The 2025 Jolley Prize

This year’s ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize attracted 1275 entries. There was a strong representation from Australia though Jolley continues to grow in international stature, with entries coming from thirty-five countries. The Jolley Prize is one of the world’s most lucrative prizes for an unpublished story in English.

Our three judges – Julie Janson (NSW), John Kinsella (WA), and Maria Takolander (Vic.) – longlisted eleven stories, as listed on our website. ABR congratulates the longlisted authors and thanks them for helping to create a field which the judges have described as one of the strongest they have encountered in any prize.

Just after midnight on 6 August 1945, twelve United States military personnel on Tinian Island in the north-western Pacific Ocean had an early breakfast of eggs, sausages, and pineapple fritters. After prayers with a Lutheran chaplain, they boarded a Boeing B-29 Superfortress heavy bomber for a six-hour flight to Japan. Each carried a pistol, and their commander secretly carried a metal box holding twelve cyanide capsules, for use in case of capture. Their aircraft carried a nuclear bomb which would soon be dropped on Hiroshima, a city in the west of Honshu, Japan’s largest island. Accompanying them was a second bomber carrying instrumentation to measure the blast effects, and a third carrying photography equipment. Weather reconnaissance aircraft had departed earlier, to ensure conditions were suitable for the attack.

As Mark Twain tells the story in Following the Equator (1897), Cecil Rhodes, the future magnate and politician, was down and out in Sydney in 1870. Wandering along a harbour beach, he stopped to help a fisherman land and gut a shark – in whose stomach cavity he discovered a fragment of newsprint that, days in advance of sailing ships carrying the same papers, announced the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War. Galvanised by this intelligence, Rhodes convinced a local wool broker to lend him the money to buy up much of that year’s Australian woolclip, a purchase that helped the future poster boy of Empire get back in the game.

It is common today for historians to describe what they do as telling stories about the lives and events of the past, using the narrative techniques that they share with fiction writers: describing place, weather, clothes, the set of a leading character’s chin, and so on. But as a disciplined, evidence-based enquiry, history writing is also about argument and interpretation.

When American Verena Koehler and Russian Zinaida Duvankova swapped recipes for Mexican-style beef and piroshki in the early 1950s, it didn’t seem that either were aiming to spark a political discussion. The pen pals were curious about each other’s food and lives, and the everyday differences between the United States and the Soviet Union. Yet they soon saw similarities. Koehler remarked on a woman’s need for simple, fast recipes when she both works and carries out domestic labour at home. Duvankova agreed – even as a Soviet state official, she completed a full day at work and returned home to all of the housework. As she wrote to Koehler, ‘You are a woman, and can well understand what it means to attend to a family of three.’

It is a remarkable fact that our political leaders’ dogged pursuit of ‘national security’ through the United States alliance and the costly and controversial AUKUS agreement seems to be making Australians feel rather more insecure, indeed downright anxious, feelings exacerbated by the elevation of the mercurial Donald Trump to a second term as US president. 

The proposed abolition of the Australian National Dictionary Centre represents a significant retreat from the Australian National University’s long-standing commitment to supporting a national public culture. This should alarm all of us, not least the Australian taxpayer who contributes $220 million a year – received by no other Australian university – so that the ANU can conduct significant research ‘supporting the development of Australia’s national unity and identity, including by improving Australia’s understanding of itself and the history and culture of its Indigenous peoples, its Asia-Pacific neighbours, and its place in the international community’. 

In literary careers, straightforward narrative arcs are less the rule than the exception. A writer can begin with a resounding debut, only to stumble at what in the music business is called the ‘difficult second album’. Authors can change genres and audiences; fail at achieving significant sales figures; succumb to hostile reviews, or simple indifference. Miles Franklin expressed it best in her novel title My Career Goes Bung (1946).

Ron Chernow is a renowned journalist and bestselling biographer, whose best-known work is probably Alexander Hamilton (2004), the main inspiration for Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton: An American musical (2015). Chernow’s latest book joins several acclaimed biographies of Mark Twain that have appeared in recent decades, including Gary Scharnhorst’s three-volume Life (2018, 2019, and 2022). The complete Autobiography of Mark Twain, also in three volumes, was published in 2010, 2013, and 2015. Twain dictated much of this to Albert Bigelow Paine, his authorised biographer and literary executor. As Chernow reflects, ‘The challenge for Paine, as for all future Twain biographers, was that Twain was peerless at bending the truth.’

The subject of this fine biography was my Doktorvater or postgraduate supervisor. He hailed from York, ancient capital of England’s northern counties. So did my biological father, Wilfred Prest (1907-1985). Both won university scholarships to study history. But their family backgrounds and life trajectories were very different.

New Zealand/Aotearoa is a small country, with a population of roughly five million people, but as former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern enthuses in her memoir A Different Kind of Power, it regularly punches above its weight. Not that she is one to toot her own horn, at least in an obvious fashion, but let’s take her prime ministership as a vivid case in point.

Edward Said, who passed away in 2003, is often hailed as one of the last public intellectuals, a literary scholar whose advocacy for Palestine took him beyond the narrow confines of academia and into the media spotlight. With the humanities in perpetual crisis and a culture of anti-intellectualism taking hold, it has been suggested that it is no longer possible for an academic to attain the same level of recognition and cultural influence that Said did. While this may explain the waning influence of critical theory, Viet Thanh Nguyen has demonstrated that intellectuals still have an important role to play in the public sphere. Like Said, Nguyen is a well-respected and prominent literary scholar. Nguyen’s cultural status, however, has arisen through his creative work; his début novel, The Sympathiser (2015), won the Pulitzer Prize and was adapted for a high-profile HBO limited series that screened in 2024. Nguyen has been the recipient of a prestigious MacArthur Foundation grant, starred in photo shoots with the actress Sandra Oh, and been profiled in the pages of Vanity Fair. Suave, eloquent, and willing to embrace Hollywood, Nguyen is a media savvy intellectual ready-made for today’s fast paced digital climate. In recent years, he has become an important voice of the Vietnamese diaspora.

With more than two decades of experience in interviewing at SBS and the ABC, Kumi Taguchi knows how to craft a person’s story and build a reader’s sympathy. The Good Daughter, her first book, is a memoir. Here she looks inward, transferring these interviewing skills to herself as the subject.

Every now and then, a truly profound book appears on a profoundly important subject. Mark Lilla’s Ignorance and Bliss is one such book.

Lilla’s name might not be familiar to many Australian readers. The author of several scholarly works of history concerning Western political and religious thought, he is best known in the northern hemisphere as a regular contributor to TheNew York Review of Books, the New York Times and Liberties (a newish non-partisan online journal that publishes serious and controversial essays about significant issues in culture and politics). Some Australians might have read Lilla’s previous book, The Once and Future Liberal (2017), a bracing polemic about identity politics. A liberal, he is troubled by the turn taken by progressive politics in the United States.

While reading Notes to John I wondered about the words commonly associated with Joan Didion’s style – verve, discipline, precision, breathtaking diction (she is described as capturing the American 1960s and 1970s like no other writer). Notes to John, a posthumous publication of 150 pages made up of notes Didion made following a series of therapy sessions with her psychiatrist, contains clarity and acerbic wit in places, but in general is made up of writing that is dull, repetitive, and achingly private. Didion, who died in 2021, appears to acquiesce to her psychiatrist, Roger McKinnon. His interpretations of her life are often presented as clichéd banalities and Didion tussles linguistically with him without her usual cutting analysis and humour. It is as if in these notes she has given herself over to the supposedly greater power of psychiatric knowledge and in the process become less sagacious. The sessions cover grief, confusion, the indominable wish to understand more about oneself, and how to manage family traumas. But does the writing add anything to Didion’s body of work? I think not.

I came to this book with a question: how will the author select the dozen or so artists upon whom he focuses? Of all the artists in Australia and beyond, why these few? One answer is pragmatic: What Artists See is based, in part, on previously published essays, several from The Monthly, others in exhibition catalogues. Sprague’s book might be understood, then, as an assemblage of previously dispersed parts, a drawing together of discrete pieces under one title. But it is also far more than this.

By 1967, the United States was deeply mired in the war in Vietnam. In the immediate aftermath of World War II and until 1954, the Americans had supported French attempts to hold on to their colonial possessions in Indochina. When that failed, they opposed the creation of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, led by the nationalist and communist Ho Chi Minh in the north of the country, and supported the brutal corrupt regimes of Ngo Dinh Diem and subsequent leaders in the south. The United States subscribed to the so-called domino theory that allowing communism to flourish in one Southeast Asian country would inevitably lead adjacent nations to ‘fall over’ into communism.

Many Australians are unaware of the extent and severity of formalised racial segregation in the country prior to the 1967 referendum. In this meticulously researched study, Roland See examines the evolution of segregation and assimilation practices in the Western Australian wheatbelt town of York between 1924 – when the town’s Aboriginal reserve was first gazetted – and 1974, the year it was formally disestablished. Unlike in South Africa, where apartheid policies were highly centralised, in Western Australia racial segregation was often initiated and enforced at the municipal level. The state’s Aborigines Act, first enacted in 1905 and amended several times in the following decades, provided local governments with broad authority to create ‘native reserves’ and whites-only areas, enforce curfews, and regulate Indigenous people’s access to public amenities and services. Consequently, municipal councillors were particularly sensitive to the prejudices of their white electors. As See points out, although it was state legislation that enabled racial segregation and persecution of Aboriginal communities, ‘the local position was often the deciding factor in the implementation of such provisions and inhumane injustices’.

The Coalition was keen to spruik a nuclear future in Australia’s most recent federal election campaign. Conspicuous in its absence was a reckoning with Australia’s nuclear past. In Contaminated Country: Nuclear colonialism and Aboriginal resistance in Australia, environmental historian Jessica Urwin rightly puts that ugly legacy back in our minds.

Located on Yawuru Country in Rubibi (Broome), Magabala Books is one of the most remote publishers in the world. This First Nations publishing house has helped redefine Australian publishing since the 1980s by continually ensuring that Aboriginal stories and voices are in print. Since its formal establishment in 1987 – following a landmark desert meeting in 1984 and with funding from the Australian Bicentenary Authority’s National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Program and the Kimberley Aboriginal Law and Cultural Centre – Magabala has published more than 250 authors from across Australia. The press emerged in direct response to the widespread appropriation of Indigenous stories by Settler people and publishing houses and continues to define how publishing can best serve Aboriginal authors, artists, and illustrators.¹

‘Maybe narrative structures didn’t work at all in the world of nature, the real world. Story arcs, character development. Maybe that was part of the problem – our need to make everything a stupid story, to narrativise, when really all this wasn’t a “story” at all. It was something else altogether.’

So muses the character of Annie in Luke Horton’s second novel, Time Together. This new work is not structurally subversive in an overt way. This is not W.G. Sebald, and nor is it in-your-face metafictional. But it is a slow burn of a novel where characters, and their defining features – if we can in fact define these – emerge slowly, and these characters do not necessarily ‘develop’ in the sense of arriving at a reckoning or self-realisation. As in Sebald’s work, the novel explores memory and history, albeit mostly on personal rather than broad, political terms.

One of the advantages of the novel, and a major reason for its endurance into this messy century, is its elasticity. The novel’s willingness to contain a multiplicity of forms can defeat even the most radical attempts to shatter its structure. Another, perhaps contradictory advantage of the novel is its capacity for direct insight, opening a portal into another human mind at a particular time in human history.

Billing itself as a ‘gay Bildungsroman’, Thomas Vowles’s Our New Gods follows Ash, a young man with a dark past, in his move from rural Western Australia to the ultra-hip enclaves of Melbourne’s Inner North. Ash immerses himself in the city’s queer scene and soon finds himself in a viper’s nest of sexual and emotional entanglements. First up is his new friend James, a rich blond Adonis; James is in an open relationship with the volatile Raf; Raf has a connection with a troubled soul called Booth.

It would diminish this novel to describe it as ‘timely’. ‘Timeless’ is nearer the truth. The risk of a catastrophic breaking out involving Iran is a symptom of decades of tragedy, which novelist Shida Bazyar has conveyed here with a rare balance of vivid social realism and intimate introspection. The results are masterful.

Although the watershed years of 1979, 1989, 1999, and 2009 determine its structure, this novel is not a recital of Iran’s crises involving fundamentalist and liberalising forces. Rather, it depicts the personal stories of five members of a family in exile, whose entire existence is conditioned by yearning for a free Iran. Not even relocation to Germany, or the estrangement of younger generations from living memory of Iran, can erase that desire. Speaking in turn, each character – parents Behzad and Nahid, children Laleh, Mo, and Tara – narrates a fresh reckoning with political failure down the decades.

The War Within Me is the second book in Tracy Ryan’s trilogy on the Queens of Navarre, a kingdom precariously sandwiched between the powerful monarchies of France and Spain. In 1512 Navarre had lost much of its territory to Spain; its continued survival thereafter depended upon a complicated diplomatic dance with the French court. The first book in Ryan’s series followed the life of Marguerite of Angoulême, sister of François I of France, who married Henri II of Navarre in 1526. Now Ryan turns attention to their only daughter, Jeanne d’Albret, who succeeded to the throne after her father’s death in 1555.

A son doesn’t love what he’s supposed to love,
so what’s left to abandon? I have abandoned you,
failed forest, I say to the jade plant. A cube of milk
defrosts on the counter and daylight floods the room.
On my left the shine of antlers, on my right
the ghost of a brother. There is an animal
I could be, snarling outside in the snow –
it only wants to be touched, let inside and loved
like any vanishing thing. These nights, with my face
in soil, I hear crickets cry for another finger.
You obey so easily. To become balm
like buzzards over filth. To pick clean another form
of family, hold a knife to something wilder
no longer yourself. A fraction of a son
is still someone’s son, dividing into a cruel logic:
you cannot cut out the gash you left in your mother
and throw it to the wind without leaving
a larger one in its place. By now the animal outside
has gone quiet, and flies are bloating
in breastbone. Will only those who devour
be given wings? I tear leaves from the jade plant.

Phantom flutes ring in your ears, well past the finish of the music. The kind you get from a migraine or the neurotic howl of cicadas in the summer. The kind that hangs eerily at the back of your neck, a reminder of the thin veil separating real from imagined. The kind that makes your mind chase its own tail. It can’t be (but it is) but it can’t be and so on, into the silence that is not silence. Your father slides around in the back of the car. What slides around in the boot is not really your father but rather a shadow, or an echo or a remembering. Reminds you of shelling peas as a child. Pull out the orbs from between the fleshy green lips, eat the innards until the skin sinks in on itself into a hollowed husk. The body in the boot is just such a vessel, empty now that he has left, just epidermis and bones and irises that will break down into smaller compounds. Organic matter reduced to biology. And in the absence of soul, a peculiar cold sort of smell if a smell can be described like that. Metallic almost, like when you press your head to the concrete as a child and feel the vastness of the earth creep into you.

You felt him leave the room, like a lifting of something in you up and up as if you too were going with him. Like an ache or the foreshadow of an ache you cannot quite reach into yet, but know is lurking. And you know that someday, below consciousness, you’ll look around to find yourself already there, in that pocket of sorrow for which you’ve lived in waiting. Grief finds you here, without announcing arrival or departure, in the before and the after. You were born blue with it, already inseparable from your little body. And it lies sleeping nonlinearly through time, until wakened or perhaps it is you, asleep until called.

You can feel its gaze.

He is no longer here.

All this is known to you, just as you knew the CD made its final course minutes ago and yet.

You’re finding it hard to let go.

So many memories attached to the ensemble of skin in the trunk. You put another CD on for him, for you, it’s unclear. The flutes begin anew with their mournful atonement. His voice is there too, explaining simple addition and you are small again, so very small and you hear him smoking a cigarette and putting spuds on the stove and calling the dog. You learnt how to tie the laces on your shoes last week, but you pretend you forgot so he will bow down and do it for you and you will feel like a princess. There’s the sound of him being present and then the non-sound of absence, his anger his sadness his rage fuse with his love and his quiet contentment, cigars in the evening and watching the birds. You know him after a good day at work and after a bad day. You know him most in the water. At the beach, flying paper in the sky, your little hand in his. You’re on the sand watching the sun birthing backwards, up and out of the blue. You always come for sunrises together when neither of you can sleep and everyone else can. You’re in the waves, and they are big, but he is bigger. You know he loves being here, thrown around, passing over responsibility of adulthood for the ocean to carry for just a moment. For that one moment, you understand each other. As just two bodies capable of joy. You love him most here, in memory, in the freest form you will ever see him. You watch him put spuds on again, this time you’re older and the dog is even older and blind by now in a house that hasn’t been your house for years. You hear the sound of him weeping somewhere in the middle of his life, and you pretend you didn’t, flushed with embarrassment and childish panic. Somewhere toward the end you remember the same feeling of helplessness seeing him demented in the garden, naked and hunting for rats on all fours, like a dog. Memories are cruel, they are inescapable and omnipresent, and they are not separated from the present as we lead ourselves to believe. Some memories are smooth and vivid, obsolete. Others are hard to hold onto and shift in your hands just as you grasp them. Sound, non-sound. You are shivering, whether it’s the cold or the rememberings or your father in the back of the truck it’s hard to tell. And it is cold out, the kind that seeps into your bones and makes you grow backwards. Everyone around here grows backward. It’s the way it is done in small, bitter places. Hunched shoulders and crooked necks, always carrying winter on the back. An icy, inner dead sort of existence. You grew against it here, you remember it well. You haven’t been back in a while.  It’s probably what took Dad, you think to yourself. Not even the high summer can thaw a person like that. You’re still shivering, and the light is disappearing, slowly the sky drenching itself in night. You will need to stop soon. Put diesel in the tank. The town isn’t too far off. Dim-witted sheep stare at you forlornly on your journey.

The hills stretch on until, in the very far off distance, the sky meets the sea. It’s getting close to dark now. The last of the sun drowning herself in the water. You think distantly of joining her. You’ve thought about it before as you assume most people have. Not in an actualised way or with the desperate romanticism of pubescent imagination. But in the way where you’ve lived half your life to wake up one day and realise your existence is rather small, exhausting, useless. No greater meaning made itself apparent, as you – without ever putting a formed thought to it – always assumed it would. God never found you, nor you him. Even in the darkest of places where he seemed to reach out to others, you found only the abyss within yourself. And the things you filled your life with seemed equally as dreary. Just motions to go through until death decided to remove you from your shell, take you elsewhere. Deceitful almost, as they were pretending to be anything but distraction in the daunting realisation of inevitable time. So pointless everything. Your daughters, grown up and distant, had the same dissatisfactions you had with your old man although you tried so hard. You were not ready to be a mother, the way most women must realise they never will be. That moment when your body splits and something so fragile and small emerges from your very insides. And then you stepped into motherhood, this anxious state of nurture that had lurked in your belly before you ever housed a child in it. And it’s as familiar as daughterhood, has the same anxious heartbeat, always holding life and death in your very fabric.

And then there’s your sisters, to whom you exist as a reminder of a painful past. They will be fuming red hot chimney smoke from their heads by now. They aren’t particularly fond of you either. They love you, of course, the way you must love someone who grew with you in the softest of places, childhood as shared thing. But fondness implies warmth and there is none of that lost between the three of you. The way childhood ties you together also splits you at the seams; you cannot spend too much time together or it comes bubbling back up through the cracks. They will be following you when they realise you’ve taken him. There will be mayhem. They will think you all the odder, perhaps insane. Perhaps you are.

You just weren’t quite ready to say goodbye.

1. When you fall, one speaker goes with you. They’ve been daisy-chained around the house, so those on the deck get the same din that’s piped out to the stairwell, a playlist to pound your Docs to. You’re dancing with a vengeance by now, erotic stomps with industrial tread, your hips a counterweight where gravity meets velvet, fingernails raking the air. Someone has spliced in ultra-long cable, so the speaker follows you, to the bottom. But if it’s still singing when it hits, your brain has switched station.
2. The landlord who owns your flat owns more in the precinct. Not a single house in his rotten portfolio would meet code. One night, before you are a tenant, you go to a party in another of his holdings and open an internal door, to find that a whole room’s been wiped off the side of the building, like a bomb has dropped. Plaster dangles off the stumps of the gone walls. You wander, with your glass, around weed-woven carpet. Cold moonlight mixes some fairytale in your mind, involving the broke girls who live here. Half a mirrored light fitting holds out a horn. The bassline pulses the inside-out wallpaper.
3. You’re proud of your bralette, which is just black arithmetic, some evil formula expressed in lace. Fuck it, you say on the night you fall. It’s a top to sink shots to – you have to get good and cut to rock it. So you preload most of the afternoon, scorch your hair into snakes, pile on makeup that deserves applause. Practice steering around by the bodice, tilting high-speed liquor until your ribs make the attitude stick. Balconette that takes no prisoners. Each nipple an accomplice. Maybe it’s aerodynamic too. You seem to stay eerily airborne the longest and offer the hands of all the others – so many lost air-thrashing hands, falling and falling – nothing to hold onto.
4. Your flatmates are heroines, even before the fall. One of them has a room lined with offcuts of crystal, fistfuls of miniature asteroid she splits herself. She can chant the properties arising from each misty rock, talk you through a litany of healing as you stare through their splinters. Her lipstick sparkles with pseudoscience. She sips her water from a gem infused bottle, though the prehistoric pipes mean the house taps frequently cough black. Your castle is mould-glossed, rickety, flaking, but she sets up little votive clusters on each sill. Electromagnetic, they can balance any bad vibes out. When your landlord hikes the rent, and hikes it again, she passes round jasper, for empowerment.
5. When you take another flatmate in to plan for her possible abortion, she clutches bloodstone on the walk to the clinic. The two of you have to navigate camped-out old-boy pro-lifers with beating-heart placards – you struggle not to pick the gem out her grip and aim it at them, hard. Missile of shining geode the size of a foetus. You’d think, since she never booked the abortion, she wouldn’t fear the accident was her fault, that secret forces streaming from her womb didn’t capsize a platform, pour down strangers. But that’s underestimating the psychic damage done by the grove of pro-life posters, the stress of passing through a gauntlet of patriarchs waving hellfire slogans aflame with intrauterine light.
6. The night you first meet your flatmates-to-be you’re at a pub crawl, a numbered list of red stars on a map passed out before the on-campus starter-gun cracks. Nineteen pubs are on the route but the six of you give up by about the eighth one – the engineering students have started to stage pranks at the intersections, pulling dead ants on red lights, forming scrums around smaller cars, even picking a Mini up by the chassis, spinning it 180 clockwise, so by the next green light the female driver is jammed in her lane facing backwards. Reaching the counter to actually buy a round means pushing through a ruck of drunk hands, the crowd thronged thick so no one’s accountable for fistfuls they get of your tits or crotch. They’re all in costume anyway, a horde of splashed lab coats and League wigs, beers funnelled through plastic masks. Your feet are up off the carpet in The Strand – you’re wedged between a mob of them, steel-toes fluttering, alleys of eyeline in between their backs getting narrow, oxygen starting to wane. It’s not a good feeling, that tide. Your bones feel featherweight, faded, dislocatable. You’re not sure if it’s fear or regurgitated lager that investigates the roots of your hair. You’re wearing angel wings and you can feel their elastic cross-referenced behind you, a sinewy pull-apart equation. When you paddle to the street outside, pushed to a clearing by exiting bodies, one squished ivory pinion has puke trapped in its gauze. You are doing a squeamish job trying to flick the solids to the kerb when a giggly mass of lookalike angels spots you. You slot into their coterie, tag along with them home, slagging lads off all the way. It stands to reason their pad is an ungodly villa, bisected into up and down flats. Two-storey, lace-railed, pilings flagging, little lead petals fluttering off the paint. One tumbledown bedroom has just become vacant. 
7. There’s a boy you’re into who’s not into you, and a boy into you who you’re not into. You swallow a lot, on the night you fall, hoping psychedelic cocktails will decipher this, and end up in two distant corners of the house, letting each of them put his fingers in you, a moist and steady jab. The process is mechanised, not a bit lyric. They both seem to be running some experiment involving how many digits they can outfit you with. In either case it is so lacklustre you make like you’ve gotten to some plateau, picking up swathes of your hair as you writhe against the wallpaper. You wonder what your bralette has done to the wiring of that hot slut, your heart – surely all its bloody imaginings ought to lead somewhere. You let one of them put their dick in you too, though it doesn’t make a difference which one does. It doesn’t make a difference which one is with you afterwards, either, when the street outside is strewn, and you can’t understand why the two things that seem to be splashed everywhere are blood and shoes, solo shoes like deities launched them centripetally among the clots. And bottles – but a strange wash of conscience has rushed through the bodies in the crowd who can still walk, so you see many people teeter over in chilled slow-motion to pick up glass or pack their grip with pulped cans as they leave, shocked by luck they’re not likewise crushed. Boys cross into and out of your line of vision but which ones doesn’t count – it’s the sirens, and later the officer who tells you the six of you aren’t all breathing that you need to listen to.
8. Your room became vacant because the last girl who lived in it got her glass spiked at the uni bar, and though she was carrying quartzite, it could not stop the twilight from becoming metaphysical. It had been the annual toga party so all the flatmates had been there looped in sheets they’d be laundering for days trying to strain out the ale spat at them, showers of hops and sputum a legion of boys launched, heads back, until the dance floor felt ankle deep. They’d made a pact to stick together, but she’d fallen for someone, and begged to break it – her mascara was shattered yet she’d seemed in her right mind. When they found her the next day she was propped against the wrong door – whoever the alchemist was had dumped her back at the address, at least, but hadn’t guessed the entrance. She was sticking the white-headed safety pins that had fastened her toga into her flesh, probing the meat of her palm like she might head wristwards. The sheet was not salvageable. They’d unwound it, along with any questions. Balled it into the wheelie bin that belonged to the old lady on the ground floor. The red lid on theirs was always overflowing.
9. When you move in you strike up a bond with the dainty old lady who lives below. She is put together from a cycle of blue dresses installed with very flimsy bones, and under her moth-mottled cardi she’s riddled with liver-spots. But she’s still in possession of stellar eyes, and on her walls – when she asks you in for Earl Grey she tremors into pitted china – there are photos of her afloat, head and shoulders, in tinted sittings, an oval haze she angles her gaze through like a screen idol. In the portraits she has colossal hair. Under her gravy-braised relay of smocks there’s no sign of that long-ago décolletage. But she’s chipper and sweet, if no longer pin-up, and likes you so much she gives you stacks of old gowns, vintage numbers that are worth a bomb, although they reek of ancient potpourri. When she donates them she clearly doesn’t believe you’ll ever actually put them on, so every time she spots you in one she issues a giddy little shriek, commands you with a croak to give her a twirl. It’s the least you can manage. She almost claps her wig off. Once she gets so excited you think she’ll tip her walker. Not too many days before the fall, you orchestrate a floorshow to say thankyou for the frocks, park her on a chair by the grand front entrance and all six flatmates parade in her cast-offs up and down the ornate stairs, striking poses against the palatial railings, making extravagant swerves, sashaying past each other with catwalk flourish. You blast something brass band down the flight, and her barely legible bones conduct. She cries so many cataracted tears you worry she won’t recover. You vote her in that night as your seventh flatmate.
10. It’s not like you want to live in a slum – you do clean. But efforts to sanitise always become archaeological. The kitchen bench, for example, is pebbledash, and long ago formed its own ecosystem. You do scrub, but there’s no way it won’t get algal. Everything you bleach reverts. You can smooth the blisters in the brocade wallpaper, but even a drizzle means you watch them bubble back out one by one. Stretch marks quiver the twelve-foot stud. The roseate cornices grow black icing. Promises to coat your lids with frost hiss in through the fluted sash. In a northeasterly, the whole structure whispers a dream of lifting delicately skyward. Swing it to a southerly that noise rises to an apocalyptic groan. But the love you have for the place runs in inverse proportion to all this. It will always stay the house you long for most. When there’s a ceremony, after the fall, to bless it, and cleanse it – just corporate lip service, because the new owners are a cutthroat fleet of suits specialising in commercial law –you won’t be able to accept the invite to watch. If you were to say a few words, as requested, they’d be something like the string of vile swears the six of you shriek from room to room, off-pitch, hoarse with chlorine and bucket-echoed, when you spend a whole day communal power-cleaning, as if it’s spring.
11. Nobody passes the Bechdel Test. Not even the flatmate who wants to be a filmmaker, who casts you in screenplay after screenplay which she mostly rehearses and shoots in-house, girl-on-girl plotlines that tremble with handheld gothic. She moves you around like candlelit figures in a dollhouse and the corners of the villa collude with extra shadows, manifesting smoky strata you look all too modern and B-grade against. She likes symbolism – if you have any lines of dialogue they’re always heavily sculptural, require you to freeze or wave diaphanous sleeves like a harbinger. Still, you try to follow her scripts, coming adrift in the floaty costumes she likes, delaying the angle of wrist and iris so everything feels foreboding. They’re perfect clips for the coverage to sample later, when the fall’s made them look prescient, the camera sweeping from the flimsy deck rails to the moon, prophecy all through your eyeliner. Out of respect for the dead, though, they don’t replay the reels of kissing, the long luxurious pashing sessions she’d coach you through, locked to each other on cue, suckling plushly with nameless neutrality, messing up your poeticised lipstick, wishing like hell the narrative in your mind wasn’t always chattering with boys.
12. Stable condition is a phrase the hospital will use, once you’ve fallen, when you’re haunting the wards, not sure where in its multi-level linoleum to visit first. It is about the way the bodies have come to rest within themselves on landing, and hinges on whether their soft and jointed and organic tissue fits back in its packaging. It is about the transparency of tubing by the beds, the gleaming length of circuitry the fluid is sliding. It is to do with the question of door or curtain between you and the monitors, the question of loved ones drinking tea or tears in the sharply illuminated halls, the reinforced glass above Do Not Enter designed to square off the blue-tinted pain inside. It is nothing to do with what the landlord is looking for, on his frequent drop-in inspections, the way he prowls the premises, not tapping sills, or palpating spongy boards, but checking that six girls are getting his gist, picking up hints that he could always raise rent, clocking the friendly ramifications of his under-the-table game, making sure you can feel the way his unannounced tour of your six bedrooms soaks up whatever skin-level detail he pleases, at the sleazy speed his half-smile likes to underline.
13. Boys tend to come around looking for one girl, but if she isn’t in, they hang around. You can see it on their faces, the realisation that the house contains copies, the look up the stairwell, wide-angle, that takes in alternatives – flicker of hair or silhouette, flash of grin or footstep, assorted burst of other girl figments. You can feel them weigh up the trade, their gaze rake the options, cut and paste. And you too, you’re one, a sub, a switch – you can feel their evaluation travel you, run calculations on shape and tone and curve. They like to lean on the door frame, casual, give you a cheeky nod, comparative. And you’re a good host, you’re a decent stand-in, there’s nothing stopping you from opening wide, gesturing up the off-white bridgework to the landing, that platform from days gone by, when over the pale imperial frame all maidens of the house might once be seen draping, arranging themselves felicitously to meet the notice of a gentleman caller. But you’ll go to see if there’s piss in the fridge, laugh at his banter, and wait to see who he picks. Then probably, if it’s you he’s staying to mess with, you’ll lie and wonder through the whole non-event whether it’s you or the villa who utters such antipodean rattling. After the fall, it will feel like there’s an eerie continuum between the two – that zoned-out bedroom wall bang as you’re boarded, and the storm front sounds that build on the landing as boys you don’t remember inviting reach critical mass. 
14. The flatmate who first found the house has a story about omens. She says her viewing was the last in a booked-out day of hunting that had nearly crushed her: she’d seen hovel after hovel you wouldn’t want to keep a dog in – fly-struck carpets, sinks cockroach cluttered, the radioactive feel in the air that crystal had been cooked – and at one appointment she’d gone clanging down a flight of metal stairs to shake off the owner whose creepo questions had made her blood run cold. By the time she got to your house she’d wanted to weep at the mangy mansion, all its bay windows and trimmings of crocheted wood. Sure, she sized the landlord up as a prick, but the bond was way lighter, the weeks in advance less crippling, because he liked his transactions to stay off-book. She’d scribbled her name down, pretty please, hell yes, used every shred of charm she had to underscore it as urgent. He said he’d let her know. By the time she’d got home she realised she’d lost a favourite earring trudging round that longlist of dumps – the omen was (other than the fact he’d called back, said yes) on the day she moved into the house the earring was right there outside on a ledge, a rose gold shimmer left to her by her dead sister. She was astonished to see it again, remembers catching its glint while she was dragging in her black bags and being disbelieving, closing in on its tiny insistent shine on the sill, a pulse-racing sign. In most of the photos its aurora softly rises through her hair, rose-gold lengths at the nape she broke. On the night she dropped wearing both, but one wasn’t found till the pile up of injured was cleared, in someone else’s palm, curled in fingers that wouldn’t have known what they’d clutched for, what a hook on nothingness they’d caught. Brief piece of glistening that couldn’t save them. The lustre of zero, unalloyed. Whether it was the earring she originally lost did not, by then, seem important.
15. The very first thing the old lady gives you is not a dress but a deportment book. It’s a manual from her finishing school, features lists of etiquette dos and don’ts, instructional models posing in attitudes of chic, demure but vixenish. The six of you get hysterical over it, raving through its arcane questions – ‘Are my gloves the right length? ... avoid the animal paw look by allowing space for the bare arm to show between glove and sleeve’ ‘Do I look plastered? ... one accessory can look superb, two nice, three or more may give the plastered look.’ ‘Do my separates part in the middle? This is very bad dressing indeed, particularly if a bare midriff is revealed; a full-length slip should always be worn.’ You camp it up around the house, acting out directions for attractive entrances and exits – ‘Do you creep round the door looking at the woodwork or the handle, then at the floor or the ceiling? Or perhaps you rush in making a commotion, letting the door swing wildly? Keep tall and straight as you open the door, and at the moment of disappearing, incline the head slightly with a smile.’ All six of you catalogue every banned mannerism, cunt-flash your way through lessons in leg-crossing, cackle fuck-yous at the tightrope act of looking ‘expensively feminine’, crash like beasts through the art of ‘ascending and descending’.
16. You lose one of your flatmates not long before the fall when she goes overseas to visit her dad. She’s never met him before but the reunion is a hit and she sends postcards on the view from his penthouse, the sizzle of lights across a dark-lake city, lists the cool sites they tour and how Daddy spoils her, making up for lost days. She stays on, ecstatic. Then you get the strangest letter, a nine-page epistle that confesses she’s sleeping with him. They should just let her room go, she’s found her true love. None of you really know what to do with this, except sit on the balcony, and drink. It’s the reason, on the night, her emptied room is the only one open.
17. The deck has always looked like a gallows. It’s where the floral ironwork stops and battens of another era got slapped up. But you can’t help loving the threadbare wood, so dappled in places it feels like cloth. It must have started as a fire escape, a shimmying exit you like to think of daughters scaling down long ago, soft-shoed with mutiny. Now it’s made of nine-inch nails and petals, intergenerational splinters. You have the sense to feel its glitches widening, that night, under the dance – it’s early enough to raise a shout, demand everyone herd back into the kitchen, that’s it, slip the deadbolt, wedge it with the butcher block, the speaker buzz, so only the moon’s allowed out. Before the point where any chance of your voice being heard dissolves in the horde.
18. Sometimes a dad will call in to do the odd job, tack something up, bog a gap, fix something munted. Mumble some awkward off-key jokes, let their look veer, seedy, hang around too long. You hold off calling it until you’re sure. Cue one other flatmate to get confirmation, wait to see what her eyebrows do, the next time he shuffles over of a Sunday, gives a close-up demo with hammer and nail, nicotine cruising your neckline, tool-belt nudging. A slow-mo eyeroll of not-fucking-again is what she gives. More and more you let those chores go. The night of the fall the dud washing machine is control-panel high with ice and cans, where all of you tugging only managed to drag its dead weight as far as the landing.
19. The medicine cabinet is shallow, its mirror meshed with cracks. You think it dispenses ghosts. You close your eyes if you have to prise it open, so you don’t see the shards of yourself swung wide. You pop the dosage you’re slipping from its sleeve, and vacate, backing from its de-silvered surface – you don’t like the diagnosis, but you’ve learnt to tip your head, swallow dry. There isn’t a crystal that can help you feel safe in this corner. The spiked girl who used to live in your room tried recovering, but one night crawled into the shower box stoned, her passed-out trunk tipped over the drain so the water built to the cusp and gushed. They fished her up, she didn’t die, but there’s some kind of aura left – it doesn’t help that the steamed-off wallpaper roses dangle in shreds from the stud, swatches that like to sigh at you as they buckle. The backed-up water is found, at the inquest, to have soaked panels, caused warp and sag. The weakening left by her crying was, in the end, structural. In the mirror, you could always feel the shiver of something she’d tasted, a trickle-down damage.
20. Your first floor flat gets the regal door, the drama of the stairs – the old girl on the ground gets the servants’ entrance. At the base of the staircase there’s a gallery of internal doors but they’re all walled up her side. There are blocked doors to a zone stacked with landlord stuff too – she zips up her coral-ringed lips with a wink when you speculate – pays not to know, dear, what falls off the back of trucks. He bought her out years ago, fleeced her, but at least he lets her rent back her sagging corner. She’s known this house since she was a little thing in plaits – once she drifted as gentry above, while the ground floor served as a doss house for returned servicemen, the amputated and shocked and gouged and patched all lining steel beds in the hall, the lower verandah glassed in to harbour prone recuperating bodies. You like to think of their khaki holograms, more than the available breed of real boy, the soft wounds seeping through their uniforms, the fevery silence of all they need to unsee a tearless film in their eyes. You like to think they would have recognised the sound, the night the centreline cracked, would have staggered from the stranding of their beds to greet those who would not be getting back up.
21. You can’t make memories when you fall. There’s no point of view – or instead you get all of them, blown through your body at skull and senses in a vertiginous 360 rush. You had a kaleidoscope when you were a kid, a cylinder you’d twist between your eye and sunlight, and a myriad of beads would explode your iris in a cascade. Each blink had incendiary symmetry – you’d like to make the fall like that. You’d like to trust that a pattern was going to be gently irradiated from the plummet, to see the air sort screams and dust and limbs out into an intricate fluttering. You’d like to make the sound less godless, more like the sand-soft brush against that lens. Like when you breathe again, and twitch, from the pile where infinite pain is sown, all the seeds sift into something star shaped.
22. Do not enter is also the label on the tape, the red-white diagonal straps that rustle across the house when you go back, double-knotted at the trim, a plastic cat’s cradle. The old girl has been removed from the premises, that’s all the officer will say. You never find where she’s been installed. She would have liked the look of those streamers. She might have thought it was a ticker-tape parade. Sometimes she’d go a bit batty, wander the lawn in her petticoat, waving a tea-towel like a D-Day flag, chanting, the lads are coming.
23. Your pregnant flatmate thinks she sealed her fate just considering a termination. You sit in the hospital with her, and do what you can with mauled hands, to help her stop raving about imagined black marks and focus on the screen, the sonic sheen that spreads from the circling wand. The tiny grains that still hold on inside her, their precarious sparkling.
24. The flatmate you like least rings you long after – she is loaded and has lost her car. She’s on new meds and got herself trashed and can’t remember where she parked it. It’s 2 am and you taxi out, locate her wandering round the streets, stroke some order through her puke-streaked hair, listen to the sentences her high has smeared, full of remembering you can’t do, flashes of distended night you can’t avow. She’s luminescently drunk. At one point she’s so shrill you slap her. But she stays in step as you hunt for the car, only sobs again when you find it, lets you pat her down for the keys, pack her mutely in the passenger side. Sings along to a track on the drive that once blasted hell-yeahs out your body, through a speaker whose black noise never gave a sign how the night was bound to cave in.
25. The charm school manual had so many pages of tips the six of you had taken the piss out of – ‘an elegant variation in taking off a coat’ or how to ease open buttons ‘with an air’. You picture the jaunty pen-and-ink sketches, the model lissom in jet stilettos, now that your minor injuries have dragged out, make you flinch through skeletal routines. The one that lingers longest is the two-page layout on negotiating stairs – ‘Young woman, you should go up like a bird in flight, lightly, daintily. With exquisite fingers you should raise that gown only an inch from impeccable slippers. The whole body is a weighty thing when it comes to giving it a vertical lift. But you should go up and down like a dream, slowly, taking your time, feeling for each tread’.
26. The night you wear angel wings back from the crawl all six of your bags are packed with glasses, pints and handles you’ve lifted from the pubs, that jangle as you crisscross streets – collateral for none of the bars doing shit to keep you safe. You shatter all yours though, tripping where the lanes split to expressway, the other five flitting ahead before traffic pours the gully, a flood of headlights that pins you where you’re dropped on blooded knees, concussed at the glare oncoming, reels of it, bursting your gaze with stars of speed. You freeze there, on all fours, horns strafing, car gusts sucking your shouts and wings. They’re squeals from the black verge, your five flatmates to be, and when the lights change and the lanes empty out, they’re a scurry of cries and fingernails that dash through the distance to grasp you.
27. In a piece of crystal there is everything that falls – shirt and shroud and bough and spit and map and lace and bone and smoke and hair and cross and ash and stain and ice and wail and dust. You keep a slice on you forever, vessel singing to the sediment.

How many times will I have to exhume you?

You rise again, a winter bulb. White corm of your face blanched as a knuckle, the quivering mycelium of your hair, stirring.

I looked first at his feet – a young man’s feet, bare and tied at the big toe for burial. There was a photograph of him in Life magazine, a full-page spread. It was August 1984 and the body of the young sailor belonging to the ill-fated Franklin expedition to find the Northwest Passage had just been discovered. His perfectly preserved, mummified remains had been exhumed from a tundra on Beechy Island in the Arctic Circle where they had lain undisturbed for 138 years. Now he was a media sensation.

Nailed to the young man’s coffin was a heart-shaped tin plaque. The hand-painted inscription read: John Torrington died January 1st, 1846, aged 20 years. 

The image was astonishing – an icy cold existential slap across the face. Furtively, I cut the picture out ˋˏ✄............ˋˏ✄............ˋˏ✄............ I was compelled to keep it but could not summon the courage to look at him in his entirety. So, I folded it tightly into a wad …

… my very own origami of secrecy and postponement – and stashed it away beneath my pillow while I considered what to do next.

It was 1984 and my family lived in a small town which excelled at a crisp, suffocating kind of parochialism. Aged fourteen, I was a girl with light brown plaits and ladders in my stockings. A work in progress, my limbs were thin and mobile, my face, disproportionate. I had pointed irregular teeth and a big angular nose, Like a Roman emperor, my mother said.

I was a girl of idiosyncratic leanings, some said gifted. But giftedness can be a social liability when you are fourteen. At that tender transitional age, I was adrift in the unsettling in-between – the fraught disorienting space between childhood and youth. Between social acceptability and its opposite. I wore adolescence like a shameful, unwanted garment. Interiority was my escape.

My imaginative life was coloured by nostalgia for another century. I’d always had a leaning towards the melancholic, an ear for the saddest cadence. Reimagining the past was my preferred reverie. I pictured life in the 1840s; sepia dreams of evenings in ornate drawing rooms, huddled around an open fire – a pianola, its maudlin tunes, candlelight dancing on floral patterned walls. My adolescent dreaming was Dickensian; the ineluctable circle of domestic life, hours counted down in embroidered stitches, the heavy chiming of a clock. Filial relationships enmeshed like fine lacework – and love, love, always on the precipice of sudden and unexpected annihilation by consumption, cholera – or a drowning at sea. I felt out of step with the era, like a pressed flower, fallen from between the pages of some older book. 

✄............

Our island state was an isle of ghosts. Just beyond the perimeters of town were dark stony mountain ranges. In the foothills, sheep grazed large tracts of pasture where once dense forest had stood, land laid bare by colonial occupation. Georgian style farmhouses, framed by avenues of poplar trees, dotted the rural landscape like sentinels, redolent with old fortunes and transposed notions of the pastoral idyll from another continent. In private burial plots, old tombs leant perilously in long yellow grass – their faded white picket fences worn down to the colour of dirty fleece.

We lived in a suburb dense with post-war houses and 1960s red brick veneer. Low fences and manicured lawns marked the thresholds between public and private. The family home was a white weatherboard with a concrete verandah. The letterbox in the front yard overflowed with hardware catalogues and ignored utility bills. From my bedroom window, I could see the closed down brick works, a landscape of exposed clay and gorse. I could see the town cemetery fringed by distant mountains. No doubt there were ancestors buried there. In winter, dense fog and woodsmoke settled heavily in the valley. The disused brick kilns jutted through the blanketing grey.

Nightly from my bedroom, I witnessed the real-life serial of our neighbour’s lives playing out through their lit windows. The companionable and the mundane – chaos of small children, the washing up, the tantrums – the lonely hours, the infidelities. I saw it all. When the show was over, their house gone dark, I’d close the curtains and climb into bed. The walls of my room were peppered with pencil drawings of  shipwrecks, classical composers and admirals – my private gallery of the glorious dead. But now, under my pillow, was the image of a real flesh and bone emissary from the past, as urgent and true as he had been 138 years before when he was laid to rest in the permafrost. His resurrection was an indiscretion of the most intriguing kind. There was much to be done.

Daily I began to unfold the image just enough to reveal small portions of the body …

… the first few centimetres of the image disclosed his tender young feet edged with ice and bound together at the big toe for burial. Networks of veins embossed the dry flesh. His ankles, just visible beneath the hems of his linen trousers, were unflinchingly personal.

Quickly, I folded the image again and lodged it back in its hiding place beneath my pillow.

It was 1984 and my parents drove a Ford Falcon station wagon, with deep green duco. My mother was a reluctant housewife who wanted to be a writer, my father was a reluctant public servant who wanted to be a painter. My father wore a navy blue pullover with a neatly embroidered departmental logo on it. He always smelled of fresh stationary and sly cigarettes. There was an aura of pencil stub and carbon paper about him. Mornings, he would buff his leather shoes with black boot polish and a stiff brush over a sheet of newspaper. I loved the oily, masculine smell of the polish. He’d comb his shiny black hair neatly to one side and go to work. He was an enigma to me; in fact, I feared him. Evenings, he would return home from work, face closed and dark with exhaustion. He’d smoke a joint, drink beer and listen to the Rolling Stones and Eric Clapton to unwind. The family were not allowed to interrupt him.

Meals took place around the TV, partly because mum despised housework and the dining table was buried beneath an avalanche of magazines, manuscripts, and books, but mostly because TV was sacrosanct for dad. Mealtimes were tense. Our family ate furtively, dinner plates on our laps, as dad watched his favourite programs. He was hypersensitive to noise, so I’d try to chew and swallow my food as quietly as possible, so I didn’t trigger his explosive ire. After dinner, I would retreat to my room …

Kneeling before my pillow, I’d deliberate about whether to unfold another portion of the image. Did I have the courage? I began to hold the sailor in my mind like a delicate keepsake. Each night I’d rest my head on the pillow knowing his folded image was secreted there. It frightened me – a feeling, hot and disquieting inside. Like lava and permafrost mingling in the blood. Was this love or terror? – this nauseating song of ambiguous compulsion – quietly I’d sing old sea shanties under my breath; torn between the desire to appease and the possibility I might summon him …

In these few lines which I now relate,

I’ll put you in mind of a sailor’s dream.

The town we lived in was conservative. It exerted a dour vigilance and pinched neatness that made its youth restless. In every square stood the statue of a founding father, in the central park peacocks trailed their splendid plumage across stolid turf. It was exquisite and stifling. Every day after school teens congregated at the bus mall to flirt, and smoke. They popped gum, and swapped gossip. Boys bellowed in their broken voices and jostled one another in mock headlocks showing off to the girls. The girls looked on, inscrutable adjudicators, eyelashes caked with mascara, petulant mouths heavy with lipgloss. Their hair was elaborate, flecked with synthetic blonde streaks, sculpted and spritzed into inorganic shapes with lashings of gel.

I related to none of this. My hair was plain, my clothes old fashioned and homely; we couldn’t afford to be on trend. Conspicuously out of step with my peers, I did my best to avoid these daily gatherings. Always, I tried to slink around the periphery, unseen – always they spied me, and their barrage of ridicule rose, a startling black murmuration, obliterating my light and air.  

✄............

… his hands were the next part of him to come into view. A young man’s hands, long, delicate and smooth. They were bound to his thighs with strips of cotton. The strips had made bluish indentations around his knuckles – a thumbnail had detached. I could almost sense the nail on my tongue like a sacramental wafer. This was my communion. From now on, whenever I was seated, I’d make sure my hands were laid precisely the same way on my own thighs. With this little gesture I was acknowledging a private, immutable love …

At fourteen I was a girl with light brown plaits and a propensity for inconsolable rumination. Night-time was my nemesis. Haunted by the transitory nature of things, I’d compulsively indulge in anticipatory calculations: how many years of life did I have remaining? Why did time move only in one direction? How could the lives recorded by history, once so present and vivid and relevant, now all have vanished? How could the beautifully animated ones now be decommissioned dust? Why was I this person in this body?

Night after night I’d sweat in the darkness, questions swirling, my eyes fixed on the walls, the shifting procession of night shadows. Beneath my pillow, ruched at the crook of my neck, lay the folded image of the dead sailor. His spoiled beauty silently goading me. Night was a deep and glacial space – my terror, a sail that sent me scudding out on the frozen sea of my own thinking. Marooned again, I’d listen for the quiet breathing of my parents through the wall, searching for the anchor of their aliveness; the low rumble of my father’s snoring, the soft rustling of mum’s sheets as she turned over in bed, her discreet little cough. I wanted to knock urgently on their door – wanted to run into their room and shake them awake. Wake up! Wake up! We are all going to die! Inside, I was screaming, and I wanted to be rocked back to sensibility in the arms of my mother. For her warmth to be the safe mooring, her voice the unassuming force that broke the darkness open. But I didn’t and she wouldn’t, and so it was.

… retreating to that bright, white place in my mind where I carried the knowledge of him like an ache. Out, out onto the tundra I’d go, to kneel at the foot his imaginary grave. Out, out into the subtle frequencies of imagining that make time dissolve – that hint at the possibility of love reversing death. Out there I too felt like a lost explorer, looking to the horizon, some possibility of rescue – the shy hope of returning home.

I missed my mother. Episodically lost inside despair, she would become unresponsive beneath a mask of sadness. As if she’d gone in search of something and returned bruised and empty-handed. She wandered the house like a spectre. Then, unexpectedly, she would return from the wilds of her own remoteness, scintillatingly alive and engaged. I would be delirious with joy. In these moments we shared the most delicious and acute kind of friendship, a buoyancy full of playfulness and inventiveness. In this state she was attentive. She’d come into my room at bedtime with a tiny vial of perfume. It was so intimate it was almost frightening to have her undivided attention. She’d stroke my hair then daub a fragrant drop of scent on each wrist with the small glass dropper and wish me ‘sweet dreams’. The moistened glass on my inner wrists burned exquisitely, miniscule trails of love, blazed across my flesh. And then, without warning she’d be lost again. Cold and rageful, she’d withdraw to her bed.

The venetian blinds in her bedroom were always closed. In the dim, slatted light tiny fragments of sticky tape sparkled on the bedding like a strange constellation. In this mood my mother, like me, had a ritual for ameliorating her suffering. She could not bear the idea of ageing. She saw herself as a corpse-in-waiting while time conspired to destroy her – beauty, a fleeting treasure briefly granted before annihilation. Nights she’d prepare a mask of sticky tape for her face, believing that immobilising her features would arrest the ravaging effects of gravity. She’d cut little squares of sticky tape ˋˏ✄............ˋˏ✄............ˋˏ✄............ ˋˏ✄............ and line them up along the edge of the mantelpiece in the lounge room.  Then she’d fix her expression in the mirror and apply the tape one piece at a time   ▒ ▒ ▒ ▒   with her index finger until her face was covered by an elaborate matrix. She’d glide past me on the way to bed, her perfect, impassive face suspended under a translucent mask of cello tape.

✄............

… my gaze settled for a while on his grey linen trousers and button flies. A corner of his tucked-in, pin-striped shirt protruded through the opening of the fly – I could not bear it. It was improper, a small and poignant dishevelment, intimate and intrusive.

John Torrington, I wanted to be your comb, the mother-of-pearl buttons to fasten your shirt, your cuffs, your flies. Let me be the blanket and the shroud – the lone bright star in the last arctic night you ever saw.

I attended a state high school. It was a place of relentless torment. The classrooms smelt of adolescent musk and the terse odour of old linoleum and authority. A fine rubble of chalk and fallen dusters littered the floors beneath the blackboards. Every day felt like an endurance test, contempt, the steep face I had to climb, sharp scree of ridicule beneath my fingernails as I clung on for survival, no foot hold, no rope – no anchorman.

The students would chant insults as I entered the room. They aped my speech if I answered the teacher’s question. I was hunted in the corridors, classrooms, school grounds and the bus ride home. They’d kick the toilet door in, jeer and point at the bloodied pad in the pants around my ankles, as I scrambled to cover myself. They called me names; they punched my budding breasts. Once, they fashioned a cock out of clay in the art room, held me down and forced it into my mouth when the teacher was out of the room. It was not so much the dumb earthy phallus that offended – it was the co-operative nature of their cruelty, multiple hands pinning my wrists and ankles, fingernails dug in, eager voices baying in unison.

✄............

I hated school and most days pined to go home – but I never knew which version of my mother would be waiting when I got there. In my mind I’d rehearse what amusing story I could craft to placate her, draw her out of her depressive shell. It didn’t always work – but there was one persuasion I did have at my disposal. I could be her patient.

I began to feel sick, genuinely sick. School was a sickening. My mother had an intense fear of illness – so she’d never question my refusal to rise from bed. She granted me clemency. On these days, I would lie on the couch, draped in blankets, and feel grateful for her collusion. Illness afforded me respite from the bullying. It was also way to connect with my mother, to bypass her remoteness and preoccupation – a mutual contract; I solicited sympathy, Mum got to have companionship and control. There was something timeless about convalescence, the soft swaddling of my mother’s ministrations – the spaciousness afforded by delicacy and the special exemptions it demanded. With a hot flannel draped across my forehead and the curtains drawn against the world, it was as if we were mutually enacting our very own Victorian sickbed scene. The world momentarily pulled in, tight as a purse string. Sometimes I’d look at my own narrow white feet jutting from beneath the bedding and imagine that they were his feet.

… I began to carry the folded image wherever I went. I concentrated now on his elbows, which, like the immaculate, pale hands, were bound to his body with cotton strips. Gazing, my eye was led upwards to his torso. He wore a curious nineteenth-century shirt – it was white with thin, closely spaced blue stripes and mother-of-pearl buttons. The base of his neck, discoloured by so many years locked in ice, was visible just above the high collar. My heart quickened at the thought of what I might see next …

In the summer of 1984, I went to stay with ✄ for a holiday. I had just turned fifteen. I was excited – it was my first independent vacation.

✄ and I had always had a special rapport. He talked freely with me about large concepts (the cosmos, biology, evolution) and never condescended. He talked to me as if I were an adult. I found it enthralling – flattering. He had spoken to me this way since I was a small child. He’d once said to me You know you can tell me anything … and I did.

The landscape that summer was mesmerising; sundown by lagoons edged with tea-tree and paperbark, brackish water the colour of treacle. We talked and talked. I listened with rapt attention. He told me I was his confidant, told me I understood him in a special way. What more is there to say. You know the rest. 

He said, Being a broad-minded girl you will be aware that this is not a taboo in other cultures ... I looked out the window at the darkening horizon, animals whispered and brayed in the dark, she-oaks hummed in the wind. He smelt like hay and warm marzipan. He had smelt like home – now his large hand rested on mine, heavy as a stone.

… I walked out, out, out onto that icy tundra again, to find the grave site.  I lay my ear against the gravel and the blue-grey shale listening for the absence of a heartbeat.

The landscape of my dreams was a vast, frozen tundra. I was far, far away on a barren, snow swept rock, cleaning detritus from under his fingernails and buttoning his shirt against the cold arctic winds, whispering, ‘You only made it to twenty, John Torrington. You died a boy sailor with soft, uncalloused hands ...’

To reach Torrington’s body, the research team had to thaw the block of ice in which he lay. They heated buckets of water on camp stoves and lugged them dozens of metres to the grave where they were systematically poured over the block of ice. It was laborious, delicate work. 

During thawing, the first part of Torrington to come into view was a line of mother-of-pearl buttons. Next, his perfectly preserved toes jutted through the receding ice. His face remained concealed by a fold of fabric adhered to his skin by a layer of ice. This, it was reported, created an eerie feeling amongst the researchers, as if the young sailor was somehow aware of what was happening and was resisting final exposure.

When the last curtain of ice gave way freeing the material that obscured Torrington’s face the lead scientist gasped and sprang to his feet, He’s there, he’s right there. The team stood numbed and silent. Nothing could have prepared them for the face of John Torrington …

… his face, so compellingly young, was framed by long strands of hair – a touchingly intermediate colour. The young man’s life did not seem far away. His half-closed eyes, still blue, gazed through delicate, light brown lashes. Tied around his chin and over the crown of his head was a handkerchief made of white cotton and covered in large blue polka dots.

Now his image prevented me from sleeping. He was on the backs of my eyelids when I closed my eyes – he was in all the recesses of my imagination that threw forth their pictures, uninvited. My ears hissed and fizzed, with a glacial skreich. I was sure I could hear him thawing; his internal organs shivering free of their ice bindings, the drip, drip of cellular structures partly collapsing. His waterlogged face yawning clear of its icy cradle – the precipice between the past and the present moment abolished, crumbling like snow. The vertigo of teetering closer to him than I could ever have imagined.

I dreamt. I dreamt I was crouched at the head of his coffin, my hands under his thin shoulders – I was lifting him, his head rolling onto my shoulder, his face a few centimetres from my own …

… He was very light, said anthropologist Owen Beattie, who lifted him from his coffin, and his limbs were still supple, not stiff like a dead mans. It was as if he was unconscious. As his body was freed from the ice and they lifted him, his head rolled onto Beattie’s left shoulder. The anthropologist found himself looking directly into Torrington’s half open eyes, only a few inches from his own.

A contemporary writer described this scene as ‘a Pietà in warped time. A man cradles a boy 123 years his senior.’ I was a girl cradling the idea of a man 123 years her senior being cradled by a contemporary twenty years her senior. An origami in time. I still ask myself how the tendril of this image of disinterment – the rolling head, the gazing eyes – reached me before I had consciously read an account five years after the fact. Was it my dreaming or the anthropologist’s? Or, our collective dreaming, since his image flooded the press at the time?

Perhaps I have merely misremembered or hoped for such a dream. It doesn’t matter.

✄............

During the autopsy, the seven researchers kept Torrington’s face covered as a gesture that his privacy was maintained throughout the process. After the autopsy, Torrington was re-dressed and carefully repositioned in his coffin. Before the reburial, a note was placed beside him giving the names of the seven researchers and a description of their feelings and purpose at the site. We had some serious thoughts, says Beattie, about our feelings as human beings. It was a last private offering to John Torrington before he was once again assigned to the frozen depths. The coffin lid was then replaced and water soon began to fill the grave.

I carried his image into the following year (and five more after that). By now people were concerned by my behaviour. Upon entering class, I would lay the image open on my school desk. I’d smooth out the creases and begin speaking to him in confidential tones – it quickly cleared a swathe around me as other students moved away. He was my first line of defence – my belligerent courage, my forbidden zone, the grinning cadaver of protest. It was my way of declaring a resilience, frightening and oblique. I inhabited the space of my own alienation so ferociously it became my deliverance.

In the summer of 1985, aged fifteen years, I decided to draw him. Out of respect I did not depict his face – only those exquisite pallid young hands I had first encountered. I drew every little stone that surrounded his coffin, every swirl of woodgrain, the stripes, the shards of ice, pooled water, his hands, their bindings, his detached thumbnail, the buttons and linen, the spoilage, the improbability of him. I was taking this as far as I could go. I had faced calamity and survived. And now I was marching across the wastelands towards a new kind of beauty. A dead, lost boy, remade. A lost girl remaking; each brushstroke, pen-stroke, an act of revivification, a deepening entanglement. Like the forensic anthropologist who raised him from the ice, I was raising him again to raise myself. We were bright young things, improbable and sublime – we were defying erasure.

The poems of Bathypelagia by Debbie Lim and Re:Vision by Isi Unikowski are poems of cartography; they map the unknown and probe the world with human curiosity, tracing meaning onto elusive places, feelings, and encounters, solidifying these through the writing process. Both collections conspire to understand the world as they construct their realities one line at a time, the poems themselves moving – in the former’s case, vertically from the deep sea, and, in the latter’s case, through the casting of light, the revealing of landscapes.

Belgium’s history with what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo is one of brutality and exploitation. In 1885, Leopold II, King of the Belgians from 1865 to 1909, became the sole owner of what was then called the Congo Free State. The story of how one of Africa’s largest countries, roughly the size of Western Europe, became privately owned – that is, not owned by the Belgian state but by its people’s king – is one of complex deceit, subterfuge, greed and mania. Leopold was responsible for the killing and mutilation of millions of people – some estimate up to ten million – in Central Africa. Animals were victims too. ‘At the start of the nineteenth century there were up to twenty-six million elephants in Africa. That number currently sits between four and five hundred thousand.’ In nine years, the tusks of 94,000 elephants were shipped into Antwerp alone. Eventually, forced to relinquish to Belgium his so-called Congo Free State, Leopold destroyed all incriminating documents, writing to an aide, ‘I will give them my Congo, but they have no right to know what I did there.’ The Palace furnaces were said to burn for eight days.

Andy Griffiths is a children’s and comedy writer. He is the author of the Just! series and the Treehouse series. YOU & ME and Peanut Butter Beast, the second book in his newest series, is published in August 2025.

If you could go anywhere tomorrow, where would it be?

Time travel back to yesterday thereby creating an infinite loop that means I’ll stay the same age forever and cheat death.

What’s your idea of hell?

Hell. (Especially as depicted by Gustave Doré in his illustrations for The Divine Comedy.)

What do you consider the most specious virtue?

Moderation. ‘The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom’ – William Blake.

What’s your favourite film?

King Kong (1928). (The second half of YOU & ME and the Peanut Butter Beast borrows heavily from the second half of the movie.)

And your favourite book?

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. (The first half of YOU & ME and the Peanut Butter Beast borrows heavily from the first chapter.)

Name the three people with whom you would most like to dine?

King Kong, Fay Wray, and Pee Wee Herman. (Although it would most likely be a short meal due to King Kong’s propensity to go ape in the presence of Fay Wray.)

Which word do you most dislike, and which one would you like to see back in public usage?

The word I most dislike is ‘unconscious’ because it’s freakin’ impossible to spell without having at least three bungled attempts before having to look it up. And I’d like to see ‘grouse’ brought back into public usage because, well, it’s freakin’ grouse. (And ‘freakin’ too.)

Who is your favourite author?

Me, of course, duh. Closely followed by Lech Blaine – Australian Gospel is a masterpiece!

And your favourite literary hero or heroine?

Holden Caulfield. Although, his voice leaps off the page in such a vivid and compelling way I’m not completely certain he’s fictional.

Which qualities do you most admire in a writer?

Brevity. Wit. And brevity. Lots and lots of brevity. And wit. But mostly brevity. Lots and lots and lots of it.

Which book influenced you most in your youth?

Coles Funny Picture Book (1879) by E.W. Cole. Inexhaustible, child-centred nonsense.

Name an early literary idol or influence whom you no longer admire – or vice versa.

My childhood collection of riddle books from the late 1960s. I revered them at the time but on returning to them as an adult to raid for material for the Treehouse joke books, I was shocked by the casual racism, sexism, and general inappropriateness of at least fifty per cent of the material.

Do you have a favourite podcast?

No, if it’s a choice between a podcast and listening to music, music wins every time. (Apart from ABR’s one of course.)

What, if anything, impedes your writing?

Alcohol (sadly). And writers’ festivals.

What qualities do you look for in critics?

A sense of humour and a healthy connection to their inner child.

How do you find working with editors?

Reader, I married her!

What do you think of writers’ festivals?

Too much talking. I hardly ever get any writing done.

Are artists valued in our society?

Yes, but in many cases not for the right reasons.

What are you working on now?

Another book featuring YOU, the reader, and ME, the writer, going on yet another one of our unpredictable and wildly silly adventures.

In a country where property and real estate are central to the national psyche, it is fair to say that, even by Australian standards, we are having a moment. From the Great Australian Dream to the widespread recreational pursuit of watching The Block, real estate has become the nation’s article of faith. Meanwhile, a confluence of factors has seen housing become the hottest political issue in the country. Far from the dream, we have seemingly arrived at the worst of all possible worlds, where housing is too expensive to buy, too expensive to rent, and too expensive to build. Those without a leveraged portfolio of their own are rightly asking how we got into this mess.

This is a question that veterans of the heritage battles fought in Australia’s cities may be contemplating too, as they find themselves re-prosecuting arguments thought settled in the 1970s. Largely through grassroots activism, the Australian heritage movement succeeded over decades in winning recognition and protection for places deemed significant. This would eventually be cemented with the establishment of legislation, statutory bodies, and a professional industry.

Grief, depression, and trauma do terrible things to the human body and spirit. The brain rebels callously against its vessel, leaving the wounded mind to wallow in the deepest pits of despair, perpetually refreshing pain and obsessively seeking out the recesses of scarred memories.

The speaker in Robbie Coburn’s Ghost Poetry (2024) is similarly broken. There seems to be a separation in the book between the body (‘you’) and the mind (‘I’). Indeed, there lurks a third identity throughout Coburn’s poetry: a melancholy spectre that haunts the poems, desperately trying to pull the splintered parts of the speaker back together, sanguinely intoning that ‘I will be the ghost that dreams of you’. Such fragmentations lead to a pained observance as the speaker watches helplessly as the body is subjected to self-mutilation and violence, comprehending sadly that ‘the surface / of that body / was unmistakably mine.’