Shedload – by Chris Andrews
Poetry Chris Andrews Poetry Chris Andrews

Shedload – by Chris Andrews

RUNNER-UP, GWEN HARWOOD POETRY PRIZE 2023

I shove the shed door open. That smell:
turpentine, creosote, ivy, mouse.
Empty silhouettes on the pegboard.
Who kept all these broken promises
of repair? OK, all right, but I
can’t have been the soldering angel
who restored the heirloom crystal set.

Read More
Improbable Acts of Proximity – by Shey Marque
Poetry Shey Marque Poetry Shey Marque

Improbable Acts of Proximity – by Shey Marque

RUNNER-UP, GWEN HARWOOD POETRY PRIZE 2023

i

To imagine the dead are running
short of space – I’ll call it unlikely, so much of it
going spare, idle, we’re most hectic at the edges.
I hollo long into the wintering acres, white
particles of grief touching a thing that hits another thing
hurtling towards an edge. You bring spectre only to strangers
because my longing is too great, my pull too strong.
At some point the moon will spiral in so near,
our ocean tides will tear it apart, & it will be sublime,
for a minute.

Read More
Gifts from a harsh continent – by Tehnuka
Nonfiction Tehnuka Nonfiction Tehnuka

Gifts from a harsh continent – by Tehnuka

I wake lying on my back, staring up at a bright Antarctic sky. Although I don’t understand how I got here, I’m not surprised at having been unconscious on the ice. A childhood spent reading tales of Shackleton and Scott has left me believing Antarctica is where scientists and explorers go to die, or at least lose their toes. Despite, or perhaps because of, this conviction, I leapt at the opportunity for fieldwork on a volcano on the edge of Antarctica, in what then seemed the wildest place on Earth. And over the next few weeks, whenever things go wrong – snowmobile accident, frostbitten nose, internet malfunction – we will say to one another, making light of it: ‘Well, what did you expect? It’s a harsh continent.’

Read More
The Interpreter – by Mariam Tokhi
Fiction Mariam Tokhi Fiction Mariam Tokhi

The Interpreter – by Mariam Tokhi

Mir was a patient man. When the receptionist glanced up at the waiting room, she barely noticed him, quietly slumped over his phone. He was used to clinic waiting rooms with their bustle, anxiety and constantly ringing phones; their warning posters of sad, unvaccinated children; the griefs and elations of the people who swung out of the clinic rooms. When Mir was younger, an aspiring doctor himself, he loved watching people, playing a game with his sister Aliza where they guessed the stories of those around them …

Read More
The Hairy Iceberg – by Kylie Moppert
Nonfiction Kylie Moppert Nonfiction Kylie Moppert

The Hairy Iceberg – by Kylie Moppert

Until a year ago, I lived in an apartment above a shop front in a leafy inner suburb. After decades of living in the outer suburbs, I’d flipped a coin and leased an abandoned restaurant with rooms upstairs. There were restaurants on either side, elm trees in the street’s central garden strip, and Victorian terraces boasting ironwork fences. I renovated downstairs into an artisan bakery and immersed myself in unrelenting hours of slow-ferment, wild-yeast sourdough …

Read More
This Time Next Week – by Richard Rebel
Fiction Richard Rebel Fiction Richard Rebel

This Time Next Week – by Richard Rebel

Butch and Sundance are pinned down and bleeding in the shadows, about to go out in a sepia-toned blaze of glory. Redford – he’s got the stoic and determined thing down pat, with the boyish charm still there just below the surface. Newman’s blue eyes shine, even when the rest of his face isn’t smiling.

Dad shifts in his chair. There is a cold cup of tea beside him. He says something about William Goldman and this being one of the first ’70s movies, maybe the first, even though it was ’69. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, story-wise, he says. It’s like they made it up as they went, just a string of scenes … but it’s a fun ride anyway, you know …

Read More
The Cheesewring – by Campbell Andersen
Fiction Campbell Andersen Fiction Campbell Andersen

The Cheesewring – by Campbell Andersen

When it first happened, I blamed her. I wanted to act out some sort of rage – whether it was just throwing a spoon or making a fist-sized hole in one of her canvases, something obviously reactive and stupid, although no less satisfying – but we were crying and distraught and so I held her and said the words she wanted. We made a community Facebook post (pleading for information, offering a small reward) and I drove around at night shouting the dogs’ names out the window …

Read More
Scarface 1–5 – by Kylie Mirmohamadi
Nonfiction Kylie Mirmohamadi Nonfiction Kylie Mirmohamadi

Scarface 1–5 – by Kylie Mirmohamadi

A woman has a scar that will fade, with time.
1. She takes a selfie in the bathroom mirror. The scar down the right side of her face looks fainter, less raised, than in real life.
2. She sends it to some people. They say she looks good, beautiful, strong. They tell her they love her.
3. Her husband says that with a scar she is sexier.
4. His friend’s girlfriend, in Mexico, says there is a dried rattlesnake remedy for healing skin.
5. On a walk she listens to ‘Perfect Skin’, and David Bowie sings to her that everything will be all right, tonight …

Read More
Rat – by Anjelica Rush
Fiction Anjelica Rush Fiction Anjelica Rush

Rat – by Anjelica Rush

He is screaming about his mother, his father, the Jews, the Chinese, the Clintons, that family in Number 8, those builders in Number 9, the shitty fucking internet, our shitty fucking building, this shitty fucking country.

Most of it we disagree with, though when he yells that you can’t trust the government we shrug because there’s no arguing with that …

Read More
The Conversation of Weaving – by RT Wenzel
Nonfiction RT Wenzel Nonfiction RT Wenzel

The Conversation of Weaving – by RT Wenzel

I am not a self-taught weaver, but taught by the baskets themselves. A gifted basket using eel-trap techniques. Two thrifted, age-brittle flax baskets, spliced and braided. The extraordinary collection of moody, low-lit weavings at Okains Bay museum, chance encountered. My eyes and hands recognise the diagonals and crosses, the ribs and the spokes, the warp and weft of organic material, even before I learn a new technique. Someone in my ancestral line knew these shapes, these patterns; my fingers echo the hands of unseen teachers. But my teachers are primarily the plants themselves. Each plant has stories and preferences, and the conversation changes between seasons, storms, lunar phases …

Read More
Nursery – by Nicola Redhouse
Fiction Nicola Redhouse Fiction Nicola Redhouse

Nursery – by Nicola Redhouse

She grows the tomatoes by accident. Something alchemic in the compost. She has a few weeks where she feels almost maternal toward them, as each flower gives way to a tiny green bauble.
A man on the radio says this year a small average temperature drop has reduced a certain quality needed to turn tomatoes red. She cannot remember the details. She is neither a gardener nor a chemist, though she works in a nursery. She listens to this show, a gardening show, because she likes how the host rolls his rrrrs: says rrrhododendrrrhon, starrflowerr. She knows now that starflowers are a north American perennial.
On the news there is a report that people, civil servants in a hotel in Cuba, have been attacked by some sort of wave. Electric waves. Micro waves. (She is not a physicist, either.) These people are now tormented by a high-pitched noise, headaches. It has been months. They may be spies, the papers are saying …

Read More
Sharehouse Archaeology – by Ale Prunotto
Nonfiction Ale Prunotto Nonfiction Ale Prunotto

Sharehouse Archaeology – by Ale Prunotto

At the house inspection, I squeezed past two people in the hall pushing fearfully on plasterboard that acted more like marshmallow than a wall. One whispered to the other: ‘this place is not fit for human habitation …’ True, it is maybe not ideal, what with the gaping hole in the hallway ceiling, and the mould spidering across the bathroom walls, and the broken ratty blinds, and the eternally leaking trapdoor in the kitchen, and that time the toilet got blocked and Linds got covered in filth trying to plunge it, and that time the carpet in the hallway became squelchy and we realised that water was trickling from the roof to the porch and through the 10 centimetre gap under the front door, and we called George, the owner, who in his cowboy style not only injected silicone into the crack in the roof but also drilled a hole in the floorboards so that any persevering water would filter directly into the billion-year-old foundations …

Read More
Home of the Pure Heart, House of the Dying – by Rafael SW
Fiction Rafael SW Fiction Rafael SW

Home of the Pure Heart, House of the Dying – by Rafael SW

You are the gift that keeps on screaming. Your parents don’t want you, and rarely do you see your father, even less so once he dies. They name you Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu because Albanians don’t struggle to pronounce X, like pirate treasure in the middle of your maps. It’s 1910, though your birthday is eclipsed by August 27, when at last they drown you in God.
God is always with you. In sunsets and two-headed black eagles, in little ashtrays shaped like underground bunkers, and in the words they say over your father’s grave …

Read More
In the River – by Searlait O’Neill
Nonfiction Searlait O'Neill Nonfiction Searlait O'Neill

In the River – by Searlait O’Neill

St Mary drowned in the floods.

It can be strange seeing objects drown. The eye isn’t looking for movements, because there never were any to begin with. What is the eye looking for?

It was a white marble, her rock body. And it seemed to represent something.

The salt pillar?

Muteness?

All our lost souls watching on?

The cathedral was flooded, but they hosed it out.

Read More
Sandcastles – by Ruth Armstrong
Fiction Ruth Armstrong Fiction Ruth Armstrong

Sandcastles – by Ruth Armstrong

WINNER, OLGA MASTERS SHORT STORY AWARD 2022

Rumi doesn’t know how long he’s been on the beach. He’s not sunburnt, thanks to his yellow and red lycra stinger suit. He’s not particularly thirsty either. The only sign that time has passed is the collection of identical sandcastles lined up in evenly spaced rows fanning back from the shore – each moulded into the turreted shape of his plastic beach bucket … When the tide goes out it will leave his creations pale and brittle in the sun, and by the following morning they will be gone – no trace of them amongst the stingray holes and fragments of chalky bleached coral …

Read More
The Mowing – by Ivy Ireland
Fiction Ivy Ireland Fiction Ivy Ireland

The Mowing – by Ivy Ireland

WINNER, OLGA MASTERS SHORT STORY AWARD 2021

That cloud looks more like a squished chicken than a dragon. Not a dragon day, then. Nothing auspicious. No signs or portents. Just an up-ended moon beside a squished chicken cloud, which is fast turning into a pile of dog turds. I close the blind before the sun rises above the tree line. I pour a coffee but don’t drink it. I wander in and out of my bedroom, but don’t change out of my crushed and sweaty PJs. I head outside and walk up the long, dusty drive to bring in the bins … I itch for a ciggie. No. As bad as things are, I’ve still got that one giant refusal to cling to …

Read More
In the Archives – by Keely Jobe
Fiction Keely Jobe Fiction Keely Jobe

In the Archives – by Keely Jobe

It’s as if the place is hermetically sealed. Left outside is a pelting rain, gushing pipes, greasy water surging over gutters and traffic islands, slopping into sandals and brogues, umbrellas sucked inside out like marrow from a bone, office workers jammed in alcoves with hands wrapped around takeaway coffees, waiting for the lights to go green. Also barred from entry, the petrichor and panic, the blaring horns, the hot-wet stickiness of a late spring storm. None of that has made it past the door. Once inside, you’re floating in white space … 

Read More
Hawksbill – by Grace Heathcote
Nonfiction Grace Heathcote Nonfiction Grace Heathcote

Hawksbill – by Grace Heathcote

The turtle registers our presence with a flick of an eye, but does not pause. We are crouched so close we can see the salt-crust around her eyes, the dark-and-light patchwork of her face, the soft wrinkles on her neck. She watches us as we watch her. Where do we fit, I imagine her thinking: friend or foe?
Her strong back flippers scoop the sand to create a deep pit. Surprisingly dextrous, they stretch into the cavity and cup the sand carefully to lift it out …

Read More
A Thin, Brilliant Line – by Lal Perera
Fiction Lal Perera Fiction Lal Perera

A Thin, Brilliant Line – by Lal Perera

According to Mandy, the things we imagine are as important as the things that are real. I imagine if our house had no roof back then, a bird could look down and see the three of us in front of the TV: Dad lying along the length of the grey couch, me on the brown one, and then, once Mandy had done stretching herself out on the floor, the bird would see us making the shape of an arrow, and the arrow would point to the door …

Read More 
Archive