Tag: Australian landscape

Extending Our Selves

by Jessica White Every afternoon after school, I changed my black school shoes for joggers and ran through the paddocks for half an hour. On weekends I ran through the hills at the back of our house, my joggers slipping on bark and leaf litter. Heat rose from the earth and coiled around my ankles. Slabs of granite gave off a warm, clean scent and cicadas wove a thicket of sound. At my footfall, roos bounded away and wild goats stepped nervously through pine trees. On hot summer days, I defied my mother and ran out in the baking heat.…

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Fierce/Peace: The Creativity of Disability

by Jessica White Everything begins with the body. With lying on a trampoline on a spring morning, the season in which wattle bursts across dun hills and chilly air tickles bare legs. Except now it scrapes my cheeks and the clear light hurts my eyes. An ache spills from my shoulders, across my neck and down my back. My mother, sensing something is wrong, scoops me up and takes me to the local doctor in town, a half-hour drive away on gravel roads. He sends us to the regional hospital, another hour’s drive. They stick a needle in my back…

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The Man From Snowy River does not come from Detroit

by Felicity Castagna The writer John Gardner famously said that there are only two plots in fiction—a person goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town. What he’s essentially pointing to here is that all stories are about place. Place is at once both an incredibly abstract and generic term but also a word that points to something that is very specific; a local space with its own unique and tangible identity, something that is intimate and unique and felt in different ways by those who inhabit it. When we ask a person, ‘Where do you come from?’…

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The Reef is Not a Poem

by Nicolette Stasko When I began to think about a topic for my first post I realised that I had an opportunity to write about something I am passionate about but don’t usually get to address: conservation and the environment as represented by the natural phenomenon of the Great Barrier Reef. Readers who are familiar with my poetry or my book Oyster: from Montparnasse to Greenwell Point, would not find my interest surprising. For me, like many poets (including Judith Wright, whose work is also a main focus of this piece), the land and especially the sea is a ‘manifestation…

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Croajingalong Walkaround (An Australia Day reflection of sorts)

by Joshua Mei-Ling Dubrau The most anticipated highlight of this trip for me was a chance to revisit the small town of Mallacoota just past the NSW/Victoria border, and Croajingalong National Park. I hadn’t been back since my daughter, the half-a-teenager flopped over a table in Braidwood two posts ago was about eight months old. Mallacoota is an inlet town with creeks and lakes curving and pooling out into the ocean. Everything is pretty low key; the river aspect means it’s remained more of a small fishing town than a beachfront high-rise development. The prevalence of brown and orange in…

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