MEANJIN BACK ISSUE

Meanjin Leaves Town
Vol. 62, no. 4, 2003

This issue focusses on travels, journeys and pilgrimages to various places within Australia and around the world, including Antarctica, Burma, Poland, Fiji, Leningrad, Nepal and the Villawood detention centre for refugees. It also covers journeys of the mind and the imagination. Several of the articles are drawn from the acclaimed National Library Conference of April 2003, "Travellers' Tales: Writing About Journeys, Journeys Through Writing". Featured writers include Tony Wheeler (founder of the Lonely Planet guides), the novelist and TV personality Linda Jaivin, multi-award-winning historian Tom Griffiths, artist and prizewinning author Kim Mahood, memoirist Colin McPhedran and novelist Glenda Adams. There are intriguing pieces of travel fiction by Marion Halligan and Nadia Wheatley. And there are travel memoirs and diaries from novelist Nicholas Jose (reporting from on location in Washington at the height of the Iraqi war) and Iain McCalman (recounting his intrepid voyage aboard a replica of Captain Cook's ship, the Endeavour). In turn, acclaimed Australian novelist of eighteenth-century Venetian life, M.R. Lovric, reviews McCalman's recent study of the compulsive itinerant and con-man, Count Cagliostro. Painter and photographer Jenni Mitchell provides a stunning gallery of her images of ice, from the recent trip she made with the Australian Antarctic Division (the same trip Tom Griffiths reports on here). As befits the theme of literary travelling, the poetry in this issue will include a number of fresh translations into English of verse by Pushkin, Celan and Rimbaud, among other important foreign writers.