Cirrus@Austlit

'The island continent has created an archipelago of incarceration spanning from South East Asia, Micronesia and Melanesia in the Pacific, the Indian Ocean and across mainland Australia. This issue of Southerly, titled Writing Through Fences, is devoted entirely to the work of past and present refugees in these detention centres.

'The records of their experiences are devastating; their creative responses, across genres and media, are astounding. The issue also includes responses from Australian writers, activists, essayists and students, who engage with refugee writing as well as the practices and consequences of refugee incarceration.

'Writing Through Fences is guest edited by the writer-activists Hani Abdile, Behrouz Boochani, Janet Galbraith and Omid Tofighian. Two of these editors have direct experience of Australian refugee detention. Three have been displaced and exiled. All four have worked for years with refugees as translators, enablers and publishers to bring the creative voices of refugees into public view and circulation. This issue presents the greatest range of new refugee writing assembled to date in Australia.' (Publication summary)

'The Lives of Others is concerned with the debts and obligations that accompany the passing of the generations. “For no one bears this life alone” is how Hölderlin describes the mutuality that binds us to our forebears. Each of the contributors to this issue of Southerly endeavours to understand the ways in which this mutuality guides out actions and behaviours. What forms of writing and memorialisation can assist us to acknowledge the unfinished nature of the relationships that link the present to the past, the living to the dead? Is there a way to answer the phantom’s call yet keep faith with those secrets that have made their home in us?' (Introduction)