'In 1766, Jeanne Barret dressed as a man and became the first woman to sail around the world, accompanying naturalist Philibert Commerson. At the close of their journey they disembarked at Mauritius, where Commerson located a ‘charming shrub’ with leaves of many different shapes. He named it Baretia bonafidia for the woman whose clothing, or leaves, concealed who she was. As Jeanne’s biographer Danielle Clode writes, ‘It is an apt plant to name after Jeanne – rare and difficult to find, with very little written about it, and a complex history of misidentification and reclassification’. The plant’s qualities – rarity, elusiveness, an identity difficult to pin down – also reference the challenges Clode encountered in researching and writing In Search of the Woman Who Sailed the World. The records in the archive do not amount to much: ‘a handful of documents, a signature here and there, a reported conversation and descriptions from others, some malicious but mostly admiring. Most of the accounts were written or rewritten long after the event’.' (Introduction)
'The unnamed narrator of Madeleine Watts’ debut novel The Inland Sea (2020) is a recent literature graduate and aspiring writer. Living off the dwindling remains of her student allowance, she plans to get a job, start saving for an airplane ticket overseas. But first she heads to Glebe to buy the first of the novels she will read on the rocks at Gordons Bay over the ‘last hot summer’ of her final months adrift in Sydney.' (Introduction)
'Can poetry make things happen? Can poetry bring about change? Does it hold that power? In the wake of the heaving 2020 chronicle of civil rights protests, a global pandemic and environmental disasters, what role can poetry play towards a recovering world? While we – poets, non-poets, regular and irregular poetry readers alike – often turn to poetry in the face of grief, trauma, depression or injustice, is this ‘turning to’ the poem merely borne of tradition, in that we call upon poetry for its ability to speak through inarticulable depths of feeling? Or, do we intuitively sense that part of poetry’s purpose is to provoke or invoke change?' (Introduction)
