“Ever since I was a child I’ve collected things: pebbles, shells from the rocks in the Abruzzi, strands of wire, little screws.”

• Lina Bo Bardi

In the callout for this issue, published three years ago, we gave ourselves permission to sit and think slowly—“(a few days, months, another year?)” We cannot say this was unintentional, or that the prolonged silence that followed was wilful. Time has sped up; or it finds itself spread thinner across those things that are necessary, sometimes tediously so, and those things at the centre of this issue.

The generosity of Lina Bo Bardi’s words speaks to these intentions: to collect, to bring together, never mind how disparate or tangential, the things and the people, that have come to exert any amount of influence on how we perceive and experience the world - for better or for worse. The third issue of Paradise Journal assembles a collection of essays that dwell and diligently unpick the Icons and Idols that have been taken up as representations of the Australian context, sometimes unveiling the unsteady ground below. But this issue also makes space for those more fleeting, if one would allow it, nostalgic ponderings for those precious things we have come to hold dear.