Rayne Allinson

Rayne Allinson reviews 'Living with the Anthropocene: Love, loss and hope in the face of the environmental crisis' edited by Cameron Muir, Kirsten Wehner, and Jenny Newell

January–February 2021, no. 428 • 17 December 2020

Last month I was volunteering with a group of botanists surveying coastal heathland in the Tarkine Forest Reserve in North-West Tasmania when one of them cried out, ‘Orchid!’ We all rushed over excitedly, our phones and pocket magnifiers at the ready. It was a Green-comb Spider-orchid (Caladenia dilatata), with long, delicate-green limbs and a reddish-purply face, hovering like a ballet dancer ... (read more)

Rayne Allinson reviews 'The Child in Shakespeare' by Charlotte Scott

September 2020, no. 424 • 24 August 2020

The figure of the child stands at both ends of human experience in Shakespeare’s plays. The span between our ‘mewling and puking’ infancy and our ‘second childishness’ of old age runs to little more than a dozen lines in Jacques’s famous ‘seven ages of man’ speech in As You Like It, before we slip into ‘mere oblivion, / Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.’ In th ... (read more)

Rayne Allinson reviews 'Island 159' edited by Vern Field

August 2020, no. 423 • 27 July 2020

First published as The Tasmanian Review in 1979 (soon after the Franklin River Dam project was announced) and renamed Island Magazine in 1981 (the year of the Tasmanian Power Referendum), Island emerged as one of Australia’s leading literary magazines, yet always grounded in a fragile environment. True to its ecological roots, this fortieth anniversary edition, put together by the new editorial ... (read more)

Tim (MONA)

ABR Arts • 24 April 2020

‘All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone,’ wrote the seventeenth-century writer Blaise Pascal. As many of us are discovering, doing nothing alone in a room is a surprisingly difficult and demanding task. Even in these unusual times, when we are being asked – or in some cases, legally required – to stay home and do as little as possible, we ar ... (read more)

Rayne Allinson reviews 'Rogue Intensities' by Angela Rockel

March 2020, no. 419 • 24 February 2020

‘How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives,’ writes Annie Dillard in The Writing Life, her timely appeal for presence over productivity in modern life. Turning the page on a new year reminds us of the seasonality of time, its familiar cycles of life, death, and rebirth. But flipping through the empty pages of a calendar can also remind us that time is a human construct design ... (read more)