Collection of collections – by Meredith Jelbart
Nonfiction Meredith Jelbart Nonfiction Meredith Jelbart

Collection of collections – by Meredith Jelbart

The lady’s hand muff in the folk museum is made of fruit bats. The fur is sleek and glittering jet black. Each body is arranged beside the next, head to toe, toe to head, so that the tiny faces form a decorative scallop at either edge of the thing, a little like crochet. Beside the glass case with the fruit bats is a dressmaker’s dummy displaying a long white dress of simple cotton, trimmed with blue ribbon. A handwritten card pinned to the bodice explains that this dress was worn by Miss Dianne Collins to the Wentworth debutant ball in 1936.

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We Were Here – by Sarah Firth
Nonfiction, Arts Features Sarah Firth Nonfiction, Arts Features Sarah Firth

We Were Here – by Sarah Firth

I’m in Canberra, on Ngunnawal country, at my childhood home helping to sort through stuff accumulated over a lifetime. My parents have sold the house after 45 years to move into a smaller townhouse with room for a carer when needed. It’s the end of an era. There is so much to process. And I’m trying to get some sort of closure.

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Thrift – by Catherine Zhou
Nonfiction Catherine Zhou Nonfiction Catherine Zhou

Thrift – by Catherine Zhou

Departing, I lug a chair across a highway and the volunteer thanks me for my donation. I choose not to tell them about the missing screw. We’ll just take this into the back, they say. The curtains close and the thing is no more. Arriving, there are no walls. Baroque lanterns hang from metal frames. We’ve received a lot of guitars recently, he says. Do you play? The guitars are black and electric. A bookshelf curves around a field of children’s toys. It’s important to have no expectations here or you’ll be let down, so scour the spines. Find a book in Italian. Think, I could learn Italian if I tried.

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Dear life – by Susan Francis
Fiction Susan Francis Fiction Susan Francis

Dear life – by Susan Francis

For one hundred days we lived inside my father’s house. We lived in near silence, neither of us inclined towards cramming still space with pointless chatter. We lived with the kind of mortification that makes the sweat stick your hair to your forehead, a mortification that every morning – after I stripped him of his green-striped flannelette pyjamas – arranged us into unpleasant and painful configurations. My father’s dry, sandpapered arms, reaching childlike, straight above his head. Veins distending from his neck, the exposed roots of an ancient tree trunk.

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Bog bodies: Iron Age dreamland – by Lucinda Lagos
Nonfiction Lucinda Lagos Nonfiction Lucinda Lagos

Bog bodies: Iron Age dreamland – by Lucinda Lagos

I would like to share a recurring dream. I am wandering through a picturesque northern European marshland when I stop and drop to the ground with an overwhelming sense of purpose. I begin digging with vigour, the way you do in dreams, knowing that your actions are essential. Dream knowledge is its own canon; the implicit information I possess in a dream is unquestionable even upon waking. I find that every time I re-enter this familiar yet extraordinary dreamland, I am unphased by any strangeness, the dream and I being old acquaintances. In fact, I find the irresistible urge to dig comforting.

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Refuse – by Hei Gou
Fiction Hei Gou Fiction Hei Gou

Refuse – by Hei Gou

The detritus of our civilisation preceded us: children’s dolls, an empty toolbox, shards of coloured glass: we found them in the camp’s smouldering firepit, charred and singed but not wholly burned: objects acquired through trade with other tribes, with whom we’d already made contact: we speculated that they’d been submitted to the flames as part of a ritual, perhaps to exorcise foul spirits, but our native guide claimed they’d been jettisoned because they were useless and burned to remove the tribe’s scent, which hunters – he didn’t have to add like us - might try to exploit.

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Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me – by Xiaole Zhan
Nonfiction Xiaole Zhan Nonfiction Xiaole Zhan

Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me – by Xiaole Zhan

I’ve had a recurring scene scorched in my mind since mid-winter 2020. I’m unsure whether the image emerged from a dream or if it grew from someplace in the dark wet of my brain like a tumour. The scene is of two people, each wearing a surgical mask. They have some kind of intimate relationship that cannot be entirely discerned, only there is a power imbalance – this is for sure – and while they attempt to speak to one another through their masks, the figure with less power suffers a nosebleed which slowly seeps through the blue cloth like a Rorschach moth.

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bodytruth – by Orlando Silver
Fiction Orlando Silver Fiction Orlando Silver

bodytruth – by Orlando Silver

My therapist says, why not try finding ordinary love // less like an avalanche

I want to say, why not try shutting the fuck up // but instead I say, yes, I guess love can be that way but where’s the power in that, the majesty, the learning // where’s the bonfire of wonderment // where’s the story of carnage and release and healing

I know everything about love leads to loss // but it’s the price I paid

Even though // I knew // I would never recover from you

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Lux – by Linden Hyatt
Fiction Linden Hyatt Fiction Linden Hyatt

Lux – by Linden Hyatt

The last rays of daylight pulse in cloud as a memory of sun, faintly lighting turrets and flutes of silvered dolerite, turning rock to castles, which, to the seven-year-old gazing skyward seem as if they are falling. She reaches for her father’s hand to steady herself, but, distracted, he doesn’t take it. Nightfall will soon come, with colder air in grounded cloud, and devils and possums will snarl in hunger out there, but now in this clear space, watched by his daughter, with a little old camera from his boyhood, he tries to capture an elusive light.

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Gristle and bone – by Jade Doyle
Fiction Jade Doyle Fiction Jade Doyle

Gristle and bone – by Jade Doyle

Here is how Jack’s story begins: once upon a time there suffered a family of four. They lived in an old weatherboard house with floorboards that creaked and a tin roof that sounded like gunfire in the pressing heat. The ever-stretching landscape was doused in red dirt and brown grass, the earth cracked and veined. And perhaps you’ve heard all of this before, a child’s life turned to darkness before the age of 15, but here it is again in the shape of a father with a failing cattle business, a large man who finds ghosts and fists in the bottom of brown bottles; the shape of a mother turned quiet and rake-like by a bellowing voice; the shape of a baby sister, cause of death undetermined.

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Kevin – by Sarah Langfield
Fiction Sarah Langfield Fiction Sarah Langfield

Kevin – by Sarah Langfield

Eulogies are exceptionally difficult to write.

They aren’t like narratives, with fanciful characters that only exist in Times New Roman (sometimes Calibri, never Courier). Stories are easier. So, when tasked with writing a eulogy, I wrote a story instead.

This one.

It isn’t very good.

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Laptop death – by David Thomas Henry Wright
Nonfiction David Thomas Henry Wright Nonfiction David Thomas Henry Wright

Laptop death – by David Thomas Henry Wright

I carry the silver block tenderly, like a sick infant. I carry it onto the bus, onto the subway, across town, to the imposing glass temple. It is a characteristic of major cities of the 21st century. If your city has one, your city matters; if it doesn’t, you don’t. I am talking, of course, about the Apple Store.

Upon entering I am greeted with warmth. I inform, ‘Yesterday, my computer crashed. I can restart it, but I can’t log in. It just freezes.’ My host realises I will not be buying anything today. Warmth swiftly turns to disappointment masquerading as concern. He informs, ‘We are at capacity. Would you like to book a time for another day?’ I plead, pray, beg that I be seen today. It is a matter of utmost importance. ‘No, it is not possible,’ my host replies. The Apple Store, it seems, has no emergency room.

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Start where you are – by Jenny Sinclair
Fiction Jenny Sinclair Fiction Jenny Sinclair

Start where you are – by Jenny Sinclair

Start where you are, Uncle Vance says. Said.

The which I never, you know, got before, even though I’d heard it seven thousand, nine hundred and fifty-two times.

Start where you are, he said, when I had to change schools that time because of nothing I did wrong. It was Luke and his fighting, but Mum couldn’t do two schools in opposite directions, could she? So I started – all over again.

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The goose of granite islands – by Suyanti Winoto-Lewin
Nonfiction Suyanti Winoto-Lewin Nonfiction Suyanti Winoto-Lewin

The goose of granite islands – by Suyanti Winoto-Lewin

Forty million years ago a great rift was opening across the remains of the supercontinent Gondwana. Australia and Antarctica had snuggled together for more than a billion years, but now they slowly cleaved apart. Ocean rushed in to sizzle over the hot, fresh scars, but the break was not clean. One band of granite, old and insistent, stretched between the parting continents. As Australia drifted north, the granite arm held fast to a corner of Antarctica, pulling a piece free and dragging it behind.

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Light hazard – by Sophie Overett
Fiction Sophie Overett Fiction Sophie Overett

Light hazard – by Sophie Overett

When he asks Miss Pris what it’s like, she tells him it’s strange. Like someone’s pulled the back of her head off and is messing about with her wiring, trying to fix a computer that was never broken in the first place. An itch turned a discomfort turned a sharp, relentless pain. A cable grabbed, yanked, and finally pulled loose – its casing peeled off to leave the tender thing inside exposed. ‘Gnarly,’ Matt replies, because it is. He dumps a bundle of weeds – nutgrass and lamb’s tongue – into one of the tubs Kevin had put out, and Miss Pris laughs. It makes the crow’s feet by her eyes stark, like corvid talons kneading in the softer flesh of her.

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If Movement Were a Language: Triptych – by Svetlana Sterlin
Poetry Svetlana Sterlin Poetry Svetlana Sterlin

If Movement Were a Language: Triptych – by Svetlana Sterlin

no one would be as fluent as us / swimmers. gliding through what we know as air

density augmented. our shoulders feel / brunt of gym tiles Dad and i flipped /

onto faded patchwork carpet. i still remember / miniature brick pattern of black

and grey. now hidden beneath those tiles / does our presence haunt them, woven

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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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