Not Gone, Just Different – by Rae White
Fiction Rae White Fiction Rae White

Not Gone, Just Different – by Rae White

Our neighbour’s latest pandemic purchase lounges on the front porch, brown fur glistening in the sun and big limbs stretching across the stairs.

‘Babe!’ I holler to my wife, as I stare out our finger-smudged window. ‘Looks like next door’s got a dog.’

In the backyard sit more of our neighbour’s recently acquired bargains: a shiny new barbecue, a blow-up kids’ pool (now deflated) and a crashed drone lolling on the highest branch of a tree.

Brooke comes over and wraps her arms around me, her old woollen jumper scratching at my upper arms. She peers over me, leaning her chin on my head. ‘Looks like a good dog,’ she comments …

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Rigel and Betelgeuse – by A E Macleod
Fiction A E Macleod Fiction A E Macleod

Rigel and Betelgeuse – by A E Macleod

R looks at their ball of thread on the floor. They are never sure when they pull the first thread where it is coming from. Is the beginning really blissfully unaware of the end? … R has been marking their movements with thread for years to thwart the loss of time; letting it out, taking it in. R is not sure who recommended this …

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Get Joy from GetJoy – by Alex Cothren
Fiction Alex Cothren Fiction Alex Cothren

Get Joy from GetJoy – by Alex Cothren

Your neighbours all have one. Your work colleagues never talk about anything else. Celebrities, star athletes and even the Pope have gotten in on the action. Yep, it’s official: GetJoy fever is sweeping the globe! But while obtaining your very own GetJoy is just a click away, being a host with the most can be trickier business. So, if you find your jubilation turning to frustration, more despondency than joie de vivre, well we’re here to help with our top tips to get joy from GetJoy …

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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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Living Poets – by Jessica Lim
Nonfiction Jessica Lim Nonfiction Jessica Lim

Living Poets – by Jessica Lim

Recently I read Virginia Woolf’s 1929 classic A Room of One’s Own while my daughter slept off her adenotonsillectomy overnight in hospital … Of course the limitations of Woolf’s common sitting-room with all its openness and interruptions would naturally resonate. The sureness of her message, I suppose, had accounted for the lack of any real urgency on my part to read it – a 100-year-old truth will still be true tomorrow …

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An Open Space – by Luke Johnson
Nonfiction Luke Johnson Nonfiction Luke Johnson

An Open Space – by Luke Johnson

… To become a part-time firefighter, you have to make it through two weeks of intense training … If you do not want to know what they tell you at firefighter training concerning housefires and deceased children, then you should stop reading here. Because this is not a work of fiction …

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A Shadow From Country – by Naomi Parry
Nonfiction Naomi Parry Nonfiction Naomi Parry

A Shadow From Country – by Naomi Parry

SHORTLISTED, ISLAND NONFICTION PRIZE 2021

… I’ve been researching the Gai-mariagal warrior Musquito since 2003 and today we are looking for a name list that I have heard about, which is supposed to tell a story of the time he was exiled from Sydney to Norfolk Island. We go through indexes and bibliographies and footnotes without finding anything. Then Melissa flicks through the computer catalogue and pulls up an image. It’s a seraphic face, illuminated in the computer’s glow.
Who is this?
It’s Black Jack. It’s his death mask.

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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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No Tomorrow – by Catherine Deery
Fiction Catherine Deery Fiction Catherine Deery

No Tomorrow – by Catherine Deery

On the day Josephine our sow escapes her pen and trots off across the flat paddocks in search of love, Timmy from town is at ours and me and him are trying to hurdle the creek on our BMXs using empty drench drums and sleepers stolen from Mum’s garden as a ramp. When Mum gets the call from old Mr Taylor on the farm next door about that goddamn pig rooting around in his house garden again, she puts her hand over the receiver and sticks her head out the back door and clocks the sleepers and drums and me and Timmy and the BMXs in one sharp eyeful but doesn’t say anything, just beckons me over and makes the shape JOSEPHINE with her mouth then TAYLOR’S, so I know it’s bad …

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The Great Aviary of Love – by Kathryn Goldie
Fiction Kathryn Goldie Fiction Kathryn Goldie

The Great Aviary of Love – by Kathryn Goldie

MYTH - We fell in love at the Phoenix, a dingy pub opposite a bus stop. We joked about the graffiti in the toilets. She wanted to know everything about me. She put her hand on my leg.

REALITY - She has my toucan wind chime, the one I bought with my good ex. My good ex haggled it down from $15 to $12.50. Now the toucan perches silently on her balcony, watching me with its wooden eye. It has watched my every move for more than a year. She was supposed to be just minding it …

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New Nature Writing Collection

The next six pieces are the second cycle of work from our Australian Nature Writing Project.

The pieces were selected by Ben Walter, who also initiated the project. This is what Ben had to say about this set of works.

I love wandering through ridiculous offtrack terrain in the mountains of Tasmania, but with three young kids, I find it can be pretty hard to get away. I’d love to say that reading nature writing serves as a substitute – that it totally compensates for the direct experience – and perhaps it does to a degree …

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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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Moss – by Jane Rawson
Fiction Jane Rawson Fiction Jane Rawson

Moss – by Jane Rawson

… She remembered it cold and damp. She remembered it dark and green. Her first days in a nest beneath the snow, then those brief, bright moments before she stretched new limbs and took cover in a close, green cavern. A life of icy winds, sleet that pricked her skin into life. / Then David’s hands around her his lips on her damp breathing skin and now every day is hot and dry …

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