Galah Issue 4

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Issue 4 is all about water. It’s a bumper summer issue - a whopping 176 pages - our biggest ever - still with no advertising.

Author and journalist Gabrielle Chan, with her idiosyncratic clarity, explores our water trading system and wonders if applying the free market philosophy to it is a good thing. Author and lawyer, Richard Beasley SC, shares some of his learnings from his time as Counsel Assisting the SA Royal Commission into the Murray Darling Basin Plan

What do you do then nothing is certain? When tectonic plates shift, when it doesn’t rain, when rules change and when marriages end? Editor Annabelle Hickson visits the Murray River community of Barham on the NSW-Victoria border to try to find some answers.

We introduce ‘Come for Lunch’, a new, regular section by cook, author and all-round delight Belinda Jeffrey. Each issue Belinda will put together a menu for us and suggest, in her kind and not-short-on-detail way, what to cook for a group of friends.

We visit Jill Wran in her garden on the New South Wales Central Coast and marvel at the beauty of her private retreat from a public life.

And then we hop on a light plane and head to Haggerstone Island, 600km north of Cairns, nestled amongst the colourful reefs and pristine waters of the Great Barrier Reef.

At the other end of the country, writer Maggie MacKellar hitches a ride with the mail plane to Flinders Island, Tasmania, and discovers that getting lost can be the best method of finding your way.

Annabel Crabb writes about falling in love with the porcelain work of Honor Freeman, an artist who slip-casts relics of domestic life like old bars of soap to honour the memories of those who left them behind.

We visit a vanilla farm, we go fly fishing in Victoria and we look at Australia’s burgeoning seaweed industry. We meet painters Georgia Spain and Kiata Mason, and wood-carver Elise Cameron Smith. We hang out at a fisherman’s shack in South Australia, renovated by the Read and Hall sisters, and then learn how to block print wallpaper in a rambling country house in the Riverina, NSW.

There’s our beloved regular Books page by Meg Mason and Artscene by Fiona Bateman. We visit the Brewarrina fish traps - believed by some to be as old as 40,000 years - and learn how academics in the fields of cybernetics and artificial intelligence are using them as inspiration to design and build better technological systems for the future.

Galah Issue 4 is an exploration and celebration of regional Australia of epic proportions. We hope you enjoy it.

The on sale date is 22 November 2021.