When your mother tells you about the time she sat waiting, in Canberra’s iconic queer space Tilley’s Devine Café Gallery, anticipating the arrival of four friends who had hatched and then executed a plan to rob a vegetarian restaurant, you listen.

My work of short fiction, Inner Peas, draws on queer and second wave feminist culture of 1980s Canberra to tell the (mostly) true story of a heist pulled off by my mother’s university friends in an ode to female friendship and reclaiming power.

My purpose is to commemorate the feat, whilst celebrating the second wave feminist movement and its impact on female empowerment and friendships.

In my short story, I drew on my mother’s first-person recount of what it was like to be present, albeit as a spectator, as well as from research – which was really fun to do – into the culture of the era. It was via these means that I found a powerful voice, entwining comedic elements with engaging characters, to enhance and flesh out my narrative.

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They say the reputation of a thousand years can be undermined by the conduct of a single hour, but the way her night was going, Scout thought she could do it in five minutes. With the head chef absent for the night, the responsibility had fallen on her to run the kitchen. Table 14 had sent back salads for being too green and Table 2 was demanding a list of every ingredient to make sure no animal products crossed their lips. Nightmare. Scout desperately needed a break, and a cigarette. She was tired, she was grumpy, and she was over it. Over working long shifts at a restaurant whose food she couldn’t afford, over men who tried to show off by trying to explain to her the difference between a fry pan and a skillet, and over having to point out to them that she outranked them in the kitchen and knew better than they did what the difference was. Balancing study and work was getting harder the closer she came to finishing her degree, but Scout needed the extra money if she was ever going to get out of Canberra and head to the big smoke. She longed to escape the blue eucalypt haze and the way all the days seemed to blur together. It would be hard to leave her friends, and home they’d made, but there was more opportunity, and less familiarity, everywhere else…

My major work, a poetic triplet, Awaken – or, The Dream that was Living, is an exploration of the human psyche and the existence of the self in the stages prior to and following death.

Inspired primarily by The Tibetan Book of the Dead, I examine the nature of consciousness, the loss of self through separation of the consciousness from the physical body and the process of reincarnation.

My three-part suite begins with The Death followed by The Realisation of Reality and The Rebirth. I was heavily influenced by Buddhist teachings and contemporary psychedelic philosophy, which dictates one’s self is not their physical body or a definable object but exists as an ever changing state.

I have also integrated my own interpretation of memory and consciousness, informed by my own research. My aim in producing Awaken is to challenge my audience, offering them a new perspective on concepts of life and consciousness, evoking a feeling of clarity and wonder. I have targeted my work at young men interested in introspectively exploring themselves, publishing it through social media and other internet forums to be easily accessible to that market.

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The faint crunching
whisper of blowing, trodden
sun-drenched grass
caressing the wooden
shell of this shack. The rusted
Coca Cola sign rattling
in the endless breeze.
A veil of my life
carefully covering
my coffin. I waste away.
Many breaths, many
steps led me to my
tomb.

I have walked to
this barren wasteland.
This Graveyard
of Time. Crumbled
tomb stones, centuries
of shifting sands
bundled beneath
blades of grass littered
with bottle caps
and bush branches. Shifting
sand that I will become.

The land is cracked,
crushed shells
splinter the soles
of my feet. Remnants
of a once wet sea
fruitful with fertility.

Nothing out
here survives.
Lips cracked,
skin torn,
ribs bare.

Picture my
petty person.
Picture crows pecking
my eyes. Leaving me
torn, sightless, gaping holes
a window to my skull…

With no static home, the passport of a country I’d never been to and the complexion of a culture I never knew, I always found myself stuck in identity limbo. With family as my only constant, I clung tightly to their ideals, ignoring the constant doubt that surrounded my perception of difference.

When embarking on the journey of my major work, Deciduous, I hoped to explore and appease this doubt that manifests in children of all backgrounds through my heteroglossic narrative of unconventional poetry.

As my major work developed, it became a mode of encouragement, proving that all journey’s lead to self-actualisation and displaying what collectivises all adolescents: change.

Through unconventional and narrative poetry, I tackle the correlation between one’s personal and cultural identity throughout pivotal moments in adolescence, exploring the disparate familial arcs of a third culture kid (TCK) and those with one distinct home: Australia.

Having a fragmented identity as a TCK currently immersed in Australian Culture, I was eager to explore the inherent differences of children of different cultures. After exploring E Homi K. Bhaba’s third space theory, I assumed his postmodernist approach which helped shape Deciduous into a fictional narrative, coalescing two uniquely crafted personalities, representing the validity of difference.

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‘02 read the headlines, the morning
On the first day of my sweet adoring.

My eyelids’ first flutter, as they searched for another:
Sagacity and soul showed my mother and father;

The fragmented snip of the leathery lead
Moulded the form with all things foreseen.

As the bulbs above shone brightly and bold,
Sanitation and stethoscopes brushed my supple skin, stark cold.

Mother held me close, stapled to her chest
As warmth flooded my body, I felt her love professed.

‘02 read the paper that morning
which enabled all of my pending exploring.

Opened to loved ones, just them as a home,
A narrowed scope of new buttery tones

Constant and sure,
I sunk in the future I’d known not to endure.

The hospitals hum sang mother’s reassurance
As she stared into my eyes which wandered past my parents.

Past the door I saw rummaging, distant strangers in cloaks of white.
I felt a first taste of the Australian appetite

Looking back. Feeling. Remembering.

I rummage through the bloated pages of my first logbook. Behind its unclean edges, scrawled notes are stuffed between rumpled sheets of paper. From this crucible, my Creative Nonfiction major work Understanding Evil was born. It didn’t start this way.

Beginning in the shallow waters of contemporary far-right extremism, I took my first steps as an outsider poring through the internet. As I observed wave upon wave of modern-day Nazis, my shock at their unchecked hatred was only trumped
by the terrifying realisation that these people were, in many ways, just regular human beings.

I took the bitter plunge into the past, investigating the question: What drives the ordinary person to evil?

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The calm, measured voice of Adolf Eichmann spreads to every corner of the
courtroom as he faces down the barrels of a thousand cameras and the silence of
the three judges.

Choosing each word carefully, he considers what he says, weighing it up. A
bureaucratic man.

One thing is clear as he stands there in the glass cage, with his round black
glasses and patchy baldness: this is a human being. A rather bland one. His small
meek frame and sunken cheeks betray nothing of his involvement in such
unspeakable crimes.

Bureaucratically, neatly, carefully and meticulously he had negotiated, organising meetings and talking with the parties involved, finding mutually beneficial deals. Compromises.

One cog in a genocide.

Inhabiting the voice of journalist and philosopher Hannah Arendt, I attune myself to
its hazy frequencies, peering into the past in search of answers.

I sit among the crowd of eyes and onlookers at Eichmann’s grand spectacle
with my pen and notepad, scanning the courtroom as I often do.

When I first began covering the Trial of Adolf Eichmann, I expected the crowd
to consist of fellow journalists and reporters, as well as the younger generation of
Israelis who were not around to experience the devastating effects of the Third Reich
and needed to learn for themselves…

My major work, A Wanderer Beyond Dusk, draws on the alternative literary traditions established by H. P. Lovecraft, R. E. Howard, and Jack Vance that champion the symbolic and figurative possibilities of everyday life as refracted through the dark lens of timeslip and weird fiction.

I tell the story of an undergraduate whose future is braided into the present in a doubling back of temporal ambiguity. In doing so, I seek to explore the metaphysical strangeness of growing up, and growing old, as well as to come to grips with the way unresolved Australian colonial history remains traumatically present in the 21st Century.

As a historically-minded reader I have always had a strong attachment to antiquity and a fascination for erstwhile eras. In my Stage 6 studies, I was particularly drawn to the way that literary texts were situated in their historical context in my English Extension 1 Elective, Worlds of Upheaval.

Choices made during writing were not taken lightly. The title, the tone, the central character and overall the plot were all considered over the months of time I have been crafting the major work. The title A Wanderer Beyond Dusk could only have come about once the plot started to take its finalised form.

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Afternoon carries with it a certain scent, a particular ambiance. An older man, in his sixties perhaps, sits atop the back spare of a boxy automobile. Gazing over the Inner West streets as the sun’s last rays licked the road’s bitumen. With vacant eyes, old Nathanial pondered the scene. An attitude of melancholy had gripped him as of late, the last vestiges of light playing games with his mind. The memory of a sunset not dissimilar unnerved him.

There is a transition, he thought. Natural and constant, a change that occurs when lumen vanishes. He remembered such a shift, but at that time the veil of reality was lifted just a chink. Straining his tired brain, he attempted to arrange his thoughts, stroking his beard as he did so. No coherent framework would help, no modern scientific method. He chuckled to himself. Philosophy and metaphysics ceased to be satisfactory in scope for what he had seen. Those structures simply presented more questions and answered far fewer. His mind whirred uneasily…

In Vivek Shraya’s novel, I’m Afraid of Men she encourages readers to get to the source of where hyper-masculine behaviour comes from and sets out to confront it.

This book leads to the heart of my major work titled Airing Out The Locker Room, where I aim to discover how toxic masculinity affects all facets of Australian society. Through the podcast platform, I have used the research gathered to explain the “who, what, where and how” of toxic masculinity.

Inspired by creative non-fiction texts such as Rebecca Sonlit’s Men Explain Things to Me, creative nonfiction elements have allowed me to create a setting for the events in my podcast.

Additionally I have been able to write a colloquial text that appeals to the listener. This year saw revolutionary reports on the treatment of women in parliament and in Sydney private schools and I believe now is a relevant time to discuss these issues. This episode of my vignette-style podcast aims to educate young men in my position about what toxic masculinity is and what it leads to.

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For this episode of the show I am looking at how exactly toxic masculinity has affected various people and their experiences with it. I will share with you two stories. One from a friend of mine who was visiting from his boarding school in regional Australia and the other one from a girl who I knew quite well when we were on the bus together. I have analysed these stories and tried to delve deeper into what led these incidents to occur. I have spoken to both parties and have obtained permission to speak on behalf of them about these issues…

Our ability to explore and explain our world is merely based on our perception of it. A mere perception may be flawed. What if there is the absence of something, but we interact as if it is there? Or what if things came and went, only when we required it? We would have no way of knowing.

This concept related to the existence and absence of objects is defined as “Metaphysical Nihilism”.

The purpose of my major work, If On A Summer’s Day, a listener [Summers Day] is to explore this in a creative, idiosyncratic accessible fashion that is entertaining and thought-provoking for a wide audience. I was able to achieve this through the application of Thomas Baldwin’s 1996 doctorate “There Might Be Nothing”, a critical theory underpinning the very nature and construction of my work.

An extensive and eclectic research path has underpinned the direction of my work. Prior to composing “Summers Day” and discovering Baldwin’s argument, I began doing an in-depth study of Italo Calvino’s If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller. I was intrigued by Calvino’s use of the second person and meta-fictive narrative. 

I decided to delve deeper into the complexities of the second person, leading me to explore Inge Fink’s The Power behind the Pronoun: Narrative games in Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler.

It was when Fink noted that Calvino seemed “to share the postmodernist notions of the self-conscious” I began to navigate for the connections between postmodernism and the self-conscious.

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You are about to begin listening to this brand-new podcast, If On a Summer’s Day A Listener. Relax, dispel every other thought; Put down your copy of Italo Calvino’s, If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller, it won’t be needed. Open a window if your hot, let the cool air flow through, turn your fan on if you prefer; or, if you can afford it, turn on the air conditioner. If your too cold, best to close the window back up, rain or cold wind might flow in. If it’s not enough, turn your heater on, turn the air conditioner back on; or, just put on a jumper or jacket.

Now, put your feet up or, put them down; down on your table, flat on the floor, rested on your sleeping dog. You could bend them around your head if you really want. Just make sure you’re comfortable; once playing, it’s like a find record or, cd if you prefer, you don’t want to disturb it and just let it speak away. Oh, it’s best to close the door, you’ll hear the other room, or the wildness of the outside otherwise; You don’t have to close it, only it’s only if you really want. Scan over your screen, phone, iPad; whatever device you’re playing it off. And read the back of it, it’s blurb, the reviews, authors note, check the episode list; just check if other people like it, or if there’s anything better to listen to.

Oh well, what are you waiting for? You’ve spent too much time getting comfortable that maybe you should have started playing it. Last checks, you comfortable? Not too hot or cold? Feet nicely rest down, up or around your head?

…

Letters for my Father is a suite of six poems, intended as a manifestation of my father’s experience as a person of colour, born into the height of the South African Apartheid and flowing into my own experience as a white-passing, mixed-race individual in contemporary Australia.

Finding its origins in the fragments of my father’s stories told to me throughout my childhood – stories whose true significance and value I only truly began to understand as a young adult, Letters for my Father situates itself in the charged space that is the contemporary reexamination of race relations.

Impelled by the increasing urgency of the Black Lives Matter movement, Letters for my Father represents the estrangement from cultural identity, the passing of trauma and self-actualisation flowing from one individual to another.

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Burning Man
Where was your fire born?
Burning Man.
Foreign flame,
curio from conflict past.
I have watched you,
wide-eyed from birth.
recognising brilliance
in your own.
The source
of your heat,
an engulfing golden glow.
The lamp of your arms
ablaze with —
warmth and light for all
who cross your path.
Basking in curious love,
inescapable charm,
and the strength of your silence.
A flaming pillar
2
of fierce joy.
Born from you,
enamoured by
the swirling crimson,
amethyst and sapphire
—
your tender light.

The bright mahogany
,
warm and wide, Your smile erasing
fear and pain.
The kind caramel,
flecked with golden honey
,
the large eyes peering
deep within my soul.

I have always been fascinated by the bond between mother and daughter. Although the relationship begins as one of pure, unconditional love, it frequently becomes turbulent and fraught with disconnect. My intent in crafting my short story The Visit was to explore the separation that occurs between mother and daughter as the daughter matures. My purpose was to urge a re-definition of the mother-daughter bond as one of love and support rather than resentment.

The Visit is aimed at a female audience, ranging in age from young adult to adult. They should have an interest in literature commenting on the female experience. As such, I see my work being best suited to publication in the literary journal Adanna, a journal “for women, about women,” which publishes works that “reflect women’s issues or topics” and “celebrate womanhood”.

Honouring the mother-daughter bond as sacred is at the heart of my Major Work. I hope to communicate that the close, spiritual relationship that is so often lost can be rekindled.

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I stand on the street outside the house. It has two windows paned with stained glass on either side of the door. I can’t see through them. All I see is a strange reflection of my face, distorted in colours of red and green and blue. But I know that behind them is a bedroom. And down the corridor there is a kitchen. I know that there is a garden out the back. I remember the way the burning bricks tiled around the lawn felt on my tiny bare feet as I looked out across the grass. I used to think that my garden was endless. That it was as long and as wide as the sky.

If the garden was the sky, then the house was a castle, sitting on clouds. Glittering, tall,
and white, with red sloping roofs. It was surrounded by stars, by clouds coloured brilliant orange and gold as the sun rose behind them.

The house which I have come to is not mine.

She is out on the porch, hands folded in her lap, sitting on the wicker chair. I rest my hand on the metal gate. Flakes of green paint chip off into my palm, revealing thick rust underneath.

The wood on the fence is peeling. Nails jut out, ready to drive themselves through somebody’s skin. The streetlamps flicker on and the moon rises, casting its glow into the sky surrounding it.

“Dawn, you came,” she says. “You’re a bit late. I was beginning to worry…”

My early teenage years were clouded by unanswered questions due to my sister’s experience of sexual assault trauma. In recent years I have also been moved by the emergence of the #MeToo movement, a progressive public discourse surrounding sexual assault that validates survivors’ stories.

These influences prompted me to use my Extension 2 platform to engage with the fracturing and mending of my sister’s sense of self through a literary exploration of her world of upheaval. My Major Work, the poetry suite Gray Areas, has been my principal vehicle for transcending what became a dissonant relationship after the assault, and for exploring the particularly palimpsestic nature of a self disturbed by this form of trauma.

The modern lyric poetic form was integral in producing a literary expression of vulnerable emotion. My sister, herself a poet, used the form as a PTSD coping mechanism. A similar therapeutic approach underpins the English Advanced text, Ariel, by Sylvia Plath. Identifying this connection prompted me to traverse the field of postmodern confessional poetry.

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If I was putting you on –
like sister skin, layering
lipstick and foundation
over brotherly stubble,
this is what I would mirror.
Wiry curls
strangled
in braids
that slither
over porcelain features.
Glassy orbs,
and storm cloud brows.
Changing shape.
Changing mood.
A sloping nose,
tipped
by a razor’s point.
A skier’s nightmare.

Bold cheekbones
threatening
to slice fleshy cheeks.
A small black mole, decorating
thin, pale lips,
disguised by an innocent smile.
Singularly flawed –
an insecure thief
of sleep.
One side a sharp jaw,
the other side is soft.
A gentle spirit
and a fiery one,
an ethereal
Djinni.
Elf ears,
chained in silver trinkets.
A restless-boned corset
ribcage, which dangles
precariously
above narrow hips,
held steady by a
boneyard stomach.

A dried creek
splits your body,
running from throat to navel.
Disappearing
into the chasm.
Staring into
my paper mirror
our shared eyes converge.
The verse sketching
your face onto mine.
Melt my body, androgyne,
until I am nearly my sister,
no longer just your brother…

My collection of naturalist poetry Verba Florentes (hereafter Florentes) immerses readers in a metaphorical exploration of the internal conflict created while writing.

Through imagistic, immersive verse, Florentes presents transcendentalist values through the subverted gaze of one of its American founders: Henry David Thoreau; using a fusion of feminine and natural forces to underpin an integrative perspective. Using Thoreau’s time at Walden Pond as its inspiration, my poetic suite conveys a journey towards discovering one’s “self” through sublimity, in both poetry and nature. Furthermore, this journey of self discovery distils Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s concept that each individual has a connection with an atypical god—the soul.

Florentes thus extends spiritual concepts of self-reliance and connections to nature suggested in Emerson’s essays “Experience”, “Nature” and “Self-Reliance” (1844) as well as Thoreau’s Journal, inviting readers to contemplate the centrality of transcendentalism in their own lives.

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Glaring, flaring shadows on leaves. Seraphic sunlight
twirling the forest floor. Branches of sage, juniper and pine
igniting approaching darkness.
Daylight’s gleaming rays, illuminating
blackened soil. A board of black and white, where only queen
mother holds power. Checkering once
verdant ground, paring maples dwindle
at winter’s whisper. Morning sun’s glint igniting a blazing sermon;
erupting heavens. Roaring poetry, crying nature.
Brisk wail, winds sway sycamores—
they splay their limbs over damp loam.
Beaming rapture refracts
the fleeting brook,
light coruscating water, gleaming indefinitely.
Union of light, water and zephyr.
An almost tangible connection, quivering
in a stream of elation. Puppeteer dame, stringing
humanity together.

Suspended clouds of cotton, whiter than ivory silk. Defying none
but grounded hand of Mother. Lifted toward heavens by a god.
Peach palmed, embalmed. Encased by timber walls.
Preserved in thought, only to be liberated by the efflorescence
of black roses. Budding minds, planting next year’s bloom.
Animating comatosed ovules, nourishing infant ideas. Downpouring
blackened rain in perpetual cyclicity, breeding—fostering
4
seedlings. In golden light’s restoration, shoots of green,
pools of ink washing colour across pallor ground.
Come spring, enchanté et bienvenue…