an occasion

Editor Mark Roberts says he‘d figured at some stage in the early 1990s that his magazine p76 was of its nature occasional. Thirty-one years after the magazine began issue 7 appears, and it is a tribute to a single person: poet and visual artist Cornelis Vleeskens, who was born in the Netherlands in 1948, moved to Australia in 1958 and died in 2012. Pete Spence curates the issue which contains samples of artwork, poems and an essay together with tributes and memoirs by Scott Bugbird, Jenni Mitchell and Mark Roberts plus a start on a bibliography. One of Vleeskens’ earliest books was Hong Kong Suicide, published by Makar press in 1976. Another book, The Day the River, appeared from University of Queensland Press but most of the later works listed here over three pages came out with much smaller presses or under the author’s own imprint (and Vleeskens was not, for the most part, anthologised). p76, by the way, was named after a car produced by British Leyland for sale in the Australian market. It was a turkey that sold badly but later became a collector’s item.