a natural sort of being – by Miriam Jones
Nonfiction Miriam Jones Nonfiction Miriam Jones

a natural sort of being – by Miriam Jones

At home we were a newborn, a toddler, a man, and a non-binary me. For three months we lived outside of normal time and normal social life. The privatised home is not known for nurturing gender improvisation. Some things known to take place within the home are the unwaged feminised labour of social reproduction, and domestic violence. But for me the parental leave bubble was a quiet place, away from the sharp and assured gender infrastructure of the outside world. 

Read More
with flowers – by Alexander Bennetts
Poetry Alex Bennetts Poetry Alex Bennetts

with flowers – by Alexander Bennetts

If you hide behind a mixed bouquet you can get out of a tram fine. You can get out of small talk when you’re hoarding grief like a bundle of paper straws. With flowers, your headshot could be a botanist’s pin-up.

Read More
An Island of Dogs – by Ronald Araña Atilano
Poetry Ronald Araña Atilano Poetry Ronald Araña Atilano

An Island of Dogs – by Ronald Araña Atilano

Everyone had left after the typhoons,
says our boatman. Only two dogs live here—

they wander aimlessly through mudflats,
along the empty beach. See them come to the water

to meet us, tails wagging as soon as boat touches sand,
eyes leaping as we disembark.

Read More
Good for nothing – by Winnie Dunn
Fiction Winnie Dunn Fiction Winnie Dunn

Good for nothing – by Winnie Dunn

Powerlines hum as heat and dusk swirl together. Gah-gah-gah go the galahs. Pick bits of twigs, grains of dirt and fragments of gum leaves out of the underside of my calves. Problems. Wipe sweat off my upper lip. Problems. Jumping at the clash of fly screen back door, I can’t help but think: No money, all problems. Shadow of an afro carrying a loaded basket floats under a rusty Hills Hoist. Sirens sound in the distance like cicadas. Flash of a red ‘overdue’ stamp searing in my mind’s eye.

Read More
Beasting – by Heather Taylor-Johnson
Nonfiction Heather Taylor-Johnson Nonfiction Heather Taylor-Johnson

Beasting – by Heather Taylor-Johnson

Frida Kahlo was broken and bedridden when she began painting. A trolley-car had crashed into her bus and she was speared by an iron handrail, puncturing her abdomen and uterus. Her spinal column was wrecked, her collarbone, ribs and pelvis a disaster, and she had eleven fractures in one leg, already shrunken from childhood polio. Frida’s mother had given her plaster-casted, immobile daughter a lap easel and hung a mirror from the bed’s canopy so that the eighteen-year-old might paint her own face to pass the many painful hours. Mí amor pequeña, Frida’s mother might have thought while looking down on her daughter, bandaged and bondaged, unaware of the fierce and revolutionary paintings that lay ahead: My little love.

Read More
The Burial Feathers – by Yasmin Smith
Poetry Yasmin Smith Poetry Yasmin Smith

The Burial Feathers – by Yasmin Smith

WINNER OF THE GWEN HARWOOD POETRY PRIZE 2024

The afternoon’s powerlines are pebbled

with the chalky plumage of white cockatoos,

tipped with overblown flaxen feathers.

In the afternoon’s unfixed light,

I am reminded of the funeral parlour.

Read More
Lateral ambling gait – by Emilie Collyer
Poetry Emilie Collyer Poetry Emilie Collyer

Lateral ambling gait – by Emilie Collyer

RUNNER-UP, GWEN HARWOOD POETRY PRIZE 2024

Square grey city apartment
Hindley Street Adelaide
with my siblings & mother
for a family funeral.

My bone density report
shows further deterioration
AP spine Osteopenia
& I’m losing height.

Read More
and – by Helen Jarvis
Poetry Helen Jarvis Poetry Helen Jarvis

and – by Helen Jarvis

RUNNER-UP, GWEN HARWOOD POETRY PRIZE 2024

today I drove into a rainbow, its half-arch

picked clean and landing in the rubble beside

the new McDonald’s, and the wet road shone in my wake

Read More
Myer is Our Store – by Gillian Hagenus
Fiction Gillian Hagenus Fiction Gillian Hagenus

Myer is Our Store – by Gillian Hagenus

They call it the long sleep. But it felt more like a micro-nap. Like closing your eyes for a second on a long stretch of highway in the flattest part of the bush, wondering, was it a second, or hours? Wondering, how long would your body autopilot the car in a straight line before your hands slipped off the wheel? That’s what it felt like. Though that’s not how we died. Not all of us.

We woke up in a Myer. Not all of us, just some. We couldn’t fathom how the selection process worked.

Read More
Grass, willow, skin – by Ben Walter
Nonfiction Ben Walter Nonfiction Ben Walter

Grass, willow, skin – by Ben Walter

The wind is blowing off the dead of the river and every gust is hollowing out my body. Even though it's summer and the evenings are spending all the light they've been saving up through the year, it's freezing cold – I am eleven years old and there is nothing to me, my arms and legs are an arrangement of twigs, and the creeping ice is threatening to snap my body into pieces. The sense of arctic nakedness, of shivering in the outfield of a skewed oval, is all pervasive…

Read More
Generation optimisation – by EL Weber
Fiction EL Weber Fiction EL Weber

Generation optimisation – by EL Weber

Camille shivers, exposed. A sterile overhead light buzzes and sends spots into her left eye. Faces peer down to examine her, but it’s the older man with hard eyes and a grim mouth she knows she should focus on. The trouble is she can’t quite place him. Murmurs simmer around her as he leans in. Her heart rate jumps, hands scrabble, splay out and touch something coarse and synthetic. It’s carpet, worn thin from years of overuse; she’s on the floor, in her classroom. She’s blacked out again. Fainted, shutdown, collapsed, experienced an unexpected power loss – whatever you want to call it.

Read More
Bunya: Axis limen – by Justin Russell
Nonfiction Justin Russell Nonfiction Justin Russell

Bunya: Axis limen – by Justin Russell

It’s not every day that you get to plant a living fossil. On this day I am, and with early spring sunshine warming my bare arms I plod up the hill like a pilgrim preparing to perform a hallowed act. I’m pushing a wheelbarrow filled with a roughly assembled planting kit: my favourite long handled spade, native plant fertiliser, seaweed solution, clear plastic tree guards, bamboo stakes, a club hammer, a galvanised watering can and a bunya pine seedling.

Read More
Washing my mother’s hair – by Helen Jarvis
Poetry Helen Jarvis Poetry Helen Jarvis

Washing my mother’s hair – by Helen Jarvis

My mother bends her head over the basin. Her skull is frail
as a scrap of bird’s egg, and I cover the tap with my hand to cushion it.
Hair spreads out red in the water: the red that was once the shade
of the carp in old Japanese woodblocks; the red that skipped me

Read More
The water’s edge – by Craig White
Nonfiction Craig White Nonfiction Craig White

The water’s edge – by Craig White

Last summer, at Cooee Beach in Tasmania’s north-west, a father drowned while swimming with his children. At Johnson Rock near Currie on King Island, a 43-year-old male tourist drowned while diving with friends when he ‘encountered difficulties in the water’. At White Beach on the Tasman Peninsula, a 36-year-old man drowned while diving for scallops with his mates despite ‘extensive CPR by first responders’.

Read More 
Archive