This sense of distance and isolation is particularly present in this collection, perhaps working as a kind of metaphor for the ‘regionalism’ of Western Australia itself. Two stories are based around car journeys from ‘West-to-East’, across the massive Nullarbor Plain: in Strephyn Mappin’s ‘Heart Murmurs’ and John Webb’s very short piece ‘The Fox’, the distance of the journey is linked to the distance between driver and passenger, heading in the same direction but, in various ways, totally separate from each other. A number of stories take loneliness as a kind of precondition. Peter Cowan’s ‘Stamps’ looks for a moment into the life of a lonely old man. A woman knocks on his door: he refuses to let her in, but she returns in the morning. In a sense, she is as lonely as he is, but the story ends by shutting her out, as if it cannot cope with her: ‘He went out to close the door’.

Some stories and poems by women look into female loneliness, with the woman not so much shut out as shut in. Lee Knowles’ fine poem ‘Rebecca Morgan Speaks’ looks back to a woman growing up in a small colony in Western Australia in the 1820s. Like the colony itself, the woman has great promise, ‘... but soon I will be grown, betrothed / finished’. Married, she occasionally looks out into the wider Australian landscape: ‘the dream I sometimes glimpse / in a gull’s wing, past clouds / in these strange skies’. Patricia Avery’s poem ‘Cooking White Stones’ provides a glimpse of that ‘betrothed, finished’ condition, with a lonely reclusive married woman gazing outside through the window of her (husband’s) house. She sees, in the final lines, an emblem of her earlier self: ‘A thin girl with a bicycle / lounges on the street corner not wanting to go home’. One story, Julie Lewis’s ‘The Walls of Jericho’, goes on to take an ultimate revenge against the house-as­prison: mysterious organ music (a metaphor for the story itself?) brings down the walls and exposes the family hidden within.

A number of pieces in this collection are nostalgic, looking back to earlier days ‘etched into memory’ (to quote from Nicholas Hasluck’s poem ‘Silhouettes’). It struck me that nostalgia itself is gender-based: the male writers (Hasluck, James Legasse) recall how things were, while the female writers (Knowles, Avery, Lewis, Campbell) recall how things might have been. These female writers present the ‘unsuitable dreams’ of imprisoned women: their work articulates what Marion Campbell calls, in her story ‘Five Gazeboes’, the ‘female unsayable’. The longest and perhaps the best story in the collection, Elizabeth Jolley’s ‘Frederick the Great Returns to Fairfields’, shows how this ‘female unsayable’ can, however, turn to neurosis. Jolley’s narrator, taking refuge in a school in Hertfordshire run by women, feels threatened by men who live precariously outside the realms of the story itself, nervous men who (in spite of the powerful nickname ‘Frederick the Great’) are probably more frightened of her than she is of them.

One of the best and most powerful articulations of female imprisonment is presented in Philip Salom’s ‘A Migrant Woman Makes Her Choice’. This poem looks at a woman in the workplace, subjected to ‘the long male dream of factories and shop floors’: it presents a fine poetic image of the exploited ‘foreign self, used for labour and sex and functioning like a kind of latter-day convict, with the stain on her forehead that is patriarchy’. The migrant woman and the ‘female unsayable’ are examined further in one of the two stories by the Greek­Australian writer Vasso Kalamaras, ‘The Fence’. This story looks at the barrier between reality and possibility and, presenting an ageing Greek woman working in her house in the outback and daydreaming about her youth, lyrically evokes what the female cannot say: ‘Two hands worn from work with the living blood pulsing through them. Her body was still a young girl’s, her soul a valley full of hyacinths with love, the sun and delight’.   Women and migrants (and migrant women) are presented here as a kind of fringe group, marginalised by the patriarchal ‘centre’ just as Western Australia itself has been marginalised by the cultural ‘centres’ in the East. The Aboriginal also figures in a couple of poems in this way, as a fringe dweller: Philip Salom’s bittersweet ‘Symphony and Song on the Black Fringe’ looks into the treatment of Aboriginals ‘at the place of Paternalism ...’, and Andrew Lansdown’s ‘Far from Home, the Blower’ evokes the distant dreams of an Aboriginal as he plays the didgeridoo. In this poem, the Aboriginal is literally imprisoned and the poet sits by him as he plays (Lansdown himself works as an Education Officer at Fremantle Prison), attempting to represent his subject’s unsayable lament:

He cuts his tongue, gets plenty sounds. Plenty wind. Like tortoise. Like
crocodile ...
You know? His gaze is distant.
He is dreaming. To be a blower,
he says, to be a didgeridoo-man
is good. You know? Get respect.
Get Proudness

Many stories and poems in this collection present aspects of this ‘distant gaze’ - looking through the window to another world, wide and spacious, on the other side of ‘the fence’. Some­times, as in Julie Lewis’s second story ‘Symbiosis’, the character finds herself ‘absorbed’ and ‘nourished’ by that world literally beyond ‘the fence’, the spacious Australian bush: Lewis writes the kind of ecological fiction here that other young writers are now presenting too. Andrew Lansdown’s ‘Choka for Sacred Kingfisher’ and Caroline Caddy’s poem ‘Cockatoos’ both lyrically celebrate fauna in the bush, evoked in print with loving care (‘They are black paper warped kites/floating off the trees in heat ... ‘).

Sometimes, of course, this ‘distant gaze’ extends well beyond Western Australia itself to exotic places ‘far from home’ like Santiago (in Faye Davis’s story ‘A Map to Find the Congress’), Chile (in Alan Alexander’s poem ‘Cafe Folklorico’) and Macau (in T.A.G. Hungerford’s story ‘Balcony of Dreams’): these places are colourful and aromatic, with the narrators writing like wide-eyed tourists.

John Webb’s short prose poem ‘Postcard’ also looks out to that faraway world when the narrator receives a postcard from a girl in Italy: ‘She is there in the imagined poetic country, and I am here, in the prosaic country of the real’. In a sense, the various ‘portraits’ in this collection inevitably turn Western Australia into an ‘imagined poetic country’ too: the ‘distant gaze’, the unsayable dream, is at times almost too beautiful. Indeed, by looking out to distant exotic worlds (the bush, other places) or by capturing the private dreams of lonely people, some of these stories and poems turn away from certain larger ‘prosaic’ issues. Elizabeth Lawson’s ‘Poem for Winnie Mandela’ stands out in this collection as perhaps the only piece that recognises and responds to a contemporary prosaic struggle going on in a world beyond the shores of sunny Fremantle - and yet even this is still, finally, only a portrait.