Borderlands is the Northern Territory’s first literary journal in twenty years, providing a space for professional and emerging Northern Territory writers and digital storytellers to be published and paid for their work.
Australian literature is largely created and published on the eastern seaboard or in metropolitan centres. Yet Australia is a vast, multicultural nation. In the NT, a fifth of the population were born overseas, and a quarter are Indigenous. Indigenous voices are becoming more prominent across Australia, but need the accompanying weight of those from the NT, the Australian jurisdiction with the highest percentage of Indigenous people.
The Territory’s isolation from the rest of the nation and proximity to Asia also contributes to the Territory’s unique lifestyle. These are stories that need space within Australian literature, and Borderlands provides a platform for the Territory’s unique voices.
Our inaugural online edition was published in November 2019, with a print edition to follow in May 2020. We are raising funds to continue to pay our contributors industry rates for their work.
Australian writers are often underpaid or not paid at all for their work, and so donations will be used to pay writers and editors for their contributions to the journal, providing Territory writers with a local opportunity to be paid industry rates to sustain their arts practice and contribute to the sustainability of the Northern Territory arts sector.
To find out more about the project, visit borderlands.cdu.edu.au.
