Selfish Ghosts – by Heather Taylor-Johnson
Nonfiction Heather Taylor-Johnson Nonfiction Heather Taylor-Johnson

Selfish Ghosts – by Heather Taylor-Johnson

WINNER, ISLAND NONFICTION PRIZE 2022

It’s 1978–79 and in an abandoned warehouse in New York City, at a diner slightly out-of-focus, on a crowded subway pistoling through Brooklyn, seen pissing in a toilet in a dilapidated cubicle is Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud’s in Coney Island and at the Hudson River sex piers. He’s shooting up heroin. He is masturbating. He is pointing at Jesus graffitied on a wall. He is holding a gun to his head …

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Sudden, Temporary Deaths – by Chris Fleming
Nonfiction Chris Fleming Nonfiction Chris Fleming

Sudden, Temporary Deaths – by Chris Fleming

SHORTLISTED, ISLAND NONFICTION PRIZE 2022

I had a dream last night that I could extend my arms and legs in any direction I wanted. At first, bending my forearm back past 180 degrees, I was sure it would dislocate; and it did – but only a little, like the nitrogen pop of cracking bones. I kept going and soon possessed complete flexion and extension. I discovered the more I bent my joints like this, the fewer dislocation pains there were, the quieter the pops. I moved on to incredible, disturbing yogic feats. And then, as I often do whenever I accomplish something impossible in a dream (unaided human flight, producing fresh juice inside my mouth to drink, passing my head through solid objects), the thought occurred to me:
anyone
can do this …

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Wingsets and Snowdrifts: A Subantarctic Year – by Emily Mowat
Nonfiction Emily Mowat Nonfiction Emily Mowat

Wingsets and Snowdrifts: A Subantarctic Year – by Emily Mowat

SHORTLISTED, ISLAND NONFICTION PRIZE 2022

It’s late December, and the subantarctic summer stretches out the daylight hours. On the slopes of the escarpment where the light-mantled albatross nest, egg hatching is imminent.
I approach one, sitting plump and pleased upon her scraped-together nest of mud and tussock. She’s as sleek as a Siamese cat, with slate-brown head fading seamlessly into a mantle of pale grey. Her crescent-moon eyes tell of pack ice and polar fronts.
I notice her stretching to gather scraps of grass within reach of her nest, and tucking them carefully under her body in preparation for her soon-to-hatch chick. Perhaps I shouldn’t, but I can’t help but proffer a dried grass stem myself, and, to my surprise, her powerful, hooked black bill delicately grasps it from my hand …

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The Long Daylight – by Jo Gardiner
Nonfiction Jo Gardiner Nonfiction Jo Gardiner

The Long Daylight – by Jo Gardiner

SHORTLISTED, ISLAND NONFICTION PRIZE 2022

2015. December. Diamond Beach.
That Christmas, I travelled north from the Blue Labyrinth up through the dairy country east of the Barrington Tops and turned into Failford Road where great smooth-barked apple gums gathered amber light into their limbs.
As I crested the last rise before the small town of Diamond Beach, a snatch of violet sea appeared. That night, I remembered its colour as I rode the steady thump of surf into sleep.
On that first morning, before I met my three brothers and sister, magpies gathered on the open grassland before the dunes in front of the cabin and poured light from their throats. The whipbird whistled up the sun.

Fully fledged, first light
appears – swoops out from night and
conjures up a world …

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Chaste – by Suri Matondkar
Nonfiction Suri Matondkar Nonfiction Suri Matondkar

Chaste – by Suri Matondkar

SHORTLISTED, ISLAND NONFICTION PRIZE 2022

I once lived in a city where the buildings stood too close, edges brushing like sardined shadows on public transport.
I lived in an apartment on the third floor, sharing a room with a pair of girls. We sat on that floor, arms outstretched on either side – wingless birds imitating flight – joking about how our fingers touched each end of the room without even trying.
Stuck in that cage of cement. A luxurious one. Western toilet with flush, shower we never switched on. Buckets stoically awaiting flood. A ceiling with a bulb and tube light. Never to be used during the day, even if the room was bathed in gloom, because light was only needed at night.
The front door was held together with a chain that anyone could unhook with a floating arm, desperate fingers scraping until the metal clicked apart. Perfect for surprise wellness checks to ensure we weren’t being dirty girls who would invite dishonour into the house …

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Landfall – by Megan Coupland
Nonfiction Megan Coupland Nonfiction Megan Coupland

Landfall – by Megan Coupland

Thirty minutes north-west of Adelaide is a stretch of South Australian coastline synchronously, gloriously, luminous and bleak. In the language of the Kaurna people, the traditional owners of the land, it is Winaityinaityi Pangkara, ‘country belonging to all birds’. And from where I’m standing, not far from its northernmost point, I can see just a fragment: a shoreline so planar and still that it’s difficult to tell where solid ground transitions to water. It’s low tide, a Sunday in late January, and there is no one else in sight. There are the birds though, more numerous than I’d expected given the time of day and the settling heat …

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Lines of Curiosity – by Margaret Aitken
Nonfiction Margaret Aitken Nonfiction Margaret Aitken

Lines of Curiosity – by Margaret Aitken

The building was once used for storing vegetables, but the huge fridges have been re-crafted into offices, the drafty attic spaces renovated into meeting rooms. Crumbling bricks and dusty wooden floors testify to the original use. Paint peels from the rectangle that stands against the winter sky.

I scramble up the hill toward it, my silky dressing gown stuffed into my bag. I’ve chosen my outfit carefully. It’s easy to slip in and out of, doesn’t wrinkle when folded, not suggestive. I don’t knock before I open the corrugated-iron door …

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Learning to Be Tame – by Carla Silbert
Nonfiction Carla Silbert Nonfiction Carla Silbert

Learning to Be Tame – by Carla Silbert

Books with pastel covers tell me to expect the sensation of butterflies flapping deep in my stomach when I first feel ‘the little one’ kick. A butterfly is a fragile creature – a tiny rip in its wing renders it flightless. In my guts, an orca whale is doing somersaults. It is flipping and rolling in a too-small swimming pool, its smooth skin stretching the edges. I nickname the baby Tilikum after the orca who spent its life performing for tourists at SeaWorld in Florida. …

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Rubbish – by Liz Betts
Nonfiction Liz Betts Nonfiction Liz Betts

Rubbish – by Liz Betts

First rule of a crime story: always start with a body. The side of the road, wallaby grass, great lumps of quartz, broom beginning to flower. I see a flash of red, but I keep walking; it doesn’t scream crime. I stop, turn back, take a photograph, and move on … When I walk, I spy twiggy bush-pea, kangaroo tracks and white-winged choughs flying low. But what I am searching for is man-made …

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Pamirs – by Nathan Mifsud
Nonfiction Nathan Mifsud Nonfiction Nathan Mifsud

Pamirs – by Nathan Mifsud

In 1271, the merchant-explorer Marco Polo came upon the treeless valleys of the Pamirs – literally, the pastures. He saw lean beasts fatten within ten days, and wild sheep with horns six palms in length.

In 2015, two Australian cyclists negotiated a Tajik border post without incident. An eagle soared overhead. Marmots chirped and scampered in the alpine grasses. For lunch the men consumed two dumpling soups, two coffees and a bottle of Pepsi …

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Compare and Contrast – by Gillian Bouras
Nonfiction Gillian Bouras Nonfiction Gillian Bouras

Compare and Contrast – by Gillian Bouras

There are twenty-two vignettes in [The Summer Book by Tove Jansson], and the threads that bind them together are Grandmother and her six-year-old granddaughter, Sophia. Grandmother is nearing the end of her life, but Sophia is beginning hers, and is at the stage we all go through, that of thinking some seasons and routines are going to last and repeat themselves forever. But in sharp contrast, Grandmother feels that everything is gliding away from her. The book seems to be about nothing very much, but is about everything, about the ways in which life is lived over time … [W]hereas Sophia had a grandmother who taught her all sorts of things, I had my grandfather …

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Who Owns the Greek Myths? – by Katerina Cosgrove
Nonfiction Katerina Cosgrove Nonfiction Katerina Cosgrove

Who Owns the Greek Myths? – by Katerina Cosgrove

Novelistic retelling of Greek mythology has exploded in recent years … For me, a Greek-Australian writer, there is something about these books that feels disorienting. These works are literary, researched, respectful and probably well-meaning. I’ve taken pleasure in reading Miller’s Circe, Barker’s The Silence of the Girls and The Women of Troy, as well as Renault’s The King Must Die and The Bull from the Sea. Yet these books are written by privileged people with no small measure of power, the products of elite universities and classical educations. These writers have not publicly acknowledged consulting with Greek scholars or spent time living in Greece …

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I Go Down to the Shore – by RT Wenzel
Nonfiction RT Wenzel Nonfiction RT Wenzel

I Go Down to the Shore – by RT Wenzel

In the scheme of rivers, this river is not extraordinary. The surface is sometimes lustrous with scum and agricultural runoff, the riverbed coated in sludge and bacterial matting. Not a river you’d travel to see – although tourists do come for the platypuses.

Stretches of picturesque wilderness aren’t far away; this is Tasmania, after all. Golden mountainscapes and unpeopled beaches are always within driving distance. But I crave intimacy with my own backyard, and in particular, the uncultivated part beyond the marked beds, apple trees and sometimes-mown lawn. The terrain beyond the fence where the river lies …

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The Shimmer of Flying Fox Landscape – by Matthew Chrulew
Nonfiction Matthew Chrulew Nonfiction Matthew Chrulew

The Shimmer of Flying Fox Landscape – by Matthew Chrulew

… We are in William Robinson’s Flying Fox Landscape. At first we were just looking at this oil painting from 1989. We stood there trying to orient ourselves, bewildered by shifting perspectives. We knew what the artist had called it and followed his hint, searched for the flying fox. Perhaps it’s just named for the locale near his home. But that name must have come from their presence. Perhaps that’s the flying fox there, just below centre, a brush of angular purples caught up in some to-do with a magpie. But perhaps it is us. Sucked into this scene, thrown about by its winds, flipped this way and that …

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Animal Rescue – by Bastian Fox Phelan
Nonfiction Bastian Fox Phelan Nonfiction Bastian Fox Phelan

Animal Rescue – by Bastian Fox Phelan

My first experience of rescuing a native animal doesn’t end well. It’s after midnight and I’m driving home to Newcastle from Sydney. At the big roundabout in Jesmond, there’s a flash of pale-coloured feathers in my headlights. I swerve. Did I hit it? We pull over. When my partner spots the bird, it’s mounting the gutter on the far side of the highway. I can see its pink and grey plumage under the streetlights. It’s a galah, seemingly unfazed by its brush with death, strutting in the confident, plucky way that parrots do – perhaps just out for a midnight stroll? But that doesn’t seem right. Galahs aren’t nocturnal, and if they can still fly, they shouldn’t be walking across roads. Something about its wing looks funny – the way its tapered tip sags like a door that’s come off its hinges …

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In the Rain Shadow – by Jessica Carter
Nonfiction Jessica Carter Nonfiction Jessica Carter

In the Rain Shadow – by Jessica Carter

I wake to the smell of fading red blossoms. The air is warm already. There are bushfires in the west, yet the haze is not smoke but dust. Late last night I arrived here, on the other side of the Great Dividing Range, the one marked by rain shadow, and the absence of tall buildings, rushing humans, city fumes and ocean breeze. The sky is wider, the plant leaves tighter. Breathing comes lightly.

I’m back on the family farm, but the return is always fraught – a mixture of trepidation and a deep pull somewhere near my heart. A reminder of the queasy combination of fear and hope that comes with being tethered to something …

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The Magpie and the Scarecrow – by Helena Pantsis
Nonfiction Helena Pantsis Nonfiction Helena Pantsis

The Magpie and the Scarecrow – by Helena Pantsis

Mangia, Mangia, the men call out, throwing bread through the metal fence, its tessellating wire pattern opening onto a park, sod wet and uneven. The factory sits directly beside the park. The men sit in the adjoining alleyway, cigarettes burning holes in their mouths while they tear their lunches apart with ashy hands. Mangia swoops lithely down from the gum. He opens his mouth – his voice threads through the gaps, a loud artillery, fine and fluty. A short, descending call. Mangia, Mangia, the men say in response to his carolling, c’mon magpie, time for lunch …

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The Right One to Rescue – by Sharon Kent
Nonfiction Sharon Kent Nonfiction Sharon Kent

The Right One to Rescue – by Sharon Kent

… ‘Mum! There’s a cat on the road. With a bucket on its head.’

I am studying the map. From somewhere, I half-hear this ludicrous statement, but I dismiss it, like an annoying mosquito that I can’t be bothered to swat away. I turn to my son. ‘It’s going to be dark soon. Will – you – get – in – the – car!’ I flash him a stony look. ‘Hurry up!’

He hesitates, looking down the road forlornly, before trying a different tone.

‘There’s a cat on the road. With a bucket on its head.’ He speaks evenly, as if he’s dealing with someone who doesn’t understand his language, where there’s no point becoming exasperated or overly excited …

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Far Out, Cats – by M.T. O’Byrne
Nonfiction M.T. O'Byrne Nonfiction M.T. O'Byrne

Far Out, Cats – by M.T. O’Byrne

I confess that I am more of a dog person than a cat person but am not so enamoured of man’s best friend that I am incapable of acknowledging the feats of cats, or that they have achieved such fame as to equal any dog, save Lassie. An average, healthy cat, for example, can jump six times its own length, which is double that of a chihuahua, assuming a chihuahua could be bothered. In human terms – according to the World Health Organisation in 2021 – this would mean being able to jump 10.2 metres if you’re a man and 9.6 metres if you’re a woman. Or, being able to jump as high as two London buses, or three stories of a building and still have enough left in the tank for a celebratory Black Russian and a Montecristo N4 cigar …

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Straight From the Horse’s Mouth: Windsor Chairmaking in Tasmania – by Dan Dwyer
Nonfiction Dan Dwyer Nonfiction Dan Dwyer

Straight From the Horse’s Mouth: Windsor Chairmaking in Tasmania – by Dan Dwyer

… The democratic chair is designed to be made with a small number of hand tools, hence democratic. If a student learns this chair, they can make more complex Windsor chairs. ‘It wouldn’t be a Windsor chair without a bit of blood on it,’ Jon said … My vision of soulful strokes and wispy shavings, the Zen and the Art of Chairmaking, had become a crash course in kindling. I took another spindle, and returned to first principles, ‘one long stroke, two short ones.’ Secretly, I breathed a sigh of relief that Jon was away; I could embarrass myself in peace …

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