I’ve written about the Abrolhos Islands for Tracks before, but an issue centred around Australian islands is a sure-fire reason to revisit the topic. These islands have captured my imagination since I was a child, and more recently, have been the subject of my university honours research project. The project, a collection of fictional short stories, with a research component, became an exploration of the sea in Australian fiction, and the many ways we understand our shorelines. Islands, like the Abrolhos, are especially relevant here, surrounded as they are, at all angles, by the sea. They function as border spaces, somewhere between land and water.
In the 1960s my grandfather worked the cray-boats off Little Rat Island, in the Abrolhos archipelago, taking his wife and three young daughters to live…
