Radical rest and recreation and their spatial permutations

In December 2022, the team at Geographical Research—including members of the Institute of Australian Geographers and staff from Wiley—came together in celebration of 60 years in the life of the journal. Held online, the short event enabled us to launch an editorial pick of 10 years’ of work on geography published between Volumes 51 and 60, and those are now available online here. It was a lovely occasion and provided an opportunity to show what is a newly refreshed look for the journal.

And then many of us went through that mad period of days or weeks before what is often a collective break at the year’s end so that we could ‘down tools’ for a period of time. A necessity? Absolutely, but also something not to be taken for granted given how many people throughout the world work with little rest and limited labour protection.

I always take more time than I’d like to wind down, and it interests me that many of the strategies I use to do so are spatial in character—at least they seem so to me, but then I feel as though I am permanently enmeshed in a geographically inflected ontology.

So, for example, I make certain that every last ‘species’ of work that might have crept out of the home office into the rest of the house is rounded up and gently enclosed back in that office, and the door is then shut for the duration. I turn off all notifications and ‘park’ them in cyber space after setting up out-of-office messages that I hope give comfort to those who are still submitting work to the journal in the team’s short absence.

And then …

And then I garden with an enthusiasm and focus that is soothing—therapeutic even—and that provides immediate gratification and connection to the elements and the more-than-human. I read light-hearted works with a mix of voraciousness and languor and then, when the temptation to nap becomes too compelling, I ‘map’ the inside of my eyelids. I reintroduce myself to forms of food preparation and cooking that engender ease and slow pace. And I mooch with friends over coffee or I simply sit in the garden and work to embody the verb be rather than do.

Rest is not, I think, a way of being that many of us are especially adept at, and I would certainly place myself in those ranks. I struggle to stop and am always and inevitably deeply grateful that I have. Rest enables recreation of the sorts I describe above and, equally and perhaps as or more importantly, gives space for recreation … processes to nourish, revitalise, rethink, gauge anew, and consciously or unconsciously ponder with a view to bring fresh perspectives and energy to life’s works when the rest is done.

Often, of course, there is a sense that the down-time was never quite enough … but my break is now over, and a new year has beckoned and with it a new volume of four issues of this journal and a new set of webinars, conference offerings, and social media communications. And, as ever, our offerings are a team effort involving many people from the core editorial team to the editorial board, our Council, publisher, and authors and readers.

So here’s to 2023 and the community that gathers around the ‘pages’ of this journal. This year, we have decided to lead each issue with a commentary by one of our associate editors—and the inaugural offering is from Patrick Moss and focuses on Australian peatlands and gaps in research about them, which should surely be seen as an enticing invitation to readers to consider how to address those opportunities for new research. We then include Steve Turton’s (2022) Festschrift in honour of Distinguished Professor Jamie Kirkpatrick, which is also available online here.

Four original articles follow Steve’s contribution: serendipitously, three are about mining and its challenges in South Africa (Sesele & Marais, 2023), Ghana (Afriyie et al., 2023), and the Philippines (Ocampo & Schmitz, 2023). The last is a comparative analysis of Buddhist and Taoist sacred mountains in China and, like the others, but for very different reasons, I found it fascinating (Qiu et al., 2023).

Continuing our Covid commentaries, we have two additional papers by An et al. (2023) and by Burton and Harwood (2023). And I am pleased to note that, in coming weeks, we will be launching a virtual issue of those commentaries published between 2020 and 2022 and have already received several new submissions for the second round of papers on a post-Covid world and hope that many of those will be available in coming months.

Thereafter, we present a special section on island methodologies and geographies comprising a guest editorial by McMahon and Baldacchino (2023) and five papers on decolonising methodologies (Farbotko et al., 2023), islandness and art (Brinklow, 2023), island settings’ influences on methodologies (Agius, 2023), connectivity conservation strategies on islands (Kirkpatrick, 2023), and insider perspectives on island research (Teasdale & Teasdale, 2023).

The issue is rounded out by a thoughtful review by Warman (2023) of Rachael Wakefield-Rann’s new book Life Indoors by Russell Warman, and, sadly, we note the passing of Emeritus Professor Joseph Powell (Rimmer, 2023), whose influence on generations of us remains.

I warmly recommend this issue to you.