The Saturday Paper

We are standing in a powerful, proud line and the photographer has his thumb up. We look strong, possibly too strong – is he intimidated into offering the thumb? No, we’re not to be messed with – we have our fists up!

The Kenyon Review

Nerrida had already fired her brother and mother – returning home at the end of an exhausting day, she’d find them slumped in the living room, barely bothering to keep up the glares they’d summoned when their sackings were fresh

3:AM Magazine

I am sitting in a net and yet the fish are biting me. My mailbox is stuffed with letters made from knives; needles and nails are baked into my bread. I have been followed from my workplace, from my laundry, from my bed. I don’t go out. When I do go out, I don’t go in.

The Saturday Paper

We just wanted to make the world a better place! “Light for all” – as much as you’ll ever need. More than enough time to get outside, buy a carton of milk, see where you are going.

Island/Lithub

“Can we keep him?” I asked. “Look at him run!” He was bounding up the hills, fetching sticks to burn and lapping up pools of water in grass and trees, in the bodies of possums and roos.

Overland

They are clouds or they are leaves. They hang in bunches over my head and the leaves rain down and the grass is green and wet with them.

The Saturday Paper

Tonight we’ll bring the President caviar. The President loves caviar. We’ve seen him slap it on his toast, swirl it in his soup and lubricate the O rings on his glistening limousine.

New Australian Fiction

‘Our peaks are filled with metal. Now our lakes are catching up.’ The slogan for our Experience is painted over the gate and I like to hum it on my way to work on the lake.

Overland

We are all Superman. It’s great! When the world needs saving we zip to a phone box and get changed into our tights and capes as quickly as we can.

The Saturday Paper

The guards come round at 9am to make sure we’re packing up. Sleeping bags, tarps, whatever we’ve scrounged, it all goes together in the bags and trolleys, then we heave it out of the stadium and find a place to crash for the day.

Meanjin

When you step into the grey boat it bows to the applauding waves and nods to those retreating and then it settles on its stage, poised to break into another round of curtain calls as the wind from the south hurls petals of spray.

Overland

The first door is split directly from the centre of a swamp gum and is blocking up its home, swaddled in the bush.

The Saturday Paper/Dark Mountain

Look, a dead great-uncle. He is staring straight ahead through a black-and-white film as his boat carves through the waves. He is standing on a beach all scratched up and flickering.

Overland

Where no farmers had ploughed the trees or settled seeds to graze the soil, where the folded arms of scrub bar gullies, where the wide buttongrass plains swelter under peaks of old quartz…

The Saturday Paper

The wind is trying to kill us. Here in the loose forest that has been shaken and then shaken again, so that trees and bushes and rocks have fallen down the back of the slope’s couch and vanished…

Meanjin

‘Crotty!’ I had yelled. ‘It’s back!’ Rushing home, I started heaving raw supplies into the back of the car while Suzy hugged her belly in the driveway.

Overland

I called her in the middle of the night and waited for her to answer with no voice at all, with a voice that I didn’t know and hadn’t heard in years, with a voice from a phone book or a gentle collision in the street…

Kill Your Darlings

It’s then that I lose heart. My mind trickles to a stop at the bottom of a hill. While staring at nothing at all on the ground with downcast half-eyes, I sneak glimpses of the small aeroplane turning on its heel and strolling across the field, drawing momentum up through blades of shaved grass.

Griffith Review

We’re running out of time; paving the streets with our striding feet, packs pounding our hips, back and forth. A set of glaring traffic lights; the roar of fallen timber, a log truck gearing down the hill. Sacks of oats, potatoes, sleeping on the footpaths.

The Saturday Paper

They let us ride the deer. That’s the best part. The worst part is the deer trashing everything they can bite or stomp their feet on, but the best part is riding the deer.