Island
Once, I was walking on a ridge and lightning was sparkling peaks to the east and the west, while a white spear of cloud hurtled straight for us…

Island
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,

ABC

When my first son was younger, he would sing a repeating tune: “When Daddy disappears, I get sad sometimes. When Daddy disappears, I get sad sometimes …” Sitting at my desk, I felt terrible — I desperately wanted to be a good father, but it also seemed important to maintain a creative practice.

Guardian Australia

Some years ago, I wrote about the terrible repercussions that would follow if the literary magazine Island were forced to close following its defunding by the Tasmanian state government’s arts funding body. I argued that there would be significant impacts for readers and writers throughout the nation.

Island (Walkley Winner, Feature Writing)

The first fish I catch as a child is a flathead. I’m leaning over the side of the boat with my red toy fishing rod, mind drifting wherever a tiny mind does, when I notice a fish at the end of the white string line. Confused, I turn to my dad. ‘Is that … the bait?’ I ask, before seeing that it is a real, actual flathead, and I have somehow caught it.

Guardian Australia

Earlier this year, I finally climbed Mount Anne. This has taken an unlikely amount of time – I’ve been climbing Tasmanian mountains for years, but had never been up one of the island’s signature summits.

ABC

Recently, I found myself messing around with PVC pipe. I’m not particularly competent when it comes to do-it-yourself — wards of emergency departments are full of people like me — but I do my best, and try to learn. But this time, I wasn’t trying to fix a downpipe or reroute some plumbing.

ABC

For the last couple of years, I’ve been trying to buy a walnut tree. For a long time, I thought this would be impossible. It wasn’t the expense; my savings could stretch that far. The issue was finding a spot.

Meanjin

We left the track a fair while ago, or perhaps it left us. By the time we had circled the Blue Peaks (two hilly lumps that were neither peaks nor particularly blue) and began to roll down the slope towards Middle Lake, it had thrown up its hands and left us to the alpine moors.

Griffith Review/The Best Australian Nature Writing

The green hump of Mount Foster is a gap on my map. Right now, I’m filling in gaps by climbing mountains like this. I know that sounds a little detached, maybe even cold, but over the past eight years I’ve been busy with three young children, so walks have been rare.

Meanjin

The way we find out about Graham reflects the changing decades—there’s a Facebook post by his partner. My wife calls me into our bedroom. The post is ambiguous, but it has us worried. Later in the evening our worst fears are confirmed. A heart attack, just like Dombrovskis—but not in the bush. It’s Good Friday, which is a conspicuous date for memorialising. I don’t know whether this is good or bad.

Meanjin/Guardian Australia/The Best Australian Science Writing

We’re driving up from the Rapid River, a beer-coloured tumult capped with froth and busy with rain; huge myrtles the size of eucalypts were camped on one bank and the blackwood was just coming into yellow wattle-flower, an unexpected sunshine in the dim wet green…

Overland

A few years ago I was discussing the Vogel Award with former Island editor Matthew Lamb; he was describing the relief he remembered feeling at inching past the age of thirty-five and no longer being eligible to enter.

Overland
Discourses of privilege are widespread in Australian literary circles, but this rarely extends to simple, old-fashioned geography. I find this surprising.

Island/KTW Journal

I remember my first trip to Cape Raoul some years ago. It had been a long time coming. There’s a small canon of walks that local bushwalkers hope to stride before their knees give out completely, from short hikes on Mount Wellington all the way through to multi-day hikes like the South Coast Track or the Western Arthurs. Like any canon, it expands as you experience it further.