Archives

  • Place, Past and Perspective
    Vol. 42 (2016)

    The “Place, Past and Perspective” edition of LiNQ appears at a time when the journal itself is symbolically situated at the intersection of all three. LiNQ has a long association with the regional writing, explorations of place and landscape, and has forged strong connections between locations. Recently, LiNQ’s rich and diverse past was fully digitised (https://journals.jcu.edu.au/linq/issue/archive), a set of online archives that span fifty years of scholarship and writing. This moment—a pause, a surveying of the past—offers a fresh perspective. It is fitting then, looking to the future, that LiNQ is refreshed; next year, the journal will appear as an annual issue of eTropic (https://journals.jcu.edu.au/etropic). This move offers new opportunities to connect, hear from fresh voices and perspectives, and to conceive of place as multi-faceted, layered and diverse.
  • Apocalypse
    Vol. 41 (2014)

    This issue invited authors to respond to the proliferation of scenarios for the apocalypse in popular culture. John R. Hall believes that numerous examples suggest that "an apocalyptic mood is no longer confined to cultures of religious fundamentalism" but also demonstrated in "diverse mainstream apocalyptic references" (1). In the media, the apocalypse generates news headlines; in October 2013, the Sydney Morning Herald reported that scientists had found "evidence of an apocalypse on a planetary system similar to our own" (von Radowitz). In 2012, the belief that the end of the Mayan calendar on 21 December would mean the end of the world triggered thousands of blog posts. A poll of 16,000 adults showed eight per cent suffered genuine anxiety that the world would end on that day. Nonfiction texts such as The World Without Us (2007) and The World in 2050 (2010) use current scientific data to project future scenarios that show civilizations crumbling and the climate radically altered as a result of global warming. The welter of recent TV series, movies and books depicting fictional versions of the apocalypse-Revolution (2012), Melancholia (2011), Defiance (2013), The Hunger Games (2008, 2012), War of the Worlds (2005), Tomorrow When the War Began (1993, 2010), I Am Legend (2007), The Road (2006,2009), Oryx and Crake (2003), even a children's film, WALL-E (2008)-reveals a renewed fascination with images of the end of the world. 

    In this issue of UNQ, contributors use poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction to explore the symbolism of the apocalypse. The word "apocalypse" derives from the Greek work "revelation." Each of these submissions reveals both contemporary anxieties and the capacity for resilience in the face of personal, national and global apocalypses.

  • LiNQ Journal - Capture

    Capture
    Vol. 40 No. 1 (2013)

    In this issue of LiNQ, themed ‘Capture’, we hope to understand more deeply how the process of capturing plays out across a variety of themes in literary and cultural studies, and in fiction and poetry. In our call for papers, we drew attention to the double meaning of the verb ‘capture’, preservation and restraint. In his novel The Collector, John Fowles explores this duality, implying that the paradox of art is that “in signalling the importance of freedom, [it] inaugurates another kind of imprisonment” (Cooper). In The Collector the imprisoned Miranda believes “when you draw something it lives and when you photograph something it dies” (Fowles). Similarly, Jeanette Winterson argues that the art of capturing is not mere reproduction:

    The wrestle with material isn’t about subduing; it is about making a third thing that didn’t exist before. The raw material was there, and you were there, but the relationship that happens between maker and material allows the finished piece to be what it is.

    We asked contributors to consider whether, if capturing is a creative act, it is possible to retain the authenticity of the source material.

    In literary theory, particularly debates around post-colonialism, Indigenous studies, autobiography and travel writing, discussions about ‘authenticity’ have returned with new and fraught urgency after the demise of the postmodern turn. The digital era provides a new set of challenges to those engaged in acts of capturing. Digital technologies provide access to infinite artifacts: Winterson’s ‘raw materials’. How do we go about selecting and preserving them for posterity? This edition of LiNQ invited explorations of how we understand both the artistic and the emotional act of capturing. In response to this call, we received a variety of critical and creative responses that consider many of these aspects and demonstrate the complexity of ‘capturing’ authenticity and making art. Below is a selection of works from Volume 40 ‘Capture’.

    References

    Fowles, John. The Collector. Sydney: Random House, 2004. Print

    Winterson, Jeanette. “Life is What You Make In It.” The Independent. 17 Jun. 2010. W eb. 4 November 2013. <http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/features/life-iswhat–you-make-in-it-2002401.html>.

  • LiNQ Journal - life writing

    Performing Lives
    Vol. 39 No. 1 (2012)

    LiNQ Volume 39 focuses on life narratives – the stories individuals tell about themselves and others. More specifically, the theme of the issue ‘Performing Lives’ considers autobiographical and biographical stories as constructed ‘performances’ rather than as simple acts of recalling and telling lives. This theme also gestures to the way life writing in print form has, in a technology-saturated era, migrated into other media including film, television, online, theatre, and the gallery. In our call for papers we asked for creative and scholarly work that broadly considered performance both in a literal sense, such as in the theatre, on film and television, as well as in a metaphorical sense. How are identities constructed and narrated in auto/biographically-based stories? How do authors and artists choose to represent themselves? What do they include and exclude? The response to our call revealed the way life narrative and auto/biographical methods have infiltrated approaches to work both inside the academy and out. Below is a selection of works from Volume 39 ‘Life Writing – Performing Lives’. Enjoy.
  • Generations
    Vol. 38 No. 1 (2011)

    As we go to press, generation 2.0 takes to the streets in protest against failing governments, economies, and systems. We are witnesses to graphic accounts of civil unrest in places like Tunisia, Algeria and Egypt. Once, news bulletins were controlled by mainstream media and overbearing governments. But nowadays, the bloodshed is immortalised by amateur journalists, albeit often unsteadily framed and out of focus, but graphically real on mobile phones. Streamed on 24-hour mainstream news services, these videos are prefaced by, ‘We can’t vouch for the validity of this footage…but here it is’. Fact morphs into fiction as we struggle to make sense of the world. Iconic news images, like the bloodied corpse of Muammar Gaddafi ’s capture hands holding half a dozen smartphones whose faceless owners are recording, with their professional colleagues, a rough draft of history. Everywhere, the custodians of knowledge are under threat. The mainstream media model is collapsing as well as the rarefied world of the book publisher, who helplessly watches readers fervently embrace the electronic world of books. In the last three years, there has been an explosion in ebook reading on smart phones. So much so write Lachlan Jobbins and Angelo Loukakis on the Australian Society of Authors guide to Digital Self-Publishing, that 2011 may well prove the transition point from print to digital publishing. No longer, they say, will digital publishing be ‘the exotic’ extra. And tellingly, they warn that elements of the future have arrived more quickly than the book industry might have anticipated or predicted.
  • Islands
    Vol. 37 No. 1 (2010)

    A place does not exist, Nettie Palmer believed, until it exists “most formidably on paper”, that is except to the people who lived in those places. Littered around the coast of Australia are some tens of thousands of islands small and large, let alone innumerable islands across the globe. Palmer is making an important point about the representations of islands in the literary imaginary. How many islands do have this kind of representative existence beyond those people and creatures that inhabit them? Are all islands linked powerfully in the public imagination with particular writers or academics? Or do we have to struggle a little here and rather is it that Australia’s islands exist most formidably visually through representation by the tourist and entertainment industries? In Australia, narrators have been telling stories about islands long before paper existed; does each island need its own stories, albeit incomplete, as each island has its own dreaming story towards the Murri sense?
  • Pop Goes the Region
    Vol. 36 No. 1 (2009)

    Last year was our fortieth anniversary issue of LiNQ and a timely reason to revisit the past, take stock, and look to the future, to our changing world where new media has morphed into our lives. It seemed to us time to supplement our paper-based issues, on the world wide web. “Pop Goes the Region” is the theme that best suited this stocktaking moment. As one of Australia’s longest running regional literary journals, we felt it was important to establish an online presence that remained local in focus but global in scope; regional in our commitments but not parochial in perspective; broad-based in our appeal but not pedestrian in approach; literary but not rarified; and expert but not specialised. Pop Goes the Region emerged in consideration of these priorities. Regional writing sometimes gets stamped with the stereotype of “parochial” just as other times it comes into vogue, and is taken up in a sort of precious way by expert critic-curators. Sometimes the fact that the local has a long history of engaging with the popular imagination is forgotten. Certainly with the advent of the internet, the confluence of the regional and the popular must no longer be overlooked. The ways in which popular and metropolitan ideas dominate internet communication can also challenge, and indeed sometimes threaten, ideas about the local and local production. In this global village where we live, technology unites and exposes our regional differences. Yu Xiao’s image “Never Grow Up” on the cover of this year’s edition of LiNQ transcends the local and global, connecting us with an emerging regional artist in China, whose image speaks of the synchronicities between pop and the region.
  • Country Matters
    Vol. 35 No. 1 (2008)

    The haunting and evocative image we selected for the cover of this issue “Country Matters” emblematises the multiple ways that the themes of this issue — country, landscape and identity — resonate for different Australians. The challenge of finding a single image to represent the many significations of “country” that are taken up in this issue was a significant one, but the cover image we finally selected spoke to us clearly of the regional connotations we sought to convey: that is, the photograph seemed to us to be first and foremost quintessentially North Queensland. On first glance the black and white photograph appears to represent an old-fashioned portrait of a settler and his child implanted somewhat forcefully and literally in the land. Yet, this is a recent photograph, taken in 1983, documenting the protests against the logging of the Daintree Forest. It conveys how the present is often haunted by the past, particularly in colonial and postcolonial settler Australia. To us, this made the image doubly pertinent, unifying themes from both the past and present, showing how Australians relate to the land: from environmental concerns to a sense of a shared or fractious history shaped by the land and the region. Many of the articles, stories, and poems in this issue contemplate how Australians identify with the landscape that shapes them.
  • Vol. 34 No. 1 (2007)

    Following the appointment of an honorary editorial collective, Volume 34 (2007) marks a new beginning in LiNQ’s thirty-eight-year history. Aspects of the volume nevertheless maintain continuity with the past and with the ideal of connectedness enshrined in the journal’s name.
  • LiNQ cover - 2006

    Earthly Things
    Vol. 33 No. 1 & 2 (2006)

    Nietzche’s musical proclivities provide unusual intellectual fodder; our fiction editor gives us a verbal snapshot of Hanoi. The poetry comes from all over the globe and includes translated works as well as poems by writers in prison. There is work by well-established poets – Michael Sharkey and Jeff Guess –among poems by those yet unlauded.
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