RECENT WORK
Outside, Mona Lisa, an essay in Griffith Review.
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. The gaps in my map have been staring at me. Perhaps travellers stuck at home through the pandemic have felt something like this – the call of the named unknown.
One Deer Running, a short story in 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. When the new deer-mates get here they don’t believe it. They’re feeding, watering and mucking out the shit but the perks are unbelievable…
Driftbones, a poem in Poetry Ireland Review (print)
we splintered, empty threads of ships,
press-ganged by wind to service,
cloudbones bowing worship….
SELECTED WORK, ORDERED BY PUBLICATION
Antipodes
- Issue 33:2: “Stump Psalm” (Poem).
- Issue 33:1: “We May Warm Ourselves” (fiction).
Australian Book Review
- Five poems in States of Poetry 2: Tasmania.
Australian Poetry Journal
- Issue 8.2: “Rocky Whelan’s Cave” (poem).
Award Winning Australian Writing
- 2015: “The Face of the Derwent” (short story).
Best Australian Science Writing
- 2018: “Speak for the Trees” (essay).
Best Summer Stories (Black Inc, 2018)
- “Unbury Me” (fiction).
The Big Issue
- Issue 605: “To Bee or Not to Bee” (Essay).
- Issue 593, 2019 Fiction Edition: “The Slide” (Fiction).
The Canary Press
- Issue 4: “Smooth Green Skin” (prose poem).
The Canberra Times
- March 11 2023: “Tanina Bluff” (poem).
- June 19 2021: “There is Always More Than One Canopy” (poem).
The Centre for Stories
- “The Quietness of Giving Up Writing” (essay).
Chart Collective
- “Step and Then Step” (nature writing).
Cordite Poetry Review
- “South” (poem).
- “The Tall Man” (poem).
- “My Dad and I Are Discussing His Olympic Career” (Flash fiction).
- “The Land as Breath” (essay).
- “Mt Frederick” (poem).
- “Pale and Cold” (prose poem).
- “Another Story” (poem).
- “This Wealth of When” (poem).
Dark Mountain (UK)
- Issue 20: “For The Perishable Body” (experimental nature prose).
Griffith Review
- “The Bridge” (fiction).
- “Outside, Mona Lisa” (essay).
The Guardian
- . “Speak for the Trees” (essay extract).
Island
- Issue 158: “Beast Evolving” (experimental nature prose).
- Issue 156: “Hidden in the Bush: In Search of Australian Nature Writing” (essay).
- Issue 153: “The Loyalist” (poem).
- Issue 153: “Unbury Me” (fiction).
- Issue 150: “Sedgeland Nation” (poem).
- Issue 147: “Landscape within Landscapes” (fiction).
- Issue 138: “An Anti-Glacier Book” (fiction).
- Issue 133: “The Battlements of Raoul” (essay).
- Issue 130: “The Angels” (fiction).
Kill Your Darlings
- Issue 17: “The Lake” (fiction).
The Lifted Brow
- Issue 34: “Jackpot” (flash fiction).
- Issue 18: “A Field Guide to the Huts of Mt. Wellington: 1913″ (fiction).
Lithub (US)
- “Beast Evolving” (fiction).
Mascara Literary Review
- Issue 16: “Winding the Land” (fiction).
Meanjin
- “Whispering Road” (essay).
- “Tempting the Pest” (experimental nature prose).
- “An Irrelevant State” (essay).
- “Atlantis Minor” (experimental nature prose).
- “What I’m Reading” (essay).
- “Flathead Out One Day” (fiction).
- “Cladding Sentiment” (poem).
- “Speak for the Trees” (essay).
- “Days of Yielding” (fiction).
New Australian Fiction
- 2021: “Flash and Glow” (fiction).
Overland
- “The Oysters Roar” (poem)
- “The Economist” (fiction).
- “On the Defunding of Island Magazine” (essay).
- “The Myth of the Vogel” (essay).
- “We Are All Superman” (fiction).
- “You Can be a Successful Writer, But Only if You Live in Melbourne or Sydney” (essay).
- “All Hollows” (fiction).
- “It’s All Happening Here” (fiction – also produced for Radio National).
- “Hymns” (poem).
- “What Fear Was” (fiction).
Phase Change (Tenth Planet Press, 2022)
- “The Switch” (fiction).
Plumwood Mountain
- Issue 7.1: “Orchidacean Footholds” (poetry).
Poetry Ireland Review
- “Driftbones” (poetry).
Review of Australian Fiction
- “The Eradication Program” (fiction).
- “Algae” (fiction).
The Saturday Paper
- “Platinum Reserve” (short story).
- “One Deer Running” (short story).
- “The Wind is Trying to Kill Us” (experimental nature writing).
- “For the Perishable Body” (experimental nature writing).
Southerly
- Issue: 77.2: “Mt Styx” (poem).
- Issue 76.1: “Intertextual Reservations” (poem).
- “Pads” (Poem: Long Paddock).
- Issue 74.1: “Joseph Hooker’s Hands” (poem).
Westerly
- Issue 60.1: “Timing the River” (fiction).
Contact me:
e. hello@ben-walter.com