Materiality

The latest issue of the Australian themed literary journal Materiality contains a story with a nice Jane Eyre reference:

Materiality #3: Precious
Edited by Alice Cannon
Paperback
64 pages
Published by Pinknantucket Press

Materiality is a themed journal that includes fiction, essay, images and poetry, focusing on the physical and the material. This issue of Materiality examines the relationship between precious things and our identity—cultural and personal. Read about gold mining and selling, the lost thylacine, love letters, illuminated manuscripts, a broken doll, Japanese lacquer, saffron, trash vs treasure and interviews with a jeweller, a luthier and a gemmologist.

How has the world been changed in our thirst for gold, for jewels, for fur and spice and feathers? Mike Pottenger and Kate Haycock address our relationship with gold in When everything gold was new again and Three grams per tonne. Em Hart charts the progress of our most valuable spice, saffron, in The golden thread. Other objects embody our memories of places, times and loved ones. Susan Long writes about the power of the photograph in Memory objects; Tom Dullemond reflects on lovers past in Fragments. The loss of precious things is central to short stories by Kate Whitfield (Endling), Mike Lynch (The Faithful Alchemist) and Anna Ryan-Punch (Delivery Day).

ArtsHub clarifies the Brontë connection:

Kelly Gardiner recounts how Jane Eyre was the ‘book to represent all books’ which she chose to take with her when she evacuated her bushfire-threatened house. (Sonia Nair)

It's not the first time that Kelly Gardiner recounts this story. A few years ago she published Billabong Bill’s Bushfire Christmas, an illustrated children book. On her blog she remembers the experience:

I made decisions about what few things I would save, packed them into a few bags and loaded up the little car, drove it to the other side of Bundeena and left it there, in the hope that the flames wouldn’t reach it. I chose one book out of my thousands (Jane Eyre, my first grown-up book, with gilt-edged pages), a few paintings, photos. It’s amazing how ruthless you become.