The intense reading was worth the trouble; I hadn’t forgotten any of the stories, and it wasn’t a grind to re-read any of them.

Unsettled Areas is an apt title for this anthology of ‘Recent South Australian Short Fiction’. Perhaps the geography of South Australia has had an unsettling effect on the imaginations of the writers, not that the stories are about landscape except incidentally. ‘The sea stretched away to the South Pole – and above – the blue sky, the white clouds that might have been reflections of the great vault of ice that cracked and slipped, slowly, at the bottom of the world’, from Prudence Hemming’s ‘The Lovely View’, gives an idea of the kind of unsettling effect of geography on imagination that I mean; empty, edge of the world space that can be filled with any conceivable figment.

Not surprisingly, most of the stories have a surreal flavour. There is, too, a fairly common ambience of sympathetic irony. The major impression, however, is of variety – in the individuality of the writers’ voices and in the range of tones, themes and settings.

Here’s a list, deliberately kept short, of the stories that remained the most impressive. They are in order of reading: Pru Hemming’s ‘The Lovely View’, quoted above, is confident and fluent; Barbara Hanrahan’s ‘Red and Purple Rain’ is skilful and sadly ironic, as is ‘Waiting For MacArthur’, by John Griffin, although this quite gentle story is about pillage and rape. Beate Josephi slyly sends a lot of us up as she mock-mythologises those increasingly distant memories of The Big Event of ’75; in ‘The Memorial’, John Emery’s ‘In a Controlled Area’ is dramatic, vividly convincing; in ‘At the Picasso Exhibition’, Brian Matthews takes risks and succeeds with great sympathy and skill in revealing the inner life of the inarticulate. At the same time, he makes a case for what is likely to be dismissed by the over-educated as ‘high art’. ‘Memories of Marlene Dietrich’, David Rain, has left images of her movies – which I haven’t seen; Andrew Taylor’s ‘The Golden Triangle’ gives traces of all the impenetrable plots, fatuous clues, and sinister terrorist conspiracies that make up those fat paperbacks that are all you can buy at airports. Funnier the second time around, it reminded me of the mixed feelings I get when I play Trivial Pursuit or enjoy one of those airport blockbusters. There were stories that remained unsatisfactory after multiple readings. They had lit crit sorts of faults, but so did many others on and off the list above, so that wasn’t the trouble. On reflection, three of the stories seemed to me to lack sympathy, ironic or otherwise, and to be, in an odd way, self-indulgent – the reader was far from the writers’ minds, and the characters orphaned by their originators. These stories began to stick out like sore toes as I re-read the anthology.

Finally, this collection brought home to me just how colonised by the dominant east-coasters my short story reading had become. I don’t think I’d have noticed this if I hadn’t read so much at one sitting: twenty-one stories is a generous serve. More please, and from other areas, too.