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At a time when climate panic obscures clear thought, 100 Atmospheres is an invitation to think differently. Through speculative, poetic, and provocative texts, thirteen writers and artists have come together to reflect on human relationships with other species and the planet. The process of creating 100 Atmospheres was shared, with works (written, photographic and drawn) created individually and collectively. To think differently, we need to practice differently. The book contains thirteen chapters threaded amidst one hundred co-authored micro-essays. In an era shaped by critical ecological transformation 100 Atmospheres dwells in the deep past and the troubled present to imagine future ways of being and becoming.

On the death of his father in 1812, Matthew Gregory Lewis, the infamous author of The Monk (1796) and The Castle Spectre (1797), inherited 'two Jamaican sugar estates, six or seven hundred human beings, and the problem of slavery' (Macdonald, The Isle of Devils, 1998). Lewis embarked on the first of two voyages to visit his plantations in early November 1815. His journal entry for November 8th records the 'black melancholy' of his residence in Gravesend whilst awaiting embarkation two days later. In the final entry of his journal (2 May 1817) Lewis notes the perturbation that follows his final command as a West India Proprietor, 'the whole air' being 'rent with noises of all kinds and creatures'. The phrasing recalls the dispossessed Caliban's isle that is 'full of noises'; but the noises of Shakespeare's isle take the form of 'sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not' where the noises of Lewis's residence are sounds of tempest that disquiet: they are a cacophony that might be understood to represent the meteorological and social turbulence experienced by the Proprietor during his Residence in the Island of Jamaica. They might also represent the strain of Lewis's entangled position - the jangle of the conflicted mind/heart of a reluctant slave-owner. But more, the disturbance registered in this personal record of a voyage into darkness that ends with Lewis's death from Yellow Fever on the return home, might be understood to draw on a social, political and literary climate of turbulence in which the Revolution and Reign of Terror in France and associated British response are entangled with consternation and debate about slavery from the late 1780s through the 1830s. The eruption of Tambora in 1815 was a geological disturbance that mirrored and exacerbated the unsettled political and social weather that would result in climate change - real and ideological. Lewis's Journal not only recorded the unsettled 'weather' of the years 1816 through 1817 - a period that came

Over the course of the 20th century, recourse to satellite and radar technology, and the use of reconnaissance aircraft, has greatly assisted the tracking of tropical cyclones. In addition, data buoys are now employed throughout the Gulf of Mexico and along the Atlantic and Pacific seaboards to relay air and water temperature, wind speed, air pressure and wave conditions that enable more accurate prediction and monitoring of storm systems. But before the people of the Caribbean had recourse to modern instrumentation and communication, surviving a regular hurricane season was founded on sensitivity to environment, accumulated knowledge passed from one generation to the next by word of mouth; and what amounted to a rehearsed, even ritualised, set of practices. As Jamaican Canadian poet Olive Senior writes in 'Hurricane Story, 1903': In those days storm warning came by telegraph to Postmistress. Living in the bush, Grandfather couldn't see her rush to broadcast the news by posting a black flag. But he was the seventh son of the seventh son and could read signs and interpret wonders so when the swallows flew below the roof line, when the sky took on a special peach glow, when flocks of birds sailed west over the hill, when clouds banked at the far side and the air was still, he knew it was time to batten down. The poem, like the time-honoured story, acts as an archive of knowledge and practice that might otherwise be lost; and like the oral tradition in which Senior's poetry is grounded, it registers and tussles with change. The atmosphere of the poem itself registers the poet-narrator's shift from childhood to adulthood, from tradition to modernity, from rural to urban, from small island view to big world view. This chapter will explore the often oppositional and difficult relationship between poetry and science, professional and amateur knowledges, indigenous and colonizing ways of reading the environment, different ways of sensing and responding to changes in atmosph

Editorial, Contents

'What kind of period is it/when to talk of trees/ is almost a crime/ because it implies silence /about so many horrors?' Olive Senior quotes Brecht in the preface to the last section of Talking of Trees, but having read her two collections of poetry I am tempted to re-word the quotation to ask, 'What kind of period is it when to talk of trees is to voice so many silenced horrors?' These horrors to which Olive Senior gives voice are acts of barbarianism perpetuated in the name of civilization: European colonization of the Americas. As Wole Soyinka almost said, 'The [wo]man dies in all who keep silent in the face of tyranny.'

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS, Index

This paper was performed at a European Australian Studies Conference in Copenhagen (Ocotober 1995) and included the reading of a number of poems (in entirety) that cannot be given word-space here, and quite obviously cannot in print, carry the qualities of that performance, but the 'word of warning' issued at the conference stands as a political statement as much now as then. That warning went/goes like this

The basis of my relationship with Anna was a shared year at the University of Aarhus, Denmark, and the co-editorship of Kunapipi for an all too brief period. Although Anna Rutherford’s involvement and influence in Commonwealth literature took many and various forms, this brief essay is a tribute to her role as editor of Kunapipi from 1979-2001.

Notes on Contributors, Index

‘The Don is dead. At 92, the man who set standards that will never be attained and records that will never be broken, died peacefully at his Adelaide home. Sir Donald Bradman, the greatest cricketer to ever play, was and always will be, Australia’s sporting inspiration. He was the Invincible.’ This is the epitaph (I guess no one is Invincible) given Sir Donald Bradman on the front page of a ‘Tribute Edition’ of The Australian (Tuesday, Feb 27, 2001). I

Looking back on the nineteenth century and beyond from her vantage point of the early twentieth century, Virginia Woolf wrote that 'if we [women] had the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think ... then ... the dead poet who was Shakespeare's sister will put on the body which she has so often laid down'. 1 This body of which she speaks is the form of our artistic choosing - the body of mind - the only body over which we have shaping control. The choice of form and the consequences of that choosing is the subject of this paper. Emily Dickinson chose the hyphenated hymnal, Elizabeth Barrett Browning chose the verse novel, Pauline Tekahionwake johnson chose the literary ballad but regretted what she perceived as the lost poetic status involved in not choosing lyric.

Pauline Johnson is remembered principally as a recitalist whose stage career was pursued with enormous energy and remarkable good humour, not only throughout Canada, but also in the U.S. and England, during the last decade of the nineteenth and first decade of the twentieth centuries. She was indeed ‘encored time and time again’ in a variety of venues that ranged from celebrated concert halls of large cities to the local bam, school or church of isolated country towns. Although ‘The Song My Paddle Sings’2 is the poem immediately associated with her name — it is her signature piece — her personal, professional and political investment in the canoe is today little known and rarely recognised.3 Yet, as Douglas Reville recalls in his History of the County of Brant (1920): ‘To know her best was during one of her many canoeing trips in which she loved to indulge, for she was a past mistress in the art of manipulating that frail craft. The most turbulent rapids had no terror for her’.4

Kunapipi 23(2) 2001

Contents, Editorial

When a Frenchman trades with them [the Indians], he takes into his services one of their Daughters, the one, presumably, who is most to his taste; he asks the Father for her, & under certain conditions, it is arranged; he promises to give the Father some blankets, a few shirts, a Musket, Powder & Shot, Tobacco & Tool; they come to an agreement at last, & the exchange is made. The Girl, who is familiar with the Country>, undertakes, on her part, to serve the Frenchman in every way, to dress his pelts, to sell his Merchandise for a specified length of time; the bargain is faithfully carried out on both sides.

Contents, Editorial

Kunapipi 25 (1) 2003, Contents, Editorial

This chapter tracks the etymology and usage of the terms hurricane, cyclone and typhoon. It discusses the relationship between indigenous knowledges, scientific data collection and analysis, and the place of tropical cyclone in a range of literatures - as a record of event and impact, but also its employment as a metaphor of human-centred disruption and violence. The authors discuss the association of tropical cyclone with the sublime; with a colonial, othering discourse of tropicality; and a palliative politics. This chapter offers a rationale for the book itself, and an overview of the range of discourses through which tropical cyclone can be tracked.

In "'Why don't you write about Canada?': Olive Senior's Poetry, Everybody's History and the 'Condition of Resonance'," Anne Collett approaches the tensely nationalist query of her title from a very different perspective: seeing Canada as a "present absence" in Senior's poetry about the Caribbean. This present absence is a means of reminding Canadians about the historical entanglements of Canada and the Caribbean. The resulting vision of Senior's poetry is one that produces the nation in the world, and that reminds readers that so-called "developed" nations like Canada have been produced as such through the systematic exploitation of other nations.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS, Contents

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Contents, Editorial

Célestine Hitiura Viate is, to quote from her novel, Frangipani, a woman ‘who knows what she wants and makes it happen’ (83). Born in Tahiti, she moved to Australia with her surfer husband in her early twenties, and began writing when pregnant with her third child. Célestine has just completed the third novel of a Tahitian family saga that follows the life of Materena, a woman in part modelled on her own mother. In her ‘welcome to womanhood’ speech Materena counsels her daughter, Leilani

Contents, Editorial