The Sound of Light – by Verity Borthwick
Nonfiction Verity Borthwick Nonfiction Verity Borthwick

The Sound of Light – by Verity Borthwick

SHORTLISTED, ISLAND NONFICTION PRIZE 2021

Children conceived under the northern lights are blessed with intelligence and wisdom. It turns out this is a recent urban legend masquerading as ancient knowledge. Still, it has propagated and even appears on the Greenland tourism website, which is where I read it. I did not know this when I visited Greenland, but something about the idea of phantasmal lights had the feel of fate, and it gave me hope. It’s strange how much I let in the idea of fate during that time …

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If You Join the Circle, You Must Dance – by Katerina Cosgrove
Nonfiction Katerina Cosgrove Nonfiction Katerina Cosgrove

If You Join the Circle, You Must Dance – by Katerina Cosgrove

SHORTLISTED, ISLAND NONFICTION PRIZE 2021

… I think of her when I sweep my outside decks in the morning. I think of her when I scour cooking pots with steel wool at night. I wonder, when I put on a load of washing, how it felt for her to soak and wring out those heavy woollen jumpers, like the one she wore when she died, or handwash her soiled nylon stockings in the cold grey light of a Melbourne winter.
She ended up with one of those stockings around her neck.
I find a photo stapled to Kalliope’s marriage certificate. It’s the first time I’ve seen her face …

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Hospitality – by Nicole Melanson
Nonfiction Nicole Melanson Nonfiction Nicole Melanson

Hospitality – by Nicole Melanson

SHORTLISTED, ISLAND NONFICTION PRIZE 2021

… My father’s death took fifteen days, during which time I left a breadcrumb trail of tears from one end of my house to the other. Brush my teeth, weep. Skim an email, weep. Drip. Drip. Drip.

Flightless, cocooned with my husband and children in lockdown, I had no sharp edges to grate myself against. I needed the kind of cathartic cry that comes from overstimulation, a total sensory meltdown. In the absence of sufficient triggers, I lived vicariously through Gordon Ramsay’s temper …

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The Ocean Sounds Like a Motorway – by Melissa Fagan
Nonfiction Melissa Fagan Nonfiction Melissa Fagan

The Ocean Sounds Like a Motorway – by Melissa Fagan

How does the ocean sound? Like the hollowed-out whoosh of a shell cupped to your ear. A distant rustle. A constant murmur. A heavy thud, a thunderous clap, the creep of the encroaching tide. When heard from above—standing on the top of a rocky cliff—the sound of the ocean carries upwards, reaching towards your ears. Beneath the surface, it’s a deep, low warble. A ghostly, inhuman echo. A whale song …

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The Backyard Project: Notes from Stolen Land – by Lia Hills
Nonfiction Lia Hills Nonfiction Lia Hills

The Backyard Project: Notes from Stolen Land – by Lia Hills

The murnong’s flower head droops, in need of a drink, a single closed tip at the end of an arching stem, like an organic streetlamp or an alien probe. I have no clock with me. I will measure time in plants, one per day, for the week that I’ll spend camping in my backyard – a half-acre in the Dandenongs – off-grid, tech-free, no contact with other humans. The plants come from a community nursery down the road that only sells local indigenous species. Each of the plants I’ll place in this ground has three names …

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Schrödinger’s Butterflies – by Dave Witty
Nonfiction Dave Witty Nonfiction Dave Witty

Schrödinger’s Butterflies – by Dave Witty

… Over the next few weeks, we saw the same butterflies on three, possibly four occasions. It is unlikely they were the same individuals - they live such short, hurried lives - but they were the same species. The common grass blue. Zizina labradus. A small butterfly not much bigger than a wasp. Its movement so fast and erratic, its size so slight, that when a grass blue comes into view, you notice only a flicker at first, a flicker that appears to jump several feet as it drops out of reality, only to reappear seconds later. Your eyes take time to adjust to their jinking motion. Only after ten, maybe twenty seconds, do you finally keep track of their passage …

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Feel the Quiet – by Zohra Aly
Nonfiction Zohra Aly Nonfiction Zohra Aly

Feel the Quiet – by Zohra Aly

There’s a list of things I imagine doing if I lived a different life: wandering into the small reserve I drive past daily, sipping my first cup of tea every morning on the patio bench, learning to identify native flora and fauna by name, picking up my embroidery from where I left it weeks ago. I never get round to them because I live this life, in which I’m wiping down kitchen benchtops, hanging laundry and scrolling through Instagram …

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And a Moth Flew Out – by Helena Kadmos
Nonfiction Helena Kadmos Nonfiction Helena Kadmos

And a Moth Flew Out – by Helena Kadmos

What showering outdoors is teaching me about my place in the pandemic

At the bottom of my garden steps is a tap. I check that the valve to the sprinkler hose is closed, and that the one to the other hose is open. I turn on the tap and follow that hose to a hidey-hole behind a green plastic water tank that’s taller than I am. This is the shadiest spot in the garden …

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A New Garden – by Erica Nathan
Nonfiction Erica Nathan Nonfiction Erica Nathan

A New Garden – by Erica Nathan

… Enticing birds to feast, shelter and pause in a shared urban space has been my ten-year learning mission. I love to garden. But even as I write this, my guard is up quicker than a thornbill’s early morning dip in the birdbath. Even among the declining number of enthusiasts, my idea of gardening lacks broad appeal …

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The Third Angel of Chernobyl – by Carmel Bird
Nonfiction Carmel Bird Nonfiction Carmel Bird

The Third Angel of Chernobyl – by Carmel Bird

… I write this in February 2022, beginning on Valentine’s Day. The whole world, suffering from the pestilence of COVID, is focused on the question of whether Russia is or is not going to invade Ukraine, which has been a separate and troubled country since 1991. By 17 February, the suspense continues, and perhaps Russia will invade, perhaps it won’t. Naturally, the world watches on television as snow falls on the troops, on the tanks, on people in bright puffer jackets …

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A Year Without Mirrors – by Sarah Klenbort
Nonfiction Sarah Klenbort Nonfiction Sarah Klenbort

A Year Without Mirrors – by Sarah Klenbort

… my daughter Kaitlyn signed, ‘Stop!’
‘The ground,’ she pointed, ‘is moving’.
I looked into the pool of light from our torch and thought I was having an LSD flashback. But I hadn’t taken drugs in 20 years.
The ground was moving. On closer observation, dozens, hundreds, thousands of shells were walking towards the ocean on the other side of our camper. I sat, rapt, half-hanging out of the tent, staring at this mass march of hermit crabs …

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The Turkeys – by Saraid Taylor
Nonfiction Saraid Taylor Nonfiction Saraid Taylor

The Turkeys – by Saraid Taylor

she steps through the mallee eucalypts and thinks of her dad: an incarnate old bush song a banjo paterson verse a shearer clean with his hands; never taught to read, travelling all down the south-west country in long jeans into tin sheds making runs of a hundred covered in wool and sweat and flies and animal heat: his life, her childhood a folklore yarn a cliché the great australian ballad, a shearer dad home by friday night only to leave again sunday afternoon …

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Spectral Coordinates – by Brigid Magner
Nonfiction Brigid Magner Nonfiction Brigid Magner

Spectral Coordinates – by Brigid Magner

… I found the survey map for my street, which was labelled in an expert copperplate hand. Till then, I hadn’t registered that I live in the ‘Parish of Jika Jika’ in the ‘County of Bourke’. Jika Jika, also known as Billibellary, was a revered elder of the Woiwurrung. His name was given to a parish which dispossessed his people, as well as to a notorious wing of the Pentridge prison that no longer exists. Seeing my family home mapped out on this survey made me feel uneasy and complicit …

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Falling Asleep Under the Love Umbrella – by Clare Millar
Nonfiction Clare Millar Nonfiction Clare Millar

Falling Asleep Under the Love Umbrella – by Clare Millar

The first book I give H is a picture book … H isn’t drawn to books these days, having let reading fall to the side during uni, but I give the book to him on the way to my place. It’s autumn, but feels like winter already, and we shiver on the bus. There’s just enough light to read against the darkness outside …

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A Waving Forest – by Zowie Douglas-Kinghorn
Nonfiction Zowie Douglas‐Kinghorn Nonfiction Zowie Douglas‐Kinghorn

A Waving Forest – by Zowie Douglas-Kinghorn

… Beneath the water, life is more graceful. Sprawling groves of kelp shift and furl in the current, while tiny silver snook fish dart between the seaweed; a wrasse glides between the plunging curtains. I follow it, hearing my sucking breath amplified by my snorkel. The mask fogs up. I continue paddling, floating and kicking over the kelp beds. I can’t see anything except a cloud of my own shallow breathing. Suddenly, my heart is racing—my chest feels like it will burst. The physical sensation of being underwater grips my ribcage like a vice. As spots appear in the corner of my mask, every shadow becomes a dark trench ready to swallow me …

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Changing Spots – by Sharon Kent
Nonfiction Sharon Kent Nonfiction Sharon Kent

Changing Spots – by Sharon Kent

I find the scats on the beach, lying by a faint depression in the sand. With careful gloved hands I pick them up. They are strange – grey-brown with a gritty texture, smelling nothing like the dog faeces they are supposed to resemble. I label a plastic bag with neat letters –16 January 2017. The Neck, Bruny Island, Tasmania – then drop the scats into the bag and seal it up. Later, a researcher will examine the specimen and extract samples for DNA analysis – a small piece in a giant puzzle. Through the plastic, I can see feathers. They are black and white. I wonder if any of them belong to the little penguins from the colony behind the dunes …

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A Questionable Survey of Suburban Eucalypts – by Uthpala Gunethilake
Nonfiction Uthpala Gunethilake Nonfiction Uthpala Gunethilake

A Questionable Survey of Suburban Eucalypts – by Uthpala Gunethilake

… There are several magnificent specimens down the slope; tall, always tall, with reddish-orange trunks and sprays of white blossoms in summer. Two books, one app and many websites later, I’m confused – is this a grey gum that has shed its bark or a Sydney red gum? Another has the telltale squiggle of moth larvae etched on its creamy-smooth bark, so it must be a scribbly gum. But it looks so much like another smooth-barked species, which fits the description of blackbutt. Another has bark furrowed like a Christmas log cake – is that a stringybark? The thing is, I can’t be sure. I know they’re all eucalypts, but I can’t call them by their names …

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The Rats Move In – by Karen A Johnson
Nonfiction Karen A Johnson Nonfiction Karen A Johnson

The Rats Move In – by Karen A Johnson

… Death and disease have hijacked the world’s narrative, at least until the sheer enormity becomes too overwhelming, and it becomes impossible to concentrate on anything outside of the inside. We beat hasty retreats to our homes and hide away until the next news broadcast. The news has replaced the novel in my world.

This is the time for explorative, dangerous fiction. Apocalyptic fiction. But I’m living in a fiction I can’t find a way to write. Nothing rivals the terror of nonfiction. I go online. I could order a gun, a knife. I don’t. I order a plant. A life …

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Fire There Is – by Searlait O’Neill
Nonfiction Searlait O'Neill Nonfiction Searlait O'Neill

Fire There Is – by Searlait O’Neill

My younger brother said that it looked as though all the feathers had been pulled from the skin of a bird, leaving nothing but demarcated veins. He went on to say, ‘That’s not exactly how it looked. I can’t say, really, how it looked.’ At the time we spoke about this, I was trying out images. I thought I’d stumble across something that could capture it. Asking him to recount the experience of seeing our brother, J, and the fire, I was looking to capture a feeling more than anything. The feeling of seeing your brother’s arms burn, of seeing his clothes dropping away like singed leaves …

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Riverine – by Kavita Bedford
Nonfiction Kavita Bedford Nonfiction Kavita Bedford

Riverine – by Kavita Bedford

… Then, it was as if the river was remembered. In the first month of the pandemic, the golden hour hit the river at six each evening. The skies were honey drenched … As the pandemic stretched over months, time ran tandem to the river. My days were linked to other city dwellers, whose sense of time, once ruled by workplaces, was now punctuated only by river walks. On certain days, the river was like glass, reflecting the sky back to itself. One day, I watched a silver heron perched on a dead tree, bark and bird merging into one bar of light as the sun went down …

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