This special double-sized issue of Island celebrates a number – 100 – that few foresaw when, back in 1979 (the year giving birth to Alien, the Iranian revolution, Greenpeace International, Thatcher’s election, V S Naipaul’s A Bend in the River, Pink Floyd’s The Wall, SALT II, Sophie’s Choice, Apocalypse Now, Mad Max and Highway to Hell), a small group of Hobart writers founded The Tasmanian Review. Forty-two pages long, and staple-bound on paper of such modest quality that it is see-through, its editorial stated that ‘the two criteria which determine the selection of material for the journal are excellence and variety’. The vitality and flexibility of those two criteria are such that they remain on the masthead today. The editorial also noted the production of the issue ‘by voluntary effort and without any government funding’. In the second issue, editors Andrew Sant and Michael Denholm were able to report on an ‘enthusiastic response’ from readers and a ‘substantial inflow of subscriptions’. Even so: ‘It is our aim to pay contributors as soon as it is financially possible.’ The next editorial carried welcome news from the state government’s Tasmanian Arts Advisory Board, in the form of ‘a small guarantee against loss over the forthcoming year’. And so the predecessor of Island took root.

Importantly, perhaps audaciously, the editors aimed at a national readership and that too has remained a feature of the magazine, coexisting with its strong Tasmanian identity. National literary magazines require state and federal funding to survive and thrive. The persistence and longevity of magazines such as Meanjin, Overland and Island, with their strong subscriber bases, are proven indicators that those taxpayers’ literary dollars are well spent. Island thanks the TAAB and the Literature Board of the Australia Council for their support over the years, as well as the University of Tasmania, which has maintained close links with Island since the early 1980s. Thanks are also due to those who have served on its Management Committee, which came into being in response to a difficult period, and which has since played an important role in guiding the magazine’s fortunes.

It is easy to overlook the unseen production side of a publication. Over the past twenty-five years the magazine’s various designers, layout artists, subeditors, proofreaders and printers have worked assiduously – often out of hours – to ensure a high standard publication produced four times a year. In particular, designer Lynda Warner continues to provide outstanding service to Island. Cassandra Pybus edited Island between 1990 and 1994. Rodney Croome then edited Island until 1999, when for a short period it had an interim editor, Russell Kelly. Format and content quite clearly reflect each major editorial period, and the roll call of authors and commentators who have appeared in the magazine’s pages is impressive.

Putting this issue together, with poetry editor James Charlton, has been a pleasure and a privilege. All of Island’s past editors were invited to send in an essay of their choice, and, in the case of past poetry editors, recent work. A selected group who, in one way or another, have been closely associated with the magazine over a long period, were also invited to submit short essays or stories, all reproduced here. Richard Flanagan’s screenplay The Scent of Bread would highlight any issue of a literary magazine; that it is published in Island 100 is especially rewarding.

Needless to say the ordinary business of the magazine goes on. Today more than ever Australian writers rely on small magazines as primary publication outlets, which is why this issue contains a range of fine stories by emerging writers. And the lead essay ‘Humbaba’ by writer and environment photographer Martin Hawes was commissioned for this issue. It’s fitting, given Island’s commitment to environmental writing, that Hawes ruminated upon the project while on a solitary walking trip ‘in the splendour of some of the wildest country on Earth’.

Since 2001 the Tasmanian state government has sponsored the biennial Tasmania Pacific Region book prizes. Not without past controversy, they have nonetheless achieved international prominence and Island again runs extracts from the shortlisted books – twelve in all. It’s unusual and pleasing to be able to publish such a variety of quality material as a single Feature, by Australian and New Zealand authors, both eminent and less known.

Sant and Denholm co-edited the magazine for ten years and are on record as indicating their pleased surprise that it managed to last that long. Taking their cue, I would not be so bold as to emphatically predict another landmark issue of Island in 2030. But only a pessimist would rule it out, unlike Island’s longtime subscribers, whose faith in and contribution to the magazine continues to prove invaluable, for Tasmanian and Australian literature.