Westerly today

We as editors have been thinking for a long time about how to take Westerly into the future.  We tend to think in terms of our constituencies, the people who give the magazine its meaning and purpose.  These include groups and individuals from universities, the writing community, the reading community, in fact, the whole worldwide republic of letters.  We have a duty to promote writing, which means in the simplest terms, to help writers and readers find each other.  We have a duty to Western Australia as a place that is unique and whose intellectual life we help to sustain, even as we call upon it to sustain us.  We have a duty to our neighbours, both those within the Australian nation, and those within the region of South / East Asia and the Indian Ocean rim.  Our ideal, the one we've inherited from those who have edited Westerly since 1956, is a cosmopolitan regionalism.  The creation of this blog is our attempt to call out to those who know or would like to know Westerly.  We would dearly like to develop Westerly as the place for intelligently conversing about literature and ideas.  We intend to periodically blog on issues that have come up in our own discussions and which we seek to develop as possible themes in our journal - Westerly magazine - and our various activities and events.  But we would also like our constituents to drive us in new directions that answer their vital needs.

Delys Bird & Tony Hughes-d'Aeth

Randolph Stow Annual Lecture: Dr. Gabrielle Carey

The Inaugural Randolph Stow Lecture held on Tuesday 20th September this year featured guest speaker Dr. Gabrielle Carey. This turned out to be a great night with an engaging discussion from Gabrielle Carey on: 'Getting to know Randolph Stow: towards a portrait of the artist as a young man.'

Abstract from Dr. Gabrielle Carey:

In 2009, a year before his death, Carey wrote to Randolph Stow asking for permission to visit him in Harwich, England. He promptly turned down the offer, describing himself as ‘rather an unsavoury old bachelor’ who ‘preferred to be left alone’. This only increased Carey’s curiosity in a writer who had been a favourite ever since the age of eight when her mother had handed her, with restrained, yet distinct ceremony a copy of Midnite: a story of a wild colonial boy.

Gabrielle Carey will speak about Randolph Stow from the point of view of a reader, a scholar and a writer as well as from the perspective of the daughter of a dear friend, born from several generations of family friendships spanning Geraldton to the Swan Valley. What do we really know of this famously reclusive and most enigmatic of writers? Carey has begun the task of trying to get to know Randolph Stow only after coming to terms with the possibility that her subject may have preferred to remain unknown and possibly, ultimately, unknowable.

Hello and Welcome

Hello there,

Welcome to the Westerly blog. We have created this page, along with our updated Facebook profile, to allow our readers to get even more out of our magazine. We'll be posting new information, events, prose and poetry excerpts as well as running competitions from these pages.

Watch this space for more details!

Best Wishes and keep reading,

The Westerly Team