter’ by Lisa Lang is a pulsating fictional work about parental grief, and ‘Softly the Fall’, by Penni Russon, is a bittersweet domestic tale of the loss of a grandfather and a beloved pet turtle. ‘A Particularly Nasty Thing’, by Matt Lamb, concerns the absentee parenting of a man living within prison walls, whose daughter is ‘at the age when you think maybe they’ll not remember you’.

But it is not entirely rueful; there is humour amid the despair. Island 129 ’s strength lies in its assumption that the domestic is universal rather than a mere relic of the ‘feminine’ domain. It is a neat and beautiful package, abundant with the lush, tropical-iceberg media artworks of current MONA scholar Pip Stafford.