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Issue Details: First known date: 2017... 2017 The Sea Will Be There: John Blight's Beachcombing Days
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'According to Judith Wright, John Blight's best poems were about the sea. From the 1940s, when he lived around the Sunshine Coast, he wrote about the rhythms of life by the sea and about human relationships with the more than human world. In the 1960s, he published 180 sonnets in two volumes, A Beachcomber's Diary and My Beachcombing Days. The sonnet form, he said, cut him down to size. This paper considers Blight's work and its engagement with the littoral zone: the seascapes and ecology of the Sunshine Coast. It attempts to hear the sea's voices — muffled, indistinct — and to illuminate Blight's ideas about its alien nature.' (Abstract)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Queensland Review vol. 24 no. 2 December 2017 12338930 2017 periodical issue

    'This issue of Queensland Review takes as its focus the literature of the Sunshine Coast and its hinterland. Under a conceptually rigorous regime, it might be deemed necessary to interrogate some of these terms closely: both ‘literature’ and ‘the Sunshine Coast’ are both, for different reasons, potentially contestable notions — as also, in this context, is the word ‘of’: does it mean ‘from’ or ‘about’ or both? Our authors have elected not to contest these matters in the abstract, but rather to adopt broadly inclusive definitions of all three terms — and, for that matter, of ‘the hinterland’. Our cover image does something similar. An unattributed colour photograph taken nearly half a century ago, looking westward from the northern tip of Bribie Island (or thereabouts) to the Glasshouse Mountains, it captures — rather cunningly given the proximity of human habitation just outside the frame — something of the primeval beauty of both the littoral and the hinterland, a recurrent theme in this collection.' (Editorial)

    2017
    pg. 215-228
Last amended 12 Dec 2017 13:49:58
215-228 The Sea Will Be There: John Blight's Beachcombing Dayssmall AustLit logo Queensland Review
Subjects:
  • Sunshine Coast, South East Queensland, Queensland,
  • 1940-1960
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