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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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…

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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.

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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.

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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

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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’.

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Afterbirth – by Payton Hogan
Fiction Payton Hogan Fiction Payton Hogan

Afterbirth – by Payton Hogan

It comes out writhing and smelling like meat. It abuses the midwives with its surprisingly strong fists, fighting against the ejection.

I know, I know, we all coo to it.

Our nostrils widen to capture more of that pure animal stench. I lean towards the baby, inhaling greedily of the odour. A familiar pang of jealousy and mourning strikes me momentarily senseless. I've turned the scissors around in my hand, the points facing my own skin. The other midwife is busy, but the anaesthetist recaptures my attention, brings me back to the present.

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Brackish tongue – by Roanna McClelland
Nonfiction Roanna McClelland Nonfiction Roanna McClelland

Brackish tongue – by Roanna McClelland

I write the first line of a poem: ‘I thought the river might heal me, but she is brackish on my tongue’.

And I wonder what story I am trying to tell when I use rivers in my work. A wonderful academic tells me water is my ‘medium’ and even as I am flattered, part of me squirms. To what end? What am I trying to express when I speak with and through rivers and nature? Do I really think I can bend and shape something as slippery as water to tell my stories?

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The only fish – by Ben Walter
Nonfiction Ben Walter Nonfiction Ben Walter

The only fish – by Ben Walter

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.

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