The title of this might lead you to expect bunyips – the scary water monsters of Australian lore – to feature. You would be misled. It does include a scattering of atmospheric drawings dating from between 1890 and 1912, but they are the only bunyips on offer. As David Brooks says in his editorial, the issue is filled with things from the backlog 'of pieces too good to reject but refusing any easy categorisation, and the bunyip motif derives, more or less at random, from Michael Sharkey's long poem, 'Where the Bunyip Builds it Nest'. (The poem isn't about bunyips, but it is a bit of a monster: a long poem in five parts made up of lines taken from other poems from settlement until now in roughly chronological order, all carefully annotated.)

On reflection, Brooks says, bunyips – nocturnal, haunters of waterholes, 'strange hybrids whose shrill quarrellings can sometimes be heard late into the night' – sound like some poets. So the motif gained legitimacy: the issue contains work by 28 poets, essays on and by a half dozen more, and reviews of seven books of poetry. The online supplement, the Long Paddock, has almost as much again, plus a substantial interview with Laurie Duggan.

The riches on offer include:

Jennifer Maiden's 'The Pearl Roundabout', in which the re-awakened Eleanor Roosevelt continues the conversations with Hillary Clinton begun in the book Pirate Rain

Margaret Bradstock's pre-elegiac 'Ask not'

Julie Maclean's 'cassowary', a North Queensland poem that compresses an awful lot into a small space, about colonisation, tourism, art, and of course the gorgeous, dangerous cassowary

Peter Kirkpatrick's delightfully old-fashioned, even archaic 'The Angels in the House', a meditation on inner city housing in heroic couplets

two poems by Craig Powell: a sonnet named from a line from Seamus Heaney, “and catch the heart off guard”, and a reinterpretation of an anecdote from Freud, 'Fort Da' (Craig Powell also reviews Toby Davidson's edition of Collected Poems by Francis Webb, seizing the occasion to share some poignant memories of Webb).

Southerly is a refereed scholarly journal, and includes scholarly articles. This issue includes Kevin Hart's 'Susannah Without the Cherub', a fascinating discussion of A D Hope's 'The Double Looking Glass'.

There are four short stories, all of which I enjoyed – Matthia Dempsey's 'One Week Gone', about an old man a week after his wife's death, is superb.

No bunyips, not really, but that's not a terrible loss, given what's there instead.