David Owen

Towards the end of the last century, Australian little magazines were forced to make a choice: become more interdisciplinary, or die. Those that have survived, and the new ones that have emerged, have taken on a new coherence and cohesion. Still mostly featuring a varied mix of writers, genres and approaches, they tend these days to have some unifying topic, or topos, and to be conducting a kind of internal conversation within their covers.

The press release for David Owen’s latest book describes it as a ‘thoroughly researched’ work by a shark ‘outsider’ that aims to ‘comprehensively overturn our negative and damaging perceptions of sharks’. I cannot claim expert knowledge of sharks, but personal experience makes me a suitable subject on which to measure the author’s effectiveness. When I was a child, one of my sisters was bitten in shallow water by a shark that had breached a netted beach in North Queensland. Although her injuries were not life-threatening, the resulting panic had a lasting effect: I rarely swim in the ocean, and have a healthy respect for sharks.

A magnet on my fridge has a cartoon image of a Tasmanian Devil and reads: ‘Send Tassie more Tourists – the last ones were delicious!’ David Owen and David Pemberton’s book shows how flawed the stereotype of the Devil as an insatiable, aggressive animal is. They reveal the Devil’s complex nature in this well-researched and detailed work, which is the first on the Devil to be published.

Hands up if you subscribe to an Australian journal. Keep them up if you subscribe to more than one. More than two? If you read them? Cover to cover? Half? More than two articles an issue? Hands up if you look forward to them. Maybe it’s just me, but there’s something that makes me terribly tired when faced with the prospect of Australia’s literary and political journals. I stand in front of the (small) shelf made available for them in my local bookshop and try to muster up the enthusiasm I might feel when faced with a shelf of new books; try to feel excited at the prospect of reading them. I have a couple of subscriptions, and when they arrive, I make a point of tearing the envelope open immediately to have a look. And yet I still have to push past a barrier of resistance to sit and actually read them.

In ‘Ouah, Ouah’, a poem in the current issue of Island, Chris Wallace-Crabbe writes: ‘Dogs go shadowing our lives like history, / furbags of the quotidian.’ Literary journals are like that in some ways. Island, Heat, Conversations and Overland undoubtedly aspire to being more than alley mutts or underarm accessories. Indeed, they attest to the increased seriousness and politicisation of Australian literature. Like dogs, these journals shadow history. Like dogs, they also live in the shadows, lingering at the sliding door, waiting to be asked in; and they’ve evolved in different ways to achieve that aim.

The Tasmanian Tiger or thylacine (Thylacinus cynocephalus) continues to stalk the Tasmanian imagination. Miasmas resembling it figure in reports from tourists and bushwalkers, who happen upon the slinking apparition in the wilderness. Fanciful meanderings of wishful hearts and minds? Perhaps. Tantalising suspicions that the thylacine may still exist will not go away. No matter that the last thylacine died in the Hobart Zoo on 7 September 1936. With it died a species, but not the legend