In Quarantine – by Megan Clement
Nonfiction Megan Clement Nonfiction Megan Clement

In Quarantine – by Megan Clement

WINNER , ISLAND NONFICTION PRIZE 2021

… The neon green BP sign across the road means the opposite of what it used to. It means I am stuck in this liminal space, with a guard at my door 24/7, squirrelled away to protect the health of Australians everywhere. This would be fine except for the fact that I’m here for 14 days and my father is dying and I don’t know if he has 14 days left …

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This Moon – by Megan Coupland
Nonfiction Megan Coupland Nonfiction Megan Coupland

This Moon – by Megan Coupland

It’s the tail end of 1873, November, and a clergyman is rugged up against a sluggish dusk. Along a Newfoundland coastline, Reverend Moses Harvey makes his way towards a fishing boat on the shore; he’s approaching the knot of fishermen who summoned him. The men, just in from the sea, are clustered around the carcass they’ve surfaced, a creature dredged inadvertently from the depths of Logy Bay, tangled in their herring nets. Harvey’s not there on church business. Instead, he’s made a name for himself locally as a collector of curiosities and the fishermen have offered him their haul: a giant squid, dead on arrival …

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Ghost streets – by Alexandra Sangster
Nonfiction Alexandra Sangster Nonfiction Alexandra Sangster

Ghost streets – by Alexandra Sangster

I have lived here long enough to know where the people who are not living anymore live.

Well not them exactly, but their ghosts.

All of the streets speak.

There is a build-up

of bones

(not the literal kind, not like in Paris with the catacombs or in Scotland with the pits of plague dead under your feet)

but bones none the less.

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A thousand gifts – by Maki Morita
Nonfiction Maki Morita Nonfiction Maki Morita

A thousand gifts – by Maki Morita

this story about food starts in a gym, but I’m talking free-to-air TV not protein bars — running on a treadmill to the white noise of Border Security could be the crème de la crème of suburban pastimes — did you know quarantine law makes good primetime drama? — we pant we glance we witness a family unravel souvenirs with which to adorn their kitchen — this is a tune to hum along to and I take another sip of water

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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.’

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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 …

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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 …

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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 …

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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 …

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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.

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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 …

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Woonoongoora – by Caroline Gardam
Nonfiction Caroline Gardam Nonfiction Caroline Gardam

Woonoongoora – by Caroline Gardam

The sun snuffs early and arrives late. Dawn is tardy, slow and defiant: a gentle light finally emerging, lightening – any birdsong chorus drowned by the rush of creek over rocks below, to the north. It’s a full three hours from first light to when winter rays deign to glitter the creek. Facing this little hut is a wall of green – an entire forest shuddering down from what we call a bluff because we think the name Fort is dumb for a proud outcrop. It’s part of the ridge along the scenic rim, of which I know nothing, but you gotta start somewhere …

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Objects of Illness/Recovery – by Anna Jacobson and Katerina Bryant
Nonfiction Anna Jacobson and Katerina Bryant Nonfiction Anna Jacobson and Katerina Bryant

Objects of Illness/Recovery – by Anna Jacobson and Katerina Bryant

As rainwater seeped through the laminate flooring, I piled my objects onto my bed: an antique out-of-tune zither, my books, a woven rainbow rug that had made my room my home. I lost none of these objects, but I did lose my shelving, which drank up water through its base. I also lost my room at the rental that had housed all my things – the doorway warped with water damage and was no longer safe to inhabit. I stayed with a friend for two-and-a-half weeks while I tried to find a new place to live. My objects were splayed across three different suburbs, and I felt fractured: one part at the old share house – safe if the disintegrating ship of the bed could hold – another part in a suitcase at a friend’s house, and a third split lifeline to my parents’ home. I wore my hamsa ring – silver hand with larimar stone at its centre – to ward off the evil eye. I needed spiritual protection, wanted to feel safe …

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The Dark House – by Emma Yearwood
Nonfiction Emma Yearwood Nonfiction Emma Yearwood

The Dark House – by Emma Yearwood

I have taken to leaving the ceiling fan on all night due to an unnerving premonition that the air will set like jelly and I will no longer be able to breathe. The solution – I must stir it, stir it, keep the air in constant motion.

This house is older and darker, more closed in, than I’m used to – like chocolate, like soil humus, like dog fart. I am used to light and airy spaces, where the wind rattles about and you may as well be outside; I am used to a feeling of un-containment …

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Lines of Location – by Johanna Ellersdorfer
Nonfiction Johanna Ellersdorfer Nonfiction Johanna Ellersdorfer

Lines of Location – by Johanna Ellersdorfer

… With each step I take, webs come in and out of focus. Light-jewelled threads like small nets in the night sky. Looking upwards towards an opening in a leafy hedge, I see a spider begin to build its web. It starts as a single line, like unspooled thread, taut and bright in the light of the street lamp. The spider glides back and forth between other lines I can barely see, and then starts to join them into an intricate mesh.

Compared to the spider, my hands are clumsy. I have tried to stitch the night sky in a series of loops and knots, copying patterns designed by a Scottish woman who, the century before last, moved around this country with her engineer husband …

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How to Build a Brother – by Helena Pantsis
Nonfiction Helena Pantsis Nonfiction Helena Pantsis

How to Build a Brother – by Helena Pantsis

My brother is a creature slowly falling apart … He first breaks a bone in Year 8 when a football hits his hand and fractures his thumb in a thin, painful line down the bone. Our school doesn’t have a nurse, just a bursar with a first aid kit, so he is sent back to class to write with his broken thumb, to return to PE in his bright-purple sports uniform. He falls apart in these ways so subtly it’s hard to remember we are all fading, slowly …

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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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