Habitat – by Rosalee Kiely
Nonfiction Rosalee Kiely Nonfiction Rosalee Kiely

Habitat – by Rosalee Kiely

I sit and watch the goings on at the kitchen bench. A person cuts bread for a sandwich and leaves the crumbs of wheat on the wooden board, leaves a cut orange. One day later, give or take, the orange is desiccated.

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Cute poem – by Toby Fitch
Nonfiction Toby Fitch Nonfiction Toby Fitch

Cute poem – by Toby Fitch

I know something that I wouldn’t mind seeing extinct, I told Evie and Tilda, who were cuddling up to me in bed, Pusheens! – those blimpy, expensive soft toy cats plonked haughtily in toy shops (basically high-end retail therapy for children)…

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Life Span – by Fiona Reilly
Nonfiction Fiona Reilly Nonfiction Fiona Reilly

Life Span – by Fiona Reilly

Every night, broad wings of black, brown and silver fluttered against my windows, drawn by the kitchen lights. Hundreds of moths scattered across the glass, forming a dark floral pattern against the inky backdrop of the night sky.

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Outer Banks – by Kathleen Williams
Nonfiction Kathleen Williams Nonfiction Kathleen Williams

Outer Banks – by Kathleen Williams

Six houses collapsed into the ocean on the Outer Banks, a series of islands off North Carolina, between May and November 2024. In this area of the world, strips of houses that were once on solid ground find themselves on sand due to coastal erosion. I discover these houses through TikTok. Their immense, shuddering structures collapsing into the ocean are captivating, seductive. I wonder if it’s somehow appealing on a class level, if we’re all hiding smirks while watching the upstairs gentry implode from the downstairs quarters.

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Extinctions – by Dani Netherclift
Nonfiction Dani Netherclift Nonfiction Dani Netherclift

Extinctions – by Dani Netherclift

The threat AI poses to writers and the art of writing seems to have arisen swiftly. Who threw open those doors? What is an entry? A door is an aperture to possibility. These are important concerns for a lyric essayist. There are so many ways in (and out), so many connecting silences in between. What does it mean for your calling to become extinct?

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Cold coffee – by Aboubakr Daqiq
Nonfiction Aboubakr Daqiq Nonfiction Aboubakr Daqiq

Cold coffee – by Aboubakr Daqiq

I haven’t always liked coffee. Loved the smell, just not the taste. In recent years, however, I’ve found myself more than impartial towards an occasional morning coffee – especially when paired with a delicious pastry. My poison of choice is the mocha. Often perjured by claims of inauthenticity and childlike nodes, the mocha has long been a victim of slander and ridicule. Putting aside the politics of coffee elitism, I’ve found that brewing a good mocha is no easy feat.

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The more you are going home – by Stephen Orr
Nonfiction Stephen Orr Nonfiction Stephen Orr

The more you are going home – by Stephen Orr

Sleeping under the piano, close to the rosewood, night sounds amplified by eighty-eight strings. So quiet I can’t really tell, but they’re just outside the window. The scraping of a leaf on a concrete path, until the breeze stops. The movement of a lizard in litter; the way wind works on canopies. Each singing, vibrating, resonating, and when I step outside, the once-a-minute bark of a dog filling the void, this sound moving across the land, through yards, down to the river. All suggesting something else is going on.

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a natural sort of being – by Miriam Jones
Nonfiction Miriam Jones Nonfiction Miriam Jones

a natural sort of being – by Miriam Jones

At home we were a newborn, a toddler, a man, and a non-binary me. For three months we lived outside of normal time and normal social life. The privatised home is not known for nurturing gender improvisation. Some things known to take place within the home are the unwaged feminised labour of social reproduction, and domestic violence. But for me the parental leave bubble was a quiet place, away from the sharp and assured gender infrastructure of the outside world. 

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Beasting – by Heather Taylor-Johnson
Nonfiction Heather Taylor-Johnson Nonfiction Heather Taylor-Johnson

Beasting – by Heather Taylor-Johnson

Frida Kahlo was broken and bedridden when she began painting. A trolley-car had crashed into her bus and she was speared by an iron handrail, puncturing her abdomen and uterus. Her spinal column was wrecked, her collarbone, ribs and pelvis a disaster, and she had eleven fractures in one leg, already shrunken from childhood polio. Frida’s mother had given her plaster-casted, immobile daughter a lap easel and hung a mirror from the bed’s canopy so that the eighteen-year-old might paint her own face to pass the many painful hours. Mí amor pequeña, Frida’s mother might have thought while looking down on her daughter, bandaged and bondaged, unaware of the fierce and revolutionary paintings that lay ahead: My little love.

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Grass, willow, skin – by Ben Walter
Nonfiction Ben Walter Nonfiction Ben Walter

Grass, willow, skin – by Ben Walter

The wind is blowing off the dead of the river and every gust is hollowing out my body. Even though it's summer and the evenings are spending all the light they've been saving up through the year, it's freezing cold – I am eleven years old and there is nothing to me, my arms and legs are an arrangement of twigs, and the creeping ice is threatening to snap my body into pieces. The sense of arctic nakedness, of shivering in the outfield of a skewed oval, is all pervasive…

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Bunya: Axis limen – by Justin Russell
Nonfiction Justin Russell Nonfiction Justin Russell

Bunya: Axis limen – by Justin Russell

It’s not every day that you get to plant a living fossil. On this day I am, and with early spring sunshine warming my bare arms I plod up the hill like a pilgrim preparing to perform a hallowed act. I’m pushing a wheelbarrow filled with a roughly assembled planting kit: my favourite long handled spade, native plant fertiliser, seaweed solution, clear plastic tree guards, bamboo stakes, a club hammer, a galvanised watering can and a bunya pine seedling.

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The water’s edge – by Craig White
Nonfiction Craig White Nonfiction Craig White

The water’s edge – by Craig White

Last summer, at Cooee Beach in Tasmania’s north-west, a father drowned while swimming with his children. At Johnson Rock near Currie on King Island, a 43-year-old male tourist drowned while diving with friends when he ‘encountered difficulties in the water’. At White Beach on the Tasman Peninsula, a 36-year-old man drowned while diving for scallops with his mates despite ‘extensive CPR by first responders’.

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Brackish tongue – by Roanna McClelland
Nonfiction Roanna McClelland Nonfiction Roanna McClelland

Brackish tongue – by Roanna McClelland

I write the first line of a poem: ‘I thought the river might heal me, but she is brackish on my tongue’.

And I wonder what story I am trying to tell when I use rivers in my work. A wonderful academic tells me water is my ‘medium’ and even as I am flattered, part of me squirms. To what end? What am I trying to express when I speak with and through rivers and nature? Do I really think I can bend and shape something as slippery as water to tell my stories?

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The only fish – by Ben Walter
Nonfiction Ben Walter Nonfiction Ben Walter

The only fish – by Ben Walter

The first fish I catch as a child is a flathead. I’m leaning over the side of the boat with my red toy fishing rod, mind drifting wherever a tiny mind does, when I notice a fish at the end of the white string line. Confused, I turn to my dad. ‘Is that … the bait?’ I ask, before seeing that it is a real, actual flathead, and I have somehow caught it.

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The ballet school – by Helena Gjone
Nonfiction Helena Gjone Nonfiction Helena Gjone

The ballet school – by Helena Gjone

After the longest hour of my life, Galina, our classical teacher, bursts through the door clutching a sheet of paper. Everyone sits up a little straighter. The room goes silent with anticipation, the wall clock ticking. My Australian dance teachers would have taken this moment to remind us ‘how much progress we’ve made this year,’ and ‘how proud I am to be your teacher’. Results would be handed out individually. But Galina doesn’t waste time with politeness or sentimental speeches, simply unfolding the paper and reading marks aloud for the entire class to hear.

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Great flying soar and in command – by Lily Chan
Nonfiction Lily Chan Nonfiction Lily Chan

Great flying soar and in command – by Lily Chan

My brother’s name is Haoren. It means great flying, soar, esteem, in command. His name is Bob when he orders takeaway. Nobody mishears Bob. Nobody checks Bob’s ID. Bob has no history and is taken at face value. He has the cheekbones of a deathless vampire from a K-pop band, honed from evening climbs of Jacob’s Ladder, 242 unbroken concrete steps showing a panoramic view of King’s Park in Perth.

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