Cirrus@Austlit

'The Northern Territory has been without its own literary journal for twenty years. This absence of a distinctive space dedicated to capturing a uniquely Territorian voice has left us on the edges of a national discussion, at the mercy of others’ agendas, and beholden to outsider publishers obligated to markets elsewhere. A quick scan of Australian literary journals finds most located in major cities and largely on the east coast, a situation symptomatic of Australia’s longstanding marginalisation of its rural, regional and remote storytellers. Compounding the blurring effect that this distance from the mainstream can have, skewed and misleading representations of Territorians and their contexts have commonly held sway in the Australian imaginary, and are, more often than is desirable, penned by outsiders. The result has been that for twenty years readers and writers from the NT have suffered displacement from the centre of ‘national’ discourse, and from any empowered position where they might influence the way Australia and the world perceives them. In the process they have come to recognise and clearly understand the gap between a lived experience of a place and its literary representation.' (Introduction)