In her essay, Braune suggests that good writing constitutes a kind of ‘reading aloud’ that inspires others to ‘read privately’ and sometimes to ‘read aloud to others too’. One feels that the founding editor of Antipodes, Robert Ross, to whom the current issue pays posthumous tribute, would have concurred. Antipodes clearly wants to promote the reading of contemporary Australian literature, as well as to provide a space for the writing of campus Australophiles. In its early days, Antipodes looked more like Southerly than like the Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature; its first issue, for example, boasted fiction by Thomas Keneally and Thea Astley, poems by A.D. Hope and Les Murray, and an interview with Shirley Hazzard. While it still mixes fiction and poetry with criticism, essays, reviews and bibliographical information, Antipodes’ emphasis has shifted slightly from the literary to the critical.

On the whole, the criticism selected for the current issue demonstrates ‘the art of writing readings’ that Braune so prizes. Gathered together under the theme ‘The Sacred in Australian Literature’, these pieces contest the myth of Australian secularism by honing in on the most hallowed of subjects in our literature: the land. Frances Devlin-Glass’s ‘An Atlas of the Sacred: Hybridity, Representability, and the Myths of Yanyuwa Country’ is a genuinely fascinating account of the making of ‘Forget About Flinders’: A Yan-yuwa Atlas of the South West Gulf of Carpentaria (2003). It details the arguments for and against the mapping of Yanyuwa kujika (dreaming narratives) with sensitivity. The atlas’s successes and failures are given even-handed elaboration and a nuanced argument for the necessity of hybrid textual versions of Aboriginal sacred narratives is elaborated. Bill Ashcroft’s ‘The Horizonal Sublime’ offers an inventive rereading of European aesthetic theories of sublimity in the context of the Australian landscape. He hypothesises that the vertical sublime of mountains was turned on its head, or rather its side, down under, and that the sacredness of the vast horizon is central to our artistic and literary imagination. Ashcroft attempts to prove his theory through the nineteenth-century paintings of E.C. Frome, George French Angus and S.T. Gill, among others, as well as through the writings of Francis Webb, Delia Falconer, Tim Winton and Andrew McGahan. Only Brigid Rooney’s article, ‘The Sinner, the Prophet, and the Pietà: Sacrifice and the Sacred in Helen Garner’s Narratives’, really strays from the issue’s overriding focus on the land. It gives a welcome account of how books such as The First Stone (1995) and Joe Cinque’s Consolation (2004) attempt to reinscribe the sacred in the secular world of the Australian legal system.

Antipodes’ intention, so far as fiction and poetry is concerned, seems to have turned from straightforward distribution to the riskier task of cultivation. The authors featured in the current issue are, arguably, more accurately described as ‘emerging’ than ‘established’ talents. One is a débutant: Ben Cornford’s ‘Veronika on the Gold Coast’ is an engaging poem which defamiliarises iconic locations such as the beach and the Big Banana to imagine a German exchange student’s impressions of Australian life. The standout inclusion is Anthony Lynch’s ‘The Spa Couple’, a Carveresque short story about a deserted husband trying to get through his first New Year’s Eve alone and, more abstractly, the enforced semi-intimacies – and semi-intrusions – of the suburbs. Happily, Lynch is content to have his first-person narrator describe a series of events as they happen; judgment and analysis are the preserve of the reader. Slowly but surely, the banalities take on a tragicomic significance. Also impressive is the extract from Greg Bogaerts’ first novel, Black Diamonds and Dust, which is also reviewed in the issue. The chances of hitting upon an Australian historical theme not despoiled by a marauding novelist or two must be slim, but to my knowledge this is the country’s first take on the coal-mining novel. The writing is marked by a convincing and intense yesteryear quality.

While the ‘Book Reviews’ section of the current issue carries on the good work of the poetry and fiction editors, Paul Kane and Jack Bennett, by lavishing generous amounts of attention on new and unsung writers, it is also conscious that it must till more familiar terrain. There are reviews of Tim Winton’s The Turning, Gail Jones’s Sixty Lights and John Hughes’s The Idea of Home. Tom Hellenberg’s comment that the cricket scenes in Malcolm Knox’s A Private Man are ‘drawn with enough detail that American readers … should be able to play a match by the time they finish the book’ inadvertently reminded me of the value of Antipodes’ book reviews: they cast a rare foreign eye over our literature. In this issue they are written, without exception, by American or US-based reviewers. With Faye Christenberry’s ‘Bibliography of Australian Literature and Criticism Published in North America – 2004’, which brings the current issue to its close, the reviews reassure us that readers of Australian writing are as diverse as they are many.