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Tasmanian Literary Awards

Forgotten Corners: essays in search of an island's soul by Pete Hay (Walleah Press)

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Forgotten Corners: essays in search of an island's soul

Pete Hay’s ‘Forgotten Corners’ acts as a companion piece to his earlier collection of personal essays, ‘Vandiemonian Essays’ (2002). Hay, within his Preface, suggests the essays in his new collection seek to thematically ‘shed light on a certain grain within Tasmanian life, the various creative and dissident currents that even now bear the tenacious Vandiemonian spirit.’ For Hay, there is within Tasmania ‘a stubborn current of resistance to the political economy imposed upon us by those who wield power (those people and institutions with little understanding of our island’s vernacular ecologies and communal folkways’). James Boyce describes the book as the outpouring of a writer ‘pre-eminent among the guardians of Tasmania’s island’s spirit,’ offering resistance to those ‘who would ravage, exploit and appropriate its natural beauty, cultural creativity and fraught history for profit and power. Animals and ancestors, people and plants, the lost and the loved, the humus and the human, the artist and the artefact, the books and the birds, the sadness and the stillness, the past and the possible, the humour and the horror all find voice in Forgotten Corners.’

About the author

Pete Hay is the author of two volumes of personal essays, Vandiemonian Essays (2002) and Forgotten Corners: Essays in Search of an island’s Soul. He is the author of the poetry collections The View from the Non-Members’ Bar (1992), Silently on the Tide (2005); and Physick (2016), a poet/painter collaborative work, Last Days of the Mill (with Tony Thorne, 2012); a chapbook, Girl Reading Lorca (2014); and a writer/photographer collaborative work, The Forests (with Matthew Newton, 2007). Hay is a retired Reader in Geography and Environmental Studies at the University of Tasmania (1985 – 2008), and remains an Honorary Research Associate at that institution. His research impact has mainly been in the sub-disciplines of island studies, place theory, environmental thought and the democratic credentials of activism. His major academic work is Main Currents in Western Environmental Thought (2002), published in Britain as A Companion to Environmental Thought. He has twice worked as a political advisor to the Australian Labor Party, once at federal level, and once as Senior Private Secretary to the Minister for Environment and Planning during Tasmania’s historic Labor/Green Accord.