Across Victoria, telecommunications are failing: mobile phones have gone dead, the Internet is unreachable, televisions and radios broadcast only static. And now reports of incredible, weird happenings – strange transformations, portals to other dimensions and invasions of magical creatures – are reaching friends and loved ones. Somehow, throughout all this, the postal network continues to […]

We’re in Los Angeles, my boyfriend and I, eating cheap Thai food and talking about how much we miss Portarlington. Right around the corner thousands of tourists tread the scummy Hollywood stars pavement, which we (also tourists) will march over once sated. Somehow the glitz and glamour (mess and poverty) of Hollywood doesn’t make us […]

  In the spotlight of a half-moon, the sixteen-year-old tan Subaru Forester almost looks dark blue. It’s parked between the front porch and a pile of mulch that’s awaiting distribution. The keys are tucked into the centre console. If necessary, I could get to driver’s seat in a sprint. I know the curves of the […]

  Her back hunched as she stepped gingerly through the slip of water on the sandbar. Tea tree tannin had steeped the river in amber and you couldn’t help admiring the dark ginger fox on a ground of golden liquor. Why did I think of you when I saw the fox hunting mullet in the […]

Val would pack her kids into the car and visit her mother-in-law, Kathleen, most days. Dad has visions of the car pulling up at the homestead, the kids bursting out the doors and running down the path, past the old kitchen, into the back entrance of the main house. “…and Nana would come out, and […]

  We moved to Doncaster when I was nine, and a few months after we got there, Doncaster Shoppingtown turned one.   We’d been living in the country for a few years for Dad’s work and then one day it was announced that Dad had a new job and we’d be moving back to Melbourne.  […]

It is the story between deeply sleeping, dreaming, and waking. – Juliana Spahr Raised in the middle of slight, significant—no neighbours that the eye could see, Fiery Creek full of tadpoles and so many hills to roll down. On a mild Summer’s day I could streak laps of the house with the air whipping my […]

  OK [1] .  [2] THIS IS A RECORDED INTERVIEW BETWEEN LEADING SENIOR CONSTABLE XXXXX AND XXXXXXX XXXXXX OF ADDRESS XXXX X XX XX XXXXXXX XXXXXX, NORTHCOTE, CONDUCTED AT THE MELBOURNE WEST POLICE COMPLEX ON XXXXXXXX XXX XXXX XX XXXXXX, XXXX.  PERSONS PRESENT ARE MY CORROBORATOR.SENIOR CONSTABLE XXXXXXX Senior Constable XXXX XXXXXXX, XXXXX. LEADING SENIOR […]

A pitch for an original Netflix series   SYNOPSIS: A 5-part TV series about a trendy inner-city couple in their early thirties who move to the country to achieve their lifelong dream of getting chickens.   EPISODE 1   LORELEI is housesitting interstate, trying to write her first book, when she gets a call from […]

1. The 1970s. We were from Hawthorn and the trip along Sydney Road to get to the Hume took us through other worlds. We’d fall silent when we passed Pentridge and I’d mouth, silently to my brother, IT’S A PRISON. A lot of the highway was single lane. Overtaking lanes were treated with reverence.  Craigieburn […]

If you happened to be driving from the city to the Melbourne Cup, you’d whisk through our shopping centre, Newmarket, in the twinkling of an eye. It’s a block and a half of Racecourse Road in Flemington, an old-fashioned street of peeling two-storey Victorian buildings. It’s got a few nice trees, but apart from its […]

  When I was a young boy my father would take me to the Moomba festival each year. Not to witness the annual parade, but the weight-lifting events held on a rickety stage in Yarra Park. We would walk from our one-bedroom terrace in Fitzroy, through the city to the river’s edge. Obsessed with masculinity […]

The Night Reverses is a unique two-man show that remixes poetry into a live music improvisation. Performing a selection of spoken word, Nathan presents Geoffrey with a high-risk challenge in front of a live audience. Upon hearing each piece for the very first time Geoffrey immediately replies, freestyling the poem into a groove via a loop machine and his […]

So I get on the train and sit beside the writer Carmel Bird and we talk.  Talking, we get around to favourite authors.  I tell Carmel when I’m reading the works of the Polish writer Hanna Krall I know why I write and when I stop reading her I slip back into my usual state […]

  I’m always looking out for deer, searching the gaps between the tall trees, watching the road ahead, sitting still in the clearings. But they remain hidden. Worse, they’re forbidden. Stretching back their ballet-dancer ears, alert to any approaches, nibbling the undergrowth, rubbing against the aromatic sassafras. Each hair singled out by the early morning […]

“Darling.” “Mother.” “I have a surprise for you. We bought a house!” “What? You and dad are in Syria, how did you sign a contract?” “Your uncle. Oh darling, its’ beautiful.” “Where is it?” “Huge! Five bedrooms, high ceilings, solid construction.” “Uncle George can’t read. What were the contract terms?” “It’s got a bar, a […]

Sources cited & further reading Djillong: Useful website which presents research and history of the Wadawurrung people, and timeline of interactions with European invaders. Wathaurong – The People Who Said No – prepared by Bruce Pascoe for the Wathaurong Aboriginal Co-operative and Coast Action (2003) Wathaurong: Too Bloody Strong – Bruce Pascoe (1998) “Wetland wanderings 2 brochure.” Geelong Australia Website. “Orange-bellied […]

I never really noticed the seasons when I lived in the suburbs. I was aware of them only in terms of the effect that they had on my body – making me shivery or flushed with heat. I did not notice the world beyond my skin – the unfurling of new leaves or the way […]

The skyline from behind the Vic Market From any angle, at night, the high-rises of Melbourne’s north-western grid are mesmerising; like bioluminescent undersea worlds, they become towering symbols of the infinitely complex, unknowable nature of life on earth. But during the day, viewed from the western corner of the grid, the skyline is like a […]

first the bridal shops women and their mothers     .    .    .    .    .      .  threading through them                                         . tinny ringing of bells                                […]

My entire day spent riding the Melbourne Star, from when it opened at 11am until it closed at 7pm, started pleasantly enough. I arrived shortly before the observation wheel opened, collected my pass from the counter and stepped into my glass-encased tomb. I did a 30-minute flight, as it’s called, taking in the sights of […]

The driveway is five minutes all itself, downhill through eucalypt and uphill through casuarina. I used to think they were pine; we cut one for a Christmas tree each year. The farm-house is on a hill surrounded by cattle paddocks, rolling down from the house on all sides. Cypresses mark the fence lines near the […]

Jin sat on her apartment’s kitchen floor, which was also the dining room, living room and bedroom floor, and looked at her bird. It was a blackbird, which she knew because its feathers were black. It had lived with her for 47 days, and now it was dead.   The blackbird was dead because Jin […]

i. The Prehistoric Age The age of The barbigerous The Brobdingnagian Marsupial King of Nairm Begins its descent with nascent Primitive sands vomiting saltbush Into the dry basin’s brackish puddles From bald rookeries and future beaches. From the dribble-of-a-river’s furthest reaches, Formations of preexisting rock put a squeeze on Fossil remains of proto-ancient critters predisposed, […]

  My mother broke her back trying to do the impossible:   grow us new tongues crack into new bones. In Springvale I foraged the streets for low hanging fruits. Floating   back and forth. See Iraq with black and white vision. There are no new   images. Peer through the window at abundance, a […]

It appeared one day in 1991 and some people will tell you that it happened overnight, like magic. Others will say that it was commissioned by the Birchip Promotion and Development Committee and unveiled by Councillor John, “…or was it Josh, or maybe even Julie”. Either way, it ended up taking pride of place in […]

  The Great Ocean Road waxes, wanes and stretches out across the eroding spine of Victoria’s coastline. Its movements are a comfort, familiar, so much so that Tamar doesn’t even notice the rain until they’re driving through it. Past the empty paddocks, blurry road sign after blurry road sign, distances and destinations escaping their eye […]

  Christopher foraged through the Spoils of bankrupted retailers Finding the finest clothes, curtains and sheets For his people across the brackish river They called him ‘The People’s Draper.’ This city once wore white gloves That you could buy from Forges The West’s Own Department Store Even tossers from the other side of town Knew […]

  She leans her head against hard glass, her body swaying with the train’s long metal shimmy. Eyes closed, sunlight flickering softly through eucalyptus leaves. Her limbs buzz – they have been too long beneath fluoro lights, too long in workplace stillness. This is her first chance to throw off the city like a heavy […]

Instantly impressive from the very first step, this freestanding single-fronted Victorian features an expansive kitchen, entertaining space for children and pets. with private remote garage for one of south- eastern Melbourne’s most thriving locations Elevated setting allows for alfresco relaxing in large floor-to-ceiling cupboards and built-in sunshine creates a sense of tranquility with private outlooks. […]

Every winter, my parents wrapped my brother and I in mittens, beanies and ski gear that made us look like polyester sumo wrestlers. We piled into the Volvo and took off to the greatest ski resort of my childhood: Mt Donna Buang.   Okay, it was the only ski resort of my childhood. Oh, and […]

You know before you arrive that ‘the last corroboree was staged in 1862, about two miles outside Hexham, for the amusement of the white conquerors’.[1] There are a lot of lasts around here, after all: the type you find on obelisks and studio portraits, they pass unseen (‘let others tell the tale I cannot’).[2]   […]

Estragon leans against a trestle table of children’s picture books. He turns an envelope over in his hands. The envelope is unstamped. He is third in line.   The line doesn’t move. Outside the sun hangs lower in the sky. The line doesn’t move. Exhausted, he puts the envelope in his bag. The line moves […]

In third-grade, my teacher Mr Collins asked us all to submit floorplans of our houses. I think we were learning about ratio and scale. While in hindsight this project seems sinister – why really would our teacher want us to hand in something so private, and why didn’t my parents question this? – I submitted […]

The days before I left Fitzroy I tried to do all of my favourite things there. I’m prone to sentimentality and wanted to savour every moment. When I shaved my head at the start of the year I nervously went to Marios, my then local, hoping they wouldn’t make a scene about my hair. The […]

(A song cycle in 5 parts) I You’d think the fell they monged would be day’s cut, mountain ash & red gum, hard lumber sluiced down the river named Falls, over the falls named Dight, to the shallows     or failing that, fell as in hill as in   that fell up the Slope from the Flat […]

Our house was at the bottom of a sloping street. A converted cream workers’ cottage, turned into a 2-storey terrace. It had a creaky iron gate that never closed, and a reddish brown front door that required a key-jiggle in the lock to get in. Encased in a bluestone fence and too-steep stone steps out […]

elias and i at the train station his arm draped slack round my neck the train cops asking-asking hey miss is everything alright like they can’t see elias is with me and that we’re both fucken fried             he’s my boyfriend he’s with me he’s with me everything is fine but elias runs underneath the […]

As I put on my shoes, I hear again the voice of Abu-Umar, Sheikh One-Sermon as we called him, claiming that a white couple once converted to Islam because he was an honest used-car salesman. They were so astounded by his honesty that they demanded to have him over for dinner, and over months, he […]

Suburbs are living stories. They have a beginning, or several beginnings, depending on where you start. Characters appear and depart. Things change: an arc. A suburb is retold again and again, like mythology, made constant and new­. One story about Hoppers Crossing rests on the name. The old road from Geelong intersects with a train […]

Rush of ascension, to know this kind of high—height—& falling, the sky’s pulse yours, this lift & freight: ‘famed aeronaut’ three times thwarted: days of rain a weight in canvas & silk, until— [May 17, 1890] —the balloon made of Irish linen & measured                       […]

On a cloudy Tuesday in October, Coral waited on the platform at Blackburn station in the same salmon-pink pantsuit she had worn to Mac’s funeral six weeks earlier. Though she had worried that someone might tell her it was an inappropriate outfit for the occasion, despite being his favourite colour on her, no one had […]

When I was choosing the setting for my novel, The Choke, I was interested in a rural area somewhere on the Murray River. I knew nature was going to be important to my central character, ten-year-old Justine Lee. I learned that Barmah, just north of the border with NSW, and only 230 km’s from Melbourne, was […]

It was always on. Every summer. The soundtrack of the holiday season coming from a small television in the corner of the lounge room. Even in non-sporty households the Boxing Day Test at the MCG was compulsory viewing – or at least it was compulsory to tune in, like somehow it was understood that it […]

Tully is standing in line with the other girls. Since signing up she’d been told she would be relocated at the next community meeting.  A few days ago she had travelled to the station with a group she didn’t recognise, headphones in, eyes unfocussed, hoods up. On the short bus ride they passed new demolished […]

When silence settles over the house once again, Farya quietly opens the door to the boys’ room and watches them sleep through the crack. The covers have been kicked to the perimeter of the bed, carving angels out of the sheets. Farya stalks into the room and lifts the doona back up to cover their […]

If there is despair here, it is of the manicured, medicated variety. Windows glint in the sunlight, there are lovely nature-strips. I wander down to the oval where I played football for several years with the Balwyn Tigers, for it’s around here that my memories of the suburb seem to coalesce. It’s school holidays, there […]

The house replays Nan her circular patterns of speech, like the living room caught wind of her lineage and wanted to listen in There are mid-century pallets on floors, and garish colours that pale everyone who enters becomes a witness to automatic narration A name is a gift, I think. I appreciate the filial ceremony […]

It’s kind of a cliché now to talk about how you can’t afford to live in the city you love or the city that made you or the city you need to be in for things to make sense. There’s just no point in dwelling on it. Things change. Mostly for the worse? Feel free […]

On a street that doesn’t exist but does exist – not just in a ‘This Is Not A Pipe’ smug way, but in a you can send mail there and everything, way – live several families who hate each other. They hate each other for reasons that we can’t remember and reasons that sometimes they […]

My revenge against Wang has been to reduce it to a series of humorous anecdotes. I know just how to tell them. There’s the one about how the local technical college used to be called Wangaratta King College, which they eventually changed because … wang-king college, you get it. There’s the one about how I […]

For once, Suriyan’s not late when he gets on the bus at Northland Shopping Centre and off at the corner of the Town Hall, saying: ‘Thanks, chum! Thank you,’ and waving at the driver. With time to spare he decides to buy some vadai or pan rolls to share among those he’s meeting. He crosses […]

His present to me that year was the West Gate Bridge. Just before Christmas on our first date, I’d asked where he lived, expecting one of the inner northern suburbs that usually made up my dating pool. “Sunshine”, was his answer. I must have looked bewildered. ‘Deep west’, was his explanation. When I asked a […]

No-one knows where Albion is, and being 7 km south of similarly-sounding St Albans doesn’t help matters (yes, I did just help you locate it). No, northsiders, when I say I live in Albion I’m not saying I live on Albion Road, Brunswick: been there, done that. Albion is essentially Sunshine, or rather, it would […]

From just up here on the olive lip of mountain mileage that pooling mouth below, half salt but also hill-fresh, could seem a lagoon. On its low point surmounting asphalt and the roll of waves sits the verandaed pub, plain focus of holiday shorescape. During the great forest fires  decades of my sap ago, bluegum […]

Living in St Kilda is like living in permanent holiday mode, where your real, alternate world can’t touch you with its grubby, stress-saturated hands. I can’t tell you the exact date that I moved in, not even the vague sense of the month or season, yet it’s become a familiar ritual as I make my […]