December 27

More from author

Heart and history

Yasmin Smith is a poet and editor of South Sea Islander, Kabi Kabi, Northern Cheyenne and English heritage. Her work has appeared in Overland, Meanjin, frankie magazine, and Island. In 2024, she won the Nakata Brophy Prize for her poem ‘Dawning in the Rivulet of My Father’s Mourning’ and the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize for ‘The Burial Feathers’. In addition to her writing pursuits, Yasmin works as an editor.

More from this edition

Reluctant farewell to a trusted companion

Non-fiction‘We have the same stroller,’ a woman in the line said to me. I turned and there she was, my first friend. A New York mother of two with her stroller. The same stroller! In black.

Getting attached

IntroductionMore than fifty years after Larkin lamented the emotional inadequacy of generations past, we’ve equipped ourselves with an extensive vocabulary with which to characterise, analyse and diagnose our relationships with ourselves, with others, and with the places, objects and ideas that shape our sense of who we are and who we wish to become. Yet still we face the same old set of conundrums: from parasocial connections and fractious family politics to the solace we seek in non-human entities, our myriad attachments continue to offer us comfort and complication in equal measure.

Land of my fathers

Non-fictionOn Saturday mornings his friends would call in to pick him up for the game. Like him, they were broad and tall and humorous, and never still. None of them ever seemed comfortable indoors. Their faces were fevered from sitting in winter stadiums. Even as septuagenarians they continued to refer to themselves as ‘the boys’, and if my mother materialised before them, they’d blush like children.