With the Olympics providing international focus on Oz this year, Granta has chosen a good time to profile the continent that tends to get a faster cliched dispatch than any other. Australia is the sort of issue that Granta does so well; focusing in on a central theme.
Peter Conrad contributes a bittersweet essay on his early departure from Tasmania to a scholarship in Oxford, with a moving portrait of the parents he left behind forever. Tim Winton, Thomas Keneally and Robyn Davidson also contribute strong memoir pieces, with Davidson returning to Aboriginal territory to update us on Mr Eddie, one of the characters in her classic book, Tracks. Polly Borland interviews 11 of the Aboriginal people she photographs in residential care centres; her text has the same illuminating clarity as her strong pictures. David Malouf introduces a series of pictures by one of Australia's best-known photojournalists, David Moore, which capture, through their images of architecture, the sense of a country being slowly settled. Other contributors to this thought-provoking issue include Peter Carey, Howard Jacobson, Murray Bail and Ben Rice, whose first novel will be published later this year.
