Cirrus@Austlit

'When the indomitable Mark Ulyseas invited me to pen this editorial, I was honoured of course, but also uncharacteristically flummoxed.

'All around me the world was coming off the rails. My studio was flooded after once-in-a-century rains that were a repeat of last year and the year before. There were not one, not two, but three great big elephants in the room that I felt obliged to gloss over if I ever I had a hope of keeping within the word limit. I’m chatty, people. To point them all out, one by one, would glaze too many otherwise bright eyes, so I will defer to Reuters. As someone recently observed in a Sydney editorial, we in the West have grown somewhat inured of big H history in our thirty years of gaudy triumphalism, the Fukuyama conviction that there would be no more vast pestilences, no more vast wars. Well those days are gone, it would seem, heralded in from an Antipodean perspective when most of the east coast of my country caught fire. There has been almost no good news since. Thus, my quandary. Art, afterall, thrives on the conviction that life will prevail.' (Justin Lowe, An Emporium of Letters, Editorial introduction)