FictionIt was a loud dinner. Everything was loud. The murmuring soundtrack of free jazz seemed to emphasise laughs and guffaws. He grew drunker and drunker and toyed with his food, which no one even noticed. Normally, he would wolf down everything they cooked, but he twisted his fork in the spaghetti and just kept twisting. As he was on serving duty, he cleared it up without anyone even registering he’d barely taken a bite.

Poetry Mildew on the whiteness of Hölderlin’s shoulders, his phantom limb reaching towards an ideal he is sure he’ll reach. When the snow comes I am not even sure if we’ll still be here, and what state the snow will present in – a white dusting...

PoetryIf the magical colours aren’t even across the page, it’s a failure of art according to aesthetes. An obscenity of blues and reds, they say.

PoetryBuried in slough of immaculate lust We wave off the iron-man model Coughing up money and fake lottery tix Ipso facto zippers and guylines, Flysheets and groundsheets, door folds And support poles, mosquito netting to keep Blood supplies intact, and appease the vista. Our business is...

Poetry‘The world is all that is the case.’ Wittgenstein   but not a newsfeed, not really...   A person isn’t a noun or an abstract noun. When the termites swarm over dry tracts after sudden wet, after deluge, after the rise of moisture mocks the dryness and...

FictionIN TERMS OF the event, the make or type of bikes surely doesn’t matter now, but it weirdly did then, so the issue seems to warrant emphasis in the process of looking back. The dragsters and stingrays, the one...

PoetryCome in, dead Emily. Judith Wright, ‘Rosina Alcona to Julius Brenzaida’     All these lines we funnel, have need of. The dead trouble us to live, and that can’t resolve into images that don’t latch on where ghosts wish for the tactile. It’s where I procured...

PoetrySearch optimisation is the bronzewing’s nemesis or indifference if it’s your attention it wants, though it’s not; link farming from Russian capitalists to offset the tender feelings aroused by recently planted olive tree saplings wilting with the frost, or the discovery of a thriving...

PoetrySnow is falling white-outover the Schloss and its collectionsof the dead. A small marble hand glistens in its case and holdsa...broken staff of life? In a darkroom animals carved from mammoths’ tusks forty-thousand years ago,and downstairs, a piece of knotted blue...

PoetryGoing away enforced where I was.There was no here without there.The Canning River fed Bull Creekovershadowed by paperbarkswith its sharp white shore, a cul de sacfed from the Hills, up over the Scarp. Or far up the coast, a new...

FictionMiner Old Tin Lizzie was the first car in Kookynie ---– the fella owed me money and wanted me to take it in payment, the kids pestering and me understanding that most of all they wanted to be the first kids in town, for a little while at least. I...

PoetryWhere all of what was there Is redacted to pasture and ditches, Orchards and dairies. Cows Omnipresent but without Domain, heavy to drag The eternal calf in the udder, Or torment the fated poddy Bellowing in its lone stall....

PoetryThe Moore or Maura River flows steadily and filmically over the ford; in twisted roots of melaleuca working green water with its platelets and clots of algae broken up in quasi-rapids, the conflicted smoothness of roots that ghost and...

PoetryLambs to the slaughter, we played under the ramp. Gangplank, dead-end, chasm. Beneath: inside the belly of an inland ship. Under the ramp sky cut through cracks. Dust motes flew jagged and the stench was close-packed and scared;...

FictionSelected for Best Australian Stories 2007They had their hearts set on purchasing a piece of land up north, but not too far north. Coastal – or as near coastal as they might afford. Close to a town for supplies,...

FictionHE'D DRIVEN DOZERS for thirty years. From bobcats to D10s. As a young bloke, he'd started in a warehouse driving forklifts. Now that's an art-form. The experienced could whiz them around on a pin and load a truck faster...

FictionBEN GETS ON the phone immediately and rings his brother who farms two hours' drive away. It's raining! he yells. Really raining. It's raining! What's it like at your place? Nothing here, replies his brother in a subdued tone....