'This issue of Southerly captures a snapshot of Australian writing today. Stories from writers just starting out on their long apprenticeship are placed side-by-side work from Australia’s finest essayists, writers and poets. This rich and expansive issue asks what it means to write in a contemporary Australia fraught with inequality, divisiveness, and the unrelenting exploitation of country. In a special collaboration with Sydney Story Factory, which runs workshops for young and marginalised writers, this issue of Southerly includes short stories that demonstrate the vibrancy and the vision of Australia’s up-and-coming writers. Including essays from Caroline Lefevre and John Kinsella, poetry from Kevin Hart, and much, much more, ‘The Long Apprenticeship’, is an issue comprising, as ever, the best in Australian writing.' (Editorial)

'These are contradictory times and Charles Dickens' haunting words at the opening of A Tale of Two Cities hold prophetically true as a gloss of the contents of four W twenty-nine-. 'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age. foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was  the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair...' One of the roles of poetry and fiction is to explore and articulate contradiction and contrariety in all its imagined layers, finials, matrices and interstice,. It's what gives art part of its power, 'authenticity', seductive appeal — to take readers inside new ways of seeing the familiar world: 'language made strange' is still a useful definition of poetry (and prose).' (Editorial introduction)