Voiceworks - Express Media

Issue One Hundred and Four | Winter 2016
Voiceworks
New fiction, nonfiction, poetry, comics & visual art
from young Australians
$12 GST FREE
EDITOR
Lucy Adams
DESIGN AND ILLUSTRATION
Lynley Eavis
EDITORIAL COMMITTEE
Cathy Tran
Clare Millar
Ella Jeffery
Ellen Cregan
Eric Butler
Fiona Spitzkowsky
Jonno Revanche
Joshua Barnes
Katerina Bryant
Kat Gillespie
Kelsey Oldham
Lily Mei
Michelle Li
Mira Schlosberg
Myles McGuire
Nina Carter
Shu-Ling Chua
Tim McGuire
Vince Ruston
VOICEWORKS INTERN
Alexia Brehas
PRE-PRESS AND PRINTING
Printgraphics Pty Ltd
14 Hardner Road
Mount Waverley VIC 3149
printgraphics.com.au
PUBLISHED BY EXPRESS MEDIA
GENERAL MANAGER
Pippa Bainbridge
CREATIVE PRODUCER
Fiona Dunne
SCHOOLS PROGRAM
PRODUCER
Alice Chipkin
FINANCE AND
ADMINISTRATION
COORDINATOR
Victoria Bennett
MARKETING COORDINATOR
Samantha Taylor
EXPRESS MEDIA BOARD
Tracy O’Shaugnessy (Chair),
Andrew Trnacek (Treasurer),
Kate Wilson (Secretary), Julia
Carlomagno, Chris Dodds,
Meredith Curnow, Martin Portus,
John Gillman, John Ferguson.
EXPRESS MEDIA PATRON
John Marsden
EXPRESS MEDIA
COMMUNICATIONS INTERN
Chanel Zagon
CONTACT DETAILS
Express Media
The Wheeler Centre
176 Little Lonsdale St
Melbourne VIC 3000
VOICEWORKSM AG.COM. AU/
EXPRESSMEDIA .ORG. AU/
FACEBOOK.COM/
VOICEWORKSM AG
@VOICEWORKSM AG
(03) 9094 7890
Voiceworks is published quarterly
by Express Media, a national
not-for-profit organisation that
provides opportunities in the
literary arts for young people
aged twelve to thirty. Express
Media presents an annual artistic
program that encourages and
develops the work of young
Australian writers.
Find out more about our program
at expressmedia.org.au.
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The views and ideas expressed in
Voiceworks are not necessarily
those held by the management
committee, staff or volunteers of
Express Media Inc. Every effort is
made to substantiate statements of
fact made in Voiceworks.
Express Media are proud to
acknowledge this journal was
produced and edited on the
traditional lands of the Wurundjeri
people of the Kulin nation. As a
national magazine, we also pay
our respects to the traditional
custodians of all the lands from
which the stories and artwork in
this issue was sourced.
ISSN 1038 4464
VOICEWORKS
ISSUE NUMBER 104
WINTER 2016
COPYRIGHT 2016
‘The Swimming Pool Cake’ is by Emma Hough Hobbs (19), an
artist and film student from Adelaide. When not watching anime...
Wait, never mind, she’s always watching anime.
Editorial
Lucy Adams
Surviving The Apocalypse
—p. 4
Eric Butler
Sweet Tooth—p. 6
Fiction
Eda Gunaydin
Meat—p. 9
Kelly Palmer
Anthrax—p. 29
Jonathan O’Brien
—and anyway, we
promised you a story,
didn’t we——p. 49
Holly Friedlander
Liddicoat
It’s Almost Time (now,
this time, here, in
Leipzig)—p. 36
Hugo Branley
A More Modern Torso
—p. 47
Gina Karlikoff
Gigi Hadid—p. 72
Danyon Burge
The Cake Ahead—p. 28
Jocelyn Deane
Apples—p. 82
Ania Gareeva
Birthday Party Matches
—p. 56
Zhi Yi Cham
Cusp—p. 88
Emily Crocker
Sprouts—p. 103
Lauren Farquhar
Road Kill—p. 83
Alex Griffin
A Brief History And Short
Future Of The Imaginary
Sharehouse—p. 19
Mindy Gill
Orang asing—p. 16
Louise Jacques
Prix Fixe—p. 26
Brigit Lambert
Banana Cake—p. 8
Lee Lai
Friday—p. 15
Nonfiction
Poetry
Emma Hough Hobbs
The Swimming Pool
Cake—p. 1
Chloe Mayne
Tectonic—p. 63
Mikaella Clements
Vertical Wine Tasting
—p. 65
Bethany Leak
These Hands—p. 97
Visual Art
Bartholomew Pawlik
The Surprising
Psychology Of Food
—p. 41
Nathan Mifsud
Bajitar Paradise—p. 57
Lucy Hunter
Apples—p. 90
Gabby Loo
It Took Me To Where I
Needed To Be—p. 102
Anwyn Hocking
PsychideliCake—p. 112
Comics
Harry McLean
Carretera Austral
(Route 7)—p. 38
Julia Trybala
Slow Burn—p. 79
Ellen Wengert
By The Half Dozen—p. 74
Kim Lateef
No Wedding Cake For An
Illegal Romance—p. 91
VOICEWORKS • 3
EDITORIAL
Surviving The Apocalypse
By Lucy Adams
Each morning, aftEr dusting the brimstone off my boots and zipping up my
hazmat suit, I strike out into the acid fog, skipping over toxic waste puddles, on
my way to the Voiceworks headquarters. The journey has felt perilous at times,
what with the apocalypse still hanging in the air.
On a day of reckoning now known as Black Friday, Express Media, which
publishes Voiceworks, was one of sixty-two arts organisations defunded in the most
recent round of Australia Council grants. There’s been plenty of media coverage on
the devastation the cuts will have on the creative landscape of Australia, and the
dominant narrative reads like doomsday.
Before the cuts, we already existed in an environment fundamentally hostile
towards young writers—a culture that dismisses the validity and legitimacy of
young voices. Writing by young people is so often patted on the head and sent to
wait in the corner until it’s ready to play with the grown-ups. If the terrain for
young writers was once inhospitable, now it’s been irradiated.
The current state of alarm is warranted, and the outrage appropriate, but what
all this means exactly for the fate of the defunded organisations remains uncertain.
Our readers and contributors want to know: what will happen to Voiceworks?
A world without Voiceworks is my idea of a dystopian hellscape. Left with
no-one to value or publish their work, young writers—rogue and feedbackless—
would take to keying poems into train windows or Artlining short stories onto
spools of toilet paper.
But we’re not there yet—this is not the end of Voiceworks.
In dark and dangerous times such as these, it’s difficult not to internalise the
apocalypse. We live in a perpetual state of unease brought about by the realisation
that our lives depend on things—institutions, policies, errant asteroids—beyond
our control. As young people, we feel this lack of control acutely. There’s a huge
disparity between the strength of our ambitions and desires, and the lack of power
or agency we’re granted by society. At times this discrepancy is so stifling it can
feel like the world is ending.
But there are strategies for surviving the apocalypse. Knowing I still had to
see this issue to print, despite Nostradamus tapping at my window, I looked to
learn from those who’ve already succeeded in surviving several mass extinctions.
4 • VOICEWORKS
I transformed into an editor extremophile—a critter that withstands catastrophic
conditions detrimental to life on Earth.
At first I channelled the tardigrade (aka water bear or moss pig), a micro-animal
able to withstand all manner of extremes—pressure, radiation, dehydration, boiling
and freezing temperatures, the vacuum of space—by entering a cryobiotic ‘tun’ state
that renders it practically indestructible. Lesson: be a real tough guy.
Then came the mummichog, a fish with the ability to activate and deactivate
a large number of its genes according to its environment. It can thrive in any
water type—fresh or salty, warm or cold, polluted or clean—and even in the
weightlessness of space. Lesson: adapt and modify.
When all of this failed, I became the lingula, a clam-like creature with a hinged
shell, which burrows deep under the ocean floor to shelter from cataclysmic
events. Lesson: retreat from the world, need nothing and no-one until it’s safe to
emerge again.
It turns out the best animal to model yourself on when faced with human
problems is the human—a creature fundamentally reliant on community. There’s
only so much we can achieve through toughening up or burrowing down. The
magazine in your hands wouldn’t exist unless I’d asked for help. Reaching out to
other humans makes for a pretty good survival strategy.
If post-apocalyptic young adult sci-fi has taught us anything, it’s that our
future rests on the shoulders of a rag-tag gang of loveable young misfits (and that
at least one of them can operate a crossbow). In case you haven’t figured it out yet,
that means you. When we lose faith in the ability of our institutions, our safety
nets and our federal government to consider our needs and take care of us, we
need to turn to each other for support.
In a culture that tells young writers what they do doesn’t matter and isn’t
valued, Voiceworks provides a safe space—a rebel base, a radiation free zone, a
rogue space station. You don’t need a bankable name to be published here or to
be welcomed into our community. We hear your voice, and it does matter. When
the world has abandoned us and deemed us expendable, we get scrappy, we get
resourceful, we build a shanty town out of blasted tin and tell each other stories.
VOICEWORKS • 5
ED(COMM)ITORIAL
Sweet Tooth
By Eric Butler
to my sixtEEn-yEar-old sElf,
I’ve been doing my breathing exercises for an entire year, preparing to blow out
this twenty-fifth candle. In for five… hold for five… out for five… perpetually
curling up and unfolding. My diaphragm gets stronger with each repetition, but
my heart still beats like a sparrow’s.
Putting yourself out there can take a lot—living safely is often easier than
actually having a life. Walking blindly without actually seeing, existing without
being seen. Having your cake, but not eating it, keeping it in the freezer. Three
years ago, I was falling for boys with their fingers in so many pies. By 2014, I
wanted to be one—a thing easier said than done.
As a child, I watched with admiration as my grandmother served sponge cake
with cream and ice-cream. There was never anything wrong with wanting both,
having both. I was taught not to feel guilt for the things that feel good. Outside of
this environment, things were different. There’s a precedent for how boys and girls
should act, you must be either one or the other, and you stick to your assigned role
and projected sexuality. Anything outside that is greedy, shameful, less than.
Growing up queer in a small city (read: anywhere), self-preservation often
trumps authenticity. There is one discourse, one culture, one community. You
must assimilate or hide. Luckily, books, sheet music and canvases all make great
hiding places. But the time inevitably comes when you have an anxiety attack
reading Pride and Prejudice, realising you’ll never marry a Bennet sister—at least
not without simultaneously pining for Mr Bingley. You skip dinner that night.
Embarrassingly, it can be difficult to realise that marginalised people
shouldn’t have to squeeze themselves (their gender, sexuality or otherwise) to
fit into these narratives. Most marginalised writers and characters are excluded
from the canon deliberately. We don’t exist in fictional form because people don’t
want us to exist at all.
By the time I was sixteen, I had turned myself inwards, not quite wanting a way
out, fearing it. Passively, I prayed for cheekbones, hoping I was the ugly duckling,
the before photo. In year ten—contact paper covering books, dandruff covering
contact paper—we watched The Breakfast Club, and I pined for a makeover from
Molly Ringwald. I mean, why watch eighties teen movies when you can be one?
6 • VOICEWORKS
Practically everyone looks pretty in pink. Sadly, the peer-support network we had
evidently didn’t extend past Saturday detentions. Besides, self-actualisation is
often something that you need to do on your own. Openness about our selves takes
constant strength, but it is vital.
Coming into Voiceworks, some eight years later, I realised that there is a strong
community here. Everyone comes to your party, there’s a support network to
bounce ideas off. Your own work becomes less masturbatory when there’s someone
there to help you. Even while you’re sitting there, doing Tim Tam slams in the
meeting room, the world becomes slightly less scary. Inside my current bubble,
the minority is the majority. More and more publications are (finally) listening to
people, regardless of their positionality. How sweet it is.
Sometimes it feels like there’s a boy at my window with a boom box, but I’ve
got my headphones on. Seeing opportunities when they present themselves isn’t
always easy, taking them can be even harder. Instead, I choose to bury my head in
the doona. I blast bubblegum pop so sweet I get a toothache, until I can’t quite tell
where the Mandy Moore lyrics end and my own writing begins. Leaving the house
helps. Failing that, you’ll never be alone when you have wi-fi.
As I’m typing, my phone chimes Heyyy, and my next application is just a click of
the ‘Submit’ button away from being finished. It can be hard to keep up momentum
when there are people out there trying to silence your voice, erase your existence,
hurt you. But you are on the right track. And you are not alone. Be louder: you can
have your cake and eat it too.
Missing u like candy,
Ex
Eric Butler (25) wonders if there'll ever be a power couple as good as Kate Moss
and Naomi Campbell (and wants in).
VOICEWORKS • 7
• FICTION •
MEAT
By Eda Gunaydin
‘Wa, it’s okay.’
Berna chants this privately—enough times a day. A good amount of times a day.
Probably thirty to fifty.
She wakes up at four most mornings. That’s also okay, it’s fine. She doesn’t
have to purée the chickpeas every morning because sometimes Yağmur purées
them the night before. She adds oil and garlic and salt and pepper and to half of it
she adds paprika because people like it orange lately. She barbecues eggplants in
between cigarettes on the open stove. She lights the cigarettes with the flame from
the hob, barely noticing she does so until Yağmur tells her off one morning. As far
as her daughter knows, she doesn’t smoke, so this is a blow to the careful economy
of information they maintain between themselves. She waters Yağmur’s peace lily,
which Yağmur doesn’t water anymore. It agitates Berna to care for the plant.
‘Banana Cake’ is by Brigit Annie Lambert (22), a Melbourne-based visual artist. Her work uses a
range of mediums such as photography, video and illustration.
VOICEWORKS • 9
• MEAT •
Eda Gunaydin
Her stove’s pilot light has conked out, says Yağmur, so she must light each hob with
a match. It reminds her of—well, ovens made of shit, which she has left behind
her, scattered through various homes in a blue-red trail since she arrived here. But
also her mother’s house.
She adds the tahini and the onions and the yoghurt. She drives to work. She
passes Fremantle Prison, and is exasperated anew at the tiny flock of tourists
already parked outside. Running late, she motors up Hampton Road.
Today is the day the guys who run the telephone app come to film. I make the
sauces myself, she mouths as she parks, weighing the words’ contours, trying to
just this once strike a balance between authentically foreign and not-going-to-belaughed-at. She pats her boss friendly-like on his shoulder for practice. She’s not
sure how strong her accent is—she doesn’t want to ask Yağmur. It would be fine.
But she doesn’t want Yağmur to make fun.
Speaking English hurts her jaw because—well, it’s okay. Speaking English
is okay. They have an eight-star rating on the telephone food delivery app.
Apparently their service is good and their food is cheap but sometimes they mix up
orders. That’s good. They’ve had to extend their trading hours because kebabs are
a drunk-person food, and people drink—a fine amount. But late into the evening.
Her sister’s kids eat tripe soup back home, when they’ve been out late drinking.
Or lamb intestines. Yağmur thinks it’s hilarious the interest in intestines. It makes
Berna think of Yağmur, seven, in Turkey with her for her mother’s funeral, and
how she would refuse to eat kokoreç, despite the smoked woody odour wafting out
from the coals of the street vendor’s carts, their friendly calls, which warmed them
briefly as they bustled past.
‘It sounds like cockroach!’ Yağmur would shrill, making to run away and
startling yet another street cat. In the interest of cultural exchange, at least,
Yağmur also refused to eat couscous—because it sounded like the Turkish for
vomit. Berna herself doesn’t eat most Australian foods. She resents the taste.
Whites don’t eat their own food anyway, she thinks often. ‘Meatloaf!’ she jokes,
any time Yağmur is home around dinner-time, if she’s not at work or at her
‘friend Selin’—her boyfriend Ali’s—house. Yağmur insists that the white people
don’t eat meatloaf.
‘That is what I am saying! They cannot even eat their invention!’ says Berna.
Yağmur is almost done with university now. Berna had lied to those who asked at
the beginning. Or, at least, she never said the word TAFE. Which was fine. Yağmur
understood. ‘Turks are so fuckin’ judgemental,’ she once said. ‘Can’t I just live
my fuckin’ life?’
‘Yes, sure. I just want you to have a good life.’
She lied about where Yağmur worked because—retail. It’s glamourless. Some
shifts Yağmur has to wear a large cardboard T-shirt-shaped advertisement on
the walkway outside the store. Her sister in Izmir told her that one of her friends
who ran a shoe store had once, and only once, bade one of his employees to do the
same. There had been a city-wide outrage and it had hit the newspapers it was
considered so degrading. It makes Berna really wonder what the fuck sort of labour
10 • VOICEWORKS
• FICTION •
they’re doing over there lately if that’s humiliating. Yağmur is fired en masse one
day, along with five others, because they’re over eighteen.
‘Now you can find a nice job,’ Berna says. Yağmur becomes a waitress.
‘Your father and I don’t want you to do waitressing,’ she says. ‘Find a nice job.’
‘You work at a kebab shop,’ Yağmur says, clicking her phone’s lockscreen.
Wow, she’s serious, Berna thinks.
‘I work like a dog,’ she says. ‘Every day I work like an ass. Is there a day I don’t
smell like sweat and meat? Name that day,’ she says, stepping into Yağmur’s
space. ‘Name that day. Of course I don’t want this for you.’
‘Bırak beni!’ she mutters, bounding up the stairs. ‘Benim suçum ne? It’s not
my fault.’
They film the thing. Berna smiles in forty different directions for forty seconds
apiece for forty dollars. Then she works the twelve-hour shift and at the end of
the day wads the two hundred dollars into her purse and crams the leftover meat
into some takeaway boxes. The beef has long ago cooled down, its oil turning
luminescent and white and tacky and solid and which she will microwave when
she gets home, if only for the satisfaction of seeing it revert to ingestible shape.
She will wrap it in some bread and eat it at the kitchen counter and slip into bed
and rest her legs high up against the wall and will her feet go back to being a size
eight. And she too will melt back into shape, fit for human consumption.
She asks Yağmur to drive her to work tomorrow because—well, it’s fine. She
only doesn’t like to drive lately, as it makes her headache trill like a birdsong but
one that slices into her. Her scalp heats up. She knows she’s dying but she can’t
kill anyone on the road because she already has a good behaviour bond on her
licence (because she truly believes it’s safer not to wear a seatbelt than to wear
one, and she and Yağmur fight about the topic often enough). She holds off just
this one time. Then another time. She keeps not driving as a favour to their souls.
Kenan has been trying to sell for a year now. He started at one-twenty grand and
now he’s down to thirty plus rent (including water and GST). No one wants to buy
despite their eight-star rating on the food delivery app and the fact their YouTube
promo video has 120 views and one enthusiastic comment praising garlic sauce. No
one mocks her accent in the video. Yağmur finds it and she sends it to some of her
friends. Yağmur says they all like it but she laughs and squeezes Berna’s cheek and
says ‘Aynı nine gibi çıkmışsın! You’re a loveable granny!’
‘Git, lan!’ she says, smiling despite herself, shooing her out the door on her way
to spend time with her friends.
Kenan has the funds to go back to Turkey. He’s going to buy a summer house
by the water. His daughter has just explained to him why she knows the answer to
everything—that if you type the right things into a website called Google all of the
questions that agitate you can simply be answered. He has had her print out a list
of fish found on the Aegean coast. All his fishing until now has been done illegally,
VOICEWORKS • 11
• MEAT •
Eda Gunaydin
in Rous Head Harbour on the weekend (before he started working weekends). Now
he wants buckets of barbunya.
‘Satmam gerek, bacim,’ he keeps saying. ‘I gotta sell.’ He is scrubbing at the
spray-paint marking the glass sliding door, proclaiming ‘fucking lebs’, which has
drip dried almost illegibly. She’d had to get Yağmur to lean out the car window
and decipher it for her because they’re not Lebs, and it’s hard to pick out things
in a foreign language when they’re not easily assumed from context. It seems
important to note that she’s not an Arab, so she says it to Yağmur while she
brushes up her eyeliner in the car before heading to campus.
‘Are we Arabs? No.’
Yağmur laughs surprisingly uproariously, given her mother is known for not
having a sense of humour.
‘Can we really afford to be picky, though? Really?’ She kisses her on both cheeks
and tells her to have a nice day and leans out the car to shout Thank you at the man
who lets her merge.
She and Kenan chat about the graffiti while tossing kilos of salad, speculate
about which set of drunkards or schoolkids wearing hoodies did it. Kenan’s money
is on South Freo. Berna points out Kenan should have just had those cameras
installed two years ago.
‘Bu etiket aynı işe yariyor!’ He points to the glass door which bears the graffiti,
and the sticker that gently suggests the presence of CCTV, insisting that you only
need the sticker anyway. Berna wants to note that’s demonstrably false in this
instance but she’s fatigued.
A reporter swings by without warning at four, asks about the graffiti. Kenan
jostles to prepare him a cup of tea and the reporter insists he wouldn’t like any,
but Kenan strongarms him, and through sips Kenan explains in an enthused shout
that it’s okay, it’s fine, it’s not normally that sort of neighbourhood, but he’s
concerned it’ll affect his ability to sell the place. He’s selling it, you know? Could
you write that in the article?
Kenan’s taking his kids back to Turkey with him, even though they’re twelve and
fourteen and don’t speak a lickity-shit of the language. She’d been concerned a
little at first but her sister back home convinced her that all the kids do over there
is take selfies, just like in W bloody A.
‘Özel okullara gonderirim, merak etme,’ he says. She raises a couple of
eyebrows but doesn’t say anything in case there are indeed specialist or intensive
schools in Ildır and she never knew they existed because she only earnt her high
school equivalency after she had Yağmur and if he rubs it in her face it will be—
fine. Irritating. But fine.
She spends Sunday stomping through her backyard garden picking green peppers,
wearing too-large black Crocs and a wool vest, pausing every so often to try to take
a picture with her phone of just how many peppers she has managed to grow. She
12 • VOICEWORKS
• FICTION •
scrolls through the image previews, carefully zooming to determine which is the
best pepper picture, and succeeds in sending one to Yağmur on WhatsApp.
‘So talented mum!!!!’ comes the response. Berna pops each pepper’s top over
the sink with a single methodical gouge, stuffs them with mince and rice and seals
them back up again with a lid-shaped tomato slice. Ali Baba and Aria don’t sell
anything but döner and chippies and so people eat döner and chippies and blame
their constipation on trashy Turkish fast food. Berna’s mother had always claimed
she invented that—the tomato lid. She’s not sure but she won’t check. If it was
someone else she prefers to wonder.
She smokes three cigarettes, then one long long cigarette, realises she’s almost
been eaten alive by mosquitoes—which is fine—and goes inside.
She rifles through Yağmur’s drawers until she finds a calculator then asks
Yağmur if it’s legal to withdraw thirty grand in cash from the bank, or if they have
a law about that as well.
Kenan acts like she’s saving his life and she smiles as much, but less insincerely,
as the day they shot the video for the app. He tries to give her pointers on the
running of a small business, emphasising the difficulty of feeling responsible
for every customer, how it’s different. He goes on to proclaim he won’t miss the
work at all, that he could probably finish the construction on the house on the
water with some money left over to get him by while he looks for a job not selling
kebabs. He brags about the low cost of living, the easy way of his milliyet.
‘Anladım,’ she says. ‘I know how we are. Resmen kıskandım.’ It’s true that
she’s jealous, but it’s fine. She’s being sarcastic.
Kenan goes; she goes to work. She wants to have CCTV cameras installed. Kenan
comes up right on this—they’re pricey as fuck and she’s not Kerry Packer.
(Yağmur reminds her every time that he’s dead, but she forgets.) She installs the
cameras herself through sheer force of will. She gives herself a pay rise and the
son of a family friend she hires gets ten dollars more than she normally got per
day. That’s just good business.
Uğur refers to himself as an ‘import’ and wears a stream of hats she
disapproves of, but which she knows he uses to hide his premature bald patch.
He works the close shift most nights and has enough latent youth that he can be
matey with the revellers who visit the shop after midnight and she can stream
ATV at home in her slippers instead of vacillating constantly between a snarl and
a grimace, hearing people rant about halal snack packs. She knows they don’t
eat halal because they’re not Muslim. No one is crowding around desperate to be
Muslim. That’s how she knows they’re not. It doesn’t aggravate Uğur. So he does
that particular labour.
The same, or different, hooligans smash in their window a month later. Uğur
hears the commotion from the back and is young and reckless enough to chase
them off cursing. After that his matey style is performed almost relentlessly.
VOICEWORKS • 13
• MEAT •
Eda Gunaydin
She leans into the ‘homemade’ aspect of the business model of the place, and
starts wearing a tülbent to work. Customers see the head covering and more
often than not surmise that she, a wise homemaking sort, makes the sauces, and
stuffs the vine leaves, and rolls the pastry out for the pides and gözleme herself.
She does, of course, do all these things, although the food delivery app has been
pushing her to outsource them so they can expand their delivery hours and use the
app’s delivery drivers.
She has no choice but to say okay and that’s that, although she shivers a little
with disgust every time she sees the vine leaves which have so very clearly come out
of a tin get put in plastic to be sent to some unsuspecting person’s house. Yağmur
calls it ‘autentik plus’ and it makes Berna smile, grimly.
Kenan sends word he’s coming back to WA a week before he does it, with no
house and no business, and never clearly explains the problem. Berna predicts that
he’s managed to piss away his savings and kebab profits and didn’t get the house
finished after all, because he believed the tradespeople when they said he’d have to
pay upfront. She insists to Yağmur that it’s because he’d lived here for so long.
‘Turkler iyi kazık atmayı biliyorlar,’ she insists. ‘We don’t have to rip people
off like that here. Siz safsınız be. So naïve. We’d see how good you’d be at scams if
you didn’t have a Centrelink.’
Yağmur considers and says, ‘Nah, there are heaps of shit people here though.
What’s wrong with being honest anyway?’
Kenan comes around sniffing for scraps, and in the well-worn Turkish tradition
of feeding and maintaining all the street cats and dogs through uncoordinated
collective action, she gives him a meal.
‘You sold me for too low,’ she says. She tries to speak English more often now
because—it’s fine. The food delivery app people speak only English. When they
poke around so often she makes the adjustment. ‘Come back on the business as
manager on new shop. Your kids been through too much.’
Eda Gunaydin (22) is a researcher and writer from Western Sydney.
She is a perpetual student-in-the-making.
‘Friday’ is by Lee Lai (23), who makes comics, illustrations and food with varying
levels of seriousness. She is currently based between Montreal and Melbourne.
14 • VOICEWORKS
• POETRY
••
•
Orang asing
By Mindy Gill
Mindy Gill (20) is currently eating her way through her honours in creative
writing at QUT. Her poetry is forthcoming in the Australian Poetry Journal.
16 • VOICEWORKS
• POETRY •
Klang, you’re not so different from the last time I saw you.
You’re consistent. I like that in a city.
At the wet market across the street from my grandmother’s house
I hail a taxi, lucky gold cat Blu-tacked to the dashboard,
rambutan husks in the bottom of my bag.
You are sitting in the driver’s seat, cigarette stuck to bottom lip,
aircon blasting your hair back and I say Klang, Klang, you haven’t aged a day.
We cruise down the highway, one banana plantation after another,
and it makes me think of my father’s white Opel Kadett,
tandoori drumsticks in an oily plastic bag in my lap.
When we hit a hundred and ten I want to roll down my window, ai ai aii!
But we get stuck in a jam and I think it is better this way.
Klang, I think home is a highway without memory.
At the mamak restaurant, steel fans spray mist as we drink pulled tea
and Milo ice, and Tamil men talk politics, Agni Paravai, haze,
flipping roti canai dough and cooking coconut rice.
Stick around lah, you say, what’s the point in leaving if you’re only going
to come back.
I watch the stray dogs lie in the carpark sun
raising snouts to open palms that pass by.
Tak tahu, I don’t know, I don’t know.
The air thickens until it breaks into hot rain
and Klang, you’re asking again if I’m listening.
The dogs roll under cars and I want this moment in a parcel
of newspaper and banana leaf.
VOICEWORKS • 17
• NONFICTION •
A BRIEF HISTORY
AND SHORT
FUTURE OF THE
IMAGINARY
SHAREHOUSE
By Alex Griffin
thE studEnt sharEhousE might
be dying out. When I say sharehouse,
it’s not with any particular address
in mind, no long-decomposed
couch dragged home from roadside
collection, no TV with the sound
gone. I mean the one in our collective
imagination, the one that may have
only existed in barely remembered
stoned conversations on the couch,
unanswered texts to heavenly Gumtree
ads, or the House of Trouser that Toadie
from Neighbours lived in. As personal
and shifting as this idea has been, it’s
always hovered on the fringe of access,
maybe over the next page of Gumtree
listings, maybe stuck to the noticeboard
at IGA, or residing exactly where your
friends are moving into next weekend.
While the dream remains bewitching,
the reality that made it possible might
be slipping away. But why does it mean
so much? How did the sharehouse
become the sharehouse? And if it’s
going, why?
‘Yoooo… who’s ready to get weird?’
—Werewolf Jones in Megahex by
Simon Hanselmann
As Steinbeck’s Cannery Row shows us,
the main thing that throws a heap
of unrelated people together into a
dilapidated room is changing economic
VOICEWORKS • 19
• A BRIEF HISTORY AND SHORT FUTURE OF THE IMAGINARY SHAREHOUSE •
Alex Griffin
circumstances, and the twentiethcentury Australian student sharehouse
comes from just that. I mean, before
World War I, the idea of unmarried
students of different genders, races and
ages living together was pretty much
beyond immoral; you’d likely be laughed
out of the front bar at the pub for even
suggesting it, your ears full of smoke.
To gloss a Pollock of urban and
social complexity down to a thin black
stripe or two, where you lived and with
whom was the site of intense moral
scrutiny, couched in early twentiethcentury language about contamination,
strength and moral purity. Students
would stay at home ’til wedded off,
or lodge with relatives or in boarding
houses (which were universally looked
down upon). This was particularly
harsh on women, who had more than
enough trouble just gaining access to
higher education. Once accepted, they
weren’t able to attend institutions
without the guarantee of a room on
campus or an officially approved
guardian outside of it (which was
easier said than done).
This was all well and good while
universities remained exclusive
institutions. In 1914, less than 0.1 per
cent of the population attended uni,
roughly 4,700 people.1 Since Australian
cities rejected ye olde English tradition
of academic pastoralism (think Oxford
out in the middle of green nowhere)
by sticking our first universities in the
centre of the city, the only real problem
for non-boarding, far-flung students
was the length of the horse ride from
the family estate and the lack of stables
once they arrived.
After World War II though, big
changes started to swing. With a large
number of servicepeople returning from
war with guaranteed places and living
payments from the Commonwealth
Reconstruction and Training Scheme,
as well as increasing scholarships
and falling fees, student numbers
quietly exploded, flowing into town
from the ‘burbs. Returning soldiers
weren’t particularly keen to swap the
barracks for the dormitory, and the
flood of students from the suburbs
put pressure on transport networks,
overwhelming the limited (and socially
exclusive) amount of housing stock on
campuses. Housing pressure, for want
of a better term, was going buck wild.
Farrago, the University of Melbourne
student magazine, reported in 1953 that
students were increasingly ‘unwilling
to take lodgings in outer suburbs’. In
1949, there were close to 32,000 higher
education students in Australia. By the
time of Whitlam’s universal education
in 1972, 182,000.2 And they all had to
live somewhere.
The magic of gentrification (until it’s
all fifteen dollar coffee and unnervingly
banal commissioned street art) is that
the bane of one renter’s existence can
be the boon of the next, and so it was
with inner-city housing for students,
especially in Sydney and Melbourne.
Workers’ cottages in suburbs like
Carlton and Brunswick, for example,
had been dominated from the outset by
rogue, predatory real estate business
1. Commonwealth Bureau of Census and Statistics, Official Year Book of the Commonwealth of Australia
1916 (Melbourne: McCarron, Bird & Co, 1916).
2. Higher Education Students Time Series Tables (1949–2000) (Canberra: Higher Education Division,
Department of Education, Training and Youth Affairs, 2001).
20 • VOICEWORKS
• NONFICTION •
practices, partitioning up old terraces
and villas to squeeze out rent, and
converting anything bigger into a
boarding house. As inner-city workers
cashed in on the Long Boom and shifted
out to their dream property in the
‘...the sharehouse has
been the definitive
social formation of the
last fifty years.’
suburbs, these places became ideal for
students looking to live cheaply and
conveniently, and they duly piled in.
Likewise, the industrial character
of inner-city areas began to change at
a clip. Factories started barrelling out
to the outer suburbs, which shifted
those chasing work further away from
the cities into the sprawl. While that
happened, the building of the ‘gumtree’
universities outside of the city centre,
like Monash in Melbourne, Murdoch in
Perth and Western Sydney University,
fanned out the sharehouse ethic across
the suburbs. It wasn’t all fun. Farrago
reported that one writer was a ‘little
distressed to find [her]self living…
over a fishshop’, but the tendency for
students to move closer caught on,
and coupled with increasing levels of
permissiveness in the sixties, these
new, mutant rental households began
to develop in a flood. People didn’t
need to get married to move out of
the parental home, they realised, and
everyone else got tipped off. If we think
FOMO is a modern phenomenon, it is
most definitely not.
While a significant amount of people
still moved out to marry and establish
their own households, they were a
falling proportion, and the emphasis
was on students and people working
and living independently outside
relationships. By the seventies, the
mobility of young people was pretty
much taken for granted. My dad tells
stories about rolling in and out of
sharehouses up and down the west
coast with a regularity bordering on
the manic, and sneaking into the army
barracks at Scarborough after the
pub curfew to keep drinking with the
soldiers. A cultural pattern became set;
you move out after high school to work
or study with a bunch of people, just to
see what happens next. But what did
this all mean?
‘Milo and I sat in the living room later
that night, surrounded by the debris,
sunburned and hopelessly drunk…’
—He Died With a Felafel in His Hand
by John Birmingham
To try and sum up how this dream
imaginary sharehouse shaped us over
thousands of messier, real life examples
is stupid, but here’s a try, because the
sharehouse has been the definitive
social formation of the last fifty
years. The nuclear family might have
been the way of life politicians have
pandered to, but the sharehouse has
been on the edge of all the change and
upheaval of the last decades, through
universal education, disco, AIDS, bush
doofs and going five ways on a Netflix
subscription. The things that go into
living in one taught us a lot about
how we feel we’re meant to live today,
like a finishing school for floundering
in postmodernism, learning how to
negotiate infinite and overlapping
uncertainties, or the slow accumulation
of all the layers of twenty-something.
To expand on that, sharehouse
living is the transfer of personal agency
to the self, but without taking on
responsibilities beyond that—a period
VOICEWORKS • 21
• A BRIEF HISTORY AND SHORT FUTURE OF THE IMAGINARY SHAREHOUSE •
Alex Griffin
where you can hibernate before making
a leap, or where you can settle in a
rut without owing anyone anything.
Change and uncertainty aren’t things
to avoid but a way of life. In short,
everything becomes casualised—who
you live with, who pays for what, how
long you hang around—which is all in
stark contrast to the social formality of
moving when you’re married. Like, we
live with housemates but we can only
depend so much on them. You might
wake up one day and Heather is gone,
and that’s just that. The rest is in your
court. Which means experimenting, be
it throwing everything in the fridge in a
pot and hoping for the best, or sleeping
around for no particular reason. To be
creative with your own life, and one
another, is the idea—fridge-magnet
poetry, making up drinking games
watching The Bachelorette, or that
hastily Artlined sign (which never
comes down) telling everyone at the
party the toilet’s broken.
‘Don’t know if it was a gap year/Or a
gap life…’
—‘Gap Life’ by Dick Diver
Living with people to whom you have
no formal ties means having to be
accepting of swings and roundabouts.
Social access also means social mobility.
Pinballing around sharehouses means
that connections are less limited to
work, sport or other conventional
outlets, which has weakened older ties
and formations over time. The need
to join something more rigid, like a
social or a bowls club, dims when you
have Jill’s house up the road and the
pub on the corner. All of a sudden, it
isn’t so impossible to move from the
suburbs to the city and meet people
from the other side of the tracks. You
can rub shoulders with anyone; after
all, even Clive Palmer bummed around
in sharehouses on the dole, writing
his poetry.3 This kind of loosening of
‘Was I horrified?
Maybe. Did I want to go
to a party there? Oath.’
social relations, that we’re able to grip
and graft and slide between different
households and lifestyles, has been very
much a preamble to the ructions of the
new job market, where we’re meant
to upskill, downskill, adjust and settle
for whatever’s available. But the
real freedom is the space to express
yourself, to explore your own identity,
outside of the surveillance of family.
A room of one’s own not just to write,
but a house in which to create yourself.
Basically, maybe the sharehouse exists
in the common imagination as a
place to become yourself in ways you
hadn’t expected.
Like, the idea that anything can
happen is central, be it meeting
someone at a party, or the bathroom
window falling off in a slight breeze.
As Keats conceptualised it in a letter
to his brother, the idea of negative
capability means that a person ‘is
capable of being in uncertainties,
mysteries, doubts, without any irritable
reaching after fact and reason’. The
sharehouse is negative capability as a
lifestyle. With your housemates, you
make it up as you go along, building
3. Guy Rundle, Clivosaurus: The Politics of Clive Palmer, Quarterly Essay 56 (Carlton: Black Inc., 2014).
22 • VOICEWORKS
• NONFICTION •
ad hoc out of doubt towards, well, not
exactly clarity, but towards less doubt,
engaging merrily (or not) with all of
the messiness that comes along the
way. More or less, moving out, that rite
of initiation and maturity into society,
is now very much a DIY kit, rather than
an old-fashioned replica of your folks’
marriage. My first sharehouse involved
someone with a six-month-long vow
of silence and a PhD student living in a
yurt he constructed in the backyard. I
regret nothing.
‘…and three: a floral pillow slip will
cover up any overnight drivel.’
—The Sandman, Good News Week
Of course, as it evolved into a way and a
place that people lived, the sharehouse
became that other thing, a lifestyle,
with a whole set of codes, ideas and
clichés, a language of being in the
world. Arguably, the poet laureate of
‘My first sharehouse
involved someone
with a six-month-long
vow of silence and a
PhD student living in a
yurt he constructed in
the backyard.’
that lifestyle was the Sandman. In over
271 episodes of the Triple J radio serial
214 Bell Street, he excavated in his shaky
gravel-and-custard voice the wreckage
(emotional and otherwise) of communal
living while skirting lightly around
his own domestic failures. Nothing in
Australian lit better scrapes out the
angst and horror of people tangling
together than Monkey Grip, where
multiple sharehouses form a stage for
Nora and Jako’s long, sad waltz out
of each other’s lives. Yet there aren’t
so many novels which focus on the
sharehouse. It might be because it
doesn’t conform well to a narrative,
since life in the sharehouse is a series
of episodes. Only when someone shifts
off does a new season begin. (The flip is
that, usually, the time to leave is when
you feel as if you’re stuck in a rerun.)
It’s more archaeological than linear,
a layer cake constantly refrosted over
with the total discontinuity of how it’s
shaped and formed. The most reflective
examples might be those classics
of housemate gothic, He Died With a
Felafel in his Hand, or Simon fuckin’
Hanselmann’s Megahex.
But the true sharehousehold art
form might be the oral tradition that’s
sprung from it. After all, the stories
people tell about sharehouses are how
the sharehouse lives on as a dream.
Part grimy kitchen-sink prurience,
part distinctive oral history form, they
can be educational screeds, implicit
slices of moral instruction, and rich,
weird lamentation. Anyone who has
passed through a sharehouse has one
to impress a stranger and to spook a
parent with. Hugh told me the story
about the punk house his brother
Iven lived in where a hole had been
punched through the shower recess, to
be covered up with Glad Wrap for a few
years. They left a roll in the (broken)
bathtub to reapply it. Was I horrified?
Maybe. Did I want to go to a party
there? Oath.
Through this rosy tint, the
dream sharehouse comes into view.
Somewhere, in your price range,
there’s a house with people who might
be the best, worst, or best kind of
worst thing for you. It could be so good.
Everything begins to look possible
through this gentle nudging of pushing
VOICEWORKS • 23
• A BRIEF HISTORY AND SHORT FUTURE OF THE IMAGINARY SHAREHOUSE •
Alex Griffin
one another a little more open; that
communal dream of finding your best
selves through navigating uncertainty.
This probably sounds bong-heavy,
but this is what the magical realism
of the sharehouse myth does—it can
translate the quotidian temporarily
into something fringed with gold and
possibility, until, as all dreams must, it
wears off and through, and you’re left
looking at getting up and moving on.
‘I will never forget the smell of his
wetsuit, festering on the dining room
table because he left it in a plastic bag,
sopping wet, on there for two weeks.
And he played classical piano…’
—AC on his worst housemate
And wearing thin it is. As people marry
and couple later, rents skyrocket and
boomers increasingly dominate the
rental market for their own ends, it’s
becoming more expensive for people
who have cracked into the professions
to earn enough to break out of the
sharehouse and into home ownership.
As such, the supply of sharehouses for
students is on the wane, and they’re
becoming older, more professional,
and more expensive. The numbers are
spiritually and physically painful to
read, but here are a few to chew on.
Returning to the nest—or not
leaving it at all—is increasingly the
way things are going, with students
citing expense and housing stress as
key reasons. ABS statistics show that
in 2011, 29 per cent of Australians
aged 18–34 were living at home;
compared to 21 per cent in 1976.4
Bouncing around from place to place
is dropping too. At the same time, the
welfare net is closing on students,
and the casualisation of labour makes
it harder to juggle classes with
unpredictable and unaccommodating
work schedules. Besides all that,
the low black shadow of housing
affordability chalks another mark
against frittering money away on rent.
‘The sharehouse is
a site for cultural
productions that just
haven’t happened
elsewhere, like the
punk houses of Perth
or the tiny band
scene of Melbourne in
the eighties...’
Symbolic deaths abound. York St
in Brisbane, immortalised in Felafel,
is becoming a fourteen-room block of
apartments. And if you cleave like me
to the idea that something only truly
dies when it becomes a start-up, then
check Base: a sixteen-person ‘curated’
sharehouse that selects housemates
dependent on their potential as
entrepreneurs, to ‘connect and incubate
[thinkers]… for the new paradigm’. As
a way to live, it sounds like drinking
the Kool-Aid from a Voss bottle. (The
idea is that the house will eventually
reinvest profits into a hedge fund for
the occupants’ ideas.)
There are subtler shifts, like the
apps (google them) being toted as
solutions for sharehouse bookkeeping,
which is the anathema of sharehouse
4. Rachel Clun, ‘The Changing Face of the Australian Share House’, Domain, 25 March, 2015.
24 • VOICEWORKS
• NONFICTION •
improvisation. With an increase in
demand for housing, incumbent
roomies can be a fair sight pickier.
Dream houses on Facebook are
becoming fetish items, swathed in
likes, comments and tags, while
inboxes are regularly flooded with
earnest self-declarations of being the
best housemate possible—some combo
of arty, interesting, good at cooking,
clean, quiet (but not too quiet!) and
glad to unwind with a wine and a chat
come Friday. In short, professionally
Good At Life, which is almost the
opposite to where we started off, with
Monkey Grip’s merry-go-round and
vivid, gross bacon lunches.
Moving out of the familial home
now, if you’re fortunate enough to
afford to do so, might just be a kind of
economic foolhardiness: a very different
kind of bravery to that of the fishshop
fifties. We might be coming to a point
where the cost of the sharehouse
will make moving out less a rite of
passage and more a lifestyle choice, the
domain of those who are willing and
able to invest in the rituals of youthful
self-sustainability and emotional
carnage, of buying into the process of
creative destruction that the generation
before us idly gallivanted into. Living
young and independently might mean
studying or apprenticing until you’ve
landed the Adult Job, rather than the
grimy luxury of making it up as we go.
In a world where we outsource
our romantic lives to Tinder, fewer
sharehouses means less room for
serendipities of the kind that don’t
come readily through a screen; chance
encounters, brief dalliances, new
connections. The sharehouse is a
site for cultural productions that just
haven’t happened elsewhere, like the
punk houses of Perth or the tiny band
scene of Melbourne in the eighties that
spewed out the Primitive Calculators
(see Dogs in Space immediately if you
haven’t yet). I don’t say this to be
nostalgic; it’s the future I’m worried
about. Where will all the young, weird
and artful miscegenating happen, if not
the sharehouse?
I don’t know if this is an elegy for
something. The Herald Sun comments
section might say about bloody time, but
we lose so much when we pull away
from people we haven’t met. Sure,
skipping the sharehouse means not
making so many horrible, memorable
mistakes, but it also means fewer
risks, fewer chance encounters, more
coming to know the world at a remove
instead of way too bright and close.
The world shrinks. If you’re in a
sharehouse today, put everything down
for a moment: leave the washing on
the line, don’t sort the mail, let the
dishes sit in the sink. Look around you,
and remember that while none of this
happened by accident, pretty much all
of it did. That was the point.
Alex Griffin (23) is a writer and researcher living in Melbourne.
He likes Boris Groys and hates the beach.
VOICEWORKS • 25
• POETRY •
Prix Fixe
By Louise Jaques
Louise Jaques (24) is a poet. In 2015, she edited the UTS Writers’ Anthology.
She was thrilled to write about cake, one of her favourite subjects.
26 • VOICEWORKS
• POETRY •
the gap in the venetians lets through
a slice of sun, to stare hairily at
a stripe of dust
bated breath waiting for patrons—
day one. scrupulous in its preparations,
rituals forgotten;
even the spoons were commissioned.
I watched them hammer out the precise depth
from long, sterling billets
the distressed furnishings are teak,
shades of valencia orange peeking around
the charred indentations
the menu features carefully
selected words like battered, honeyed,
shucked and drunky. late nights spent
staining embossed paper with wet
teabags and serif
glass cabinet like the dome of a submarine
encases early morning toils
of a sugar-dusted creature
rising like the yeast he kneads
in the hour of pre-heat
glistening lime jellies
hint at nuclear desertion as
soft, bitter chocolate pudding
sags in the middle, like the navel
of a schoolgirl
the beauty’s in the texture;
fresh marscarpone clinging
to the soggy lemon sponge
VOICEWORKS • 27
• FICTION •
ANTHRAX
By Kelly Palmer
anniE and russ arE flattening scrunched wrapping paper over the carpet when
their mum tells them there is anthrax in the sky and soon everyone will be dead.
Russ lets go of his new Matchbox car. Annie scratches at a freckle that might be dirt.
‘See that cloud?’ their mum asks. She tells Annie and Russ to come out onto the
balcony. ‘See the tail? It’s toxic.’
The white cloud hanging above the KFC on the Broadwater isn’t bigger than
Annie’s hand when she holds her fist to the sky. A bell chirps. Annie steps onto the
lowest beam of the railing and leans over. Below, a boy her age runs with his bike
and jumps on as he breaks through the invisible line that divides the apartment
complex from the street.
‘It’s just a cloud,’ Annie says. She rubs her eyes. When she reaches out to a
palm frond, she can feel the damper air lingering beneath the balcony, away from
the breeze.
‘See? Look.’ Her mum taps Annie’s arm with the back of her hand. Annie pulls
back, scared that the drink in her mum’s hand will spill and leave both their
‘The Cake Ahead’ is by Danyon Burge (21), an aspiring artist. He likes
drawing, non-western music and obscure sports. He studied fine art at UWA.
VOICEWORKS • 29
• ANTHRAX •
Kelly Palmer
dresses smelling like the pub. Her mum pulls Russ to the railing by his shirtsleeve.
‘It’s a spore cloud,’ she says. ‘Full of germs. It’s a biological weapon.’
Russ sniffles, rubs his face with a fist. The arms of his sweater are shiny with
snot, and there is a dark ring of sweat around his neck.
With her hand at her forehead, Annie can look to the sun. As long as she keeps
that brightest spot covered. Millimetre by millimetre, Annie starts to shift her hand
away. She blinks hard and sees that the sun is really a black ball hiding in sunrays.
Her hand covers the sun again and gold beams escape from behind her fingers.
‘Don’t look at the sun,’ her mum says and slaps Annie’s hand away from her
face. Annie squints and flinches.
‘I wasn’t.’
‘You know better than that.’
Russ gasps through tears. He hasn’t stopped crying since their mum said
this would be his last birthday they’d ever celebrate. The threat came after Russ
complained that the green icing on his birthday cake looked yucky.
‘That’s what anthrax looks like,’ her mum repeats, then lights another
cigarette. ‘When we breathe it in, we’ll die.’
Annie bats the laundry carousel and Russ winces when stained underwear
swings at his face. Behind a towel, he cowers from the pool of sun where their
mum stands. A division as crooked as the International Date Line gives their mum
half a face smeared in ash, while the other half drowns in the plush of yellow light.
Most things are either dark grey or yellow in January. The light is a hiding place.
‘Sul knows. Sully,’ their mum calls. ‘You know about this. Right?’
The glass door is wide open; the track between the carpet and tiles keeps inside
and outside from being one room. Her mum steps over the track, onto the carpet.
‘What?’ Sully says from the couch. He slumps forward like a sack of potatoes.
Russ sits on the other couch. As he brings his feet off the floor, his knees smack
against his chin. The adults don’t seem to notice his teeth clunk.
‘Stop crying,’ Annie says to Russ.
‘What are we talkin’ about?’ Sully asks. He reminds Annie of an overweight blue
heeler she once saw sleeping with a man outside the toilets in the park. She wishes
he’d find a new place so he won’t be on their couch for another week. Sully stares
at the swollen ashtray on the coffee table. Ash and butts graze an old TV guide. The
icing-smeared plates from earlier have been cleared but for some wet flecks along
the chipped laminate.
‘Anthrax,’ her mum says as she drags the glass door closed.
‘Anthrax? I don’t know anything about that,’ Sully says.
‘I do,’ her mum says. She turns off the TV, then tosses the remote onto the
couch. ‘It comes from dead animals. Disease-ridden meat. But governments put it
in the sky to massacre whole cities with it.’
‘Your mum has watched more documentaries than anybody I ever met,’ Sully
says to the kids, lifting each syllable under the strain of whatever he had to drink
the night before. ‘Listen to her. She’s a smart woman.’
Annie picks at a burn mark in the carpet. When she looks up her brother is
picking stuffing from a split in the couch’s arm.
‘Can I go outside?’ Annie asks.
‘Aren’t you listening to me?’
30 • VOICEWORKS
• FICTION •
Annie mumbles something that sounds like yes.
Her mum raises a can to her mouth. ‘If anthrax gets inside you, you’ll be
vomiting blood and shitting your pants until you die. Just crap coming out both
ends, drowning you in filth. It’s death in the sky, Annie.’
‘Okay, Mum.’
‘Do you want that?’
‘No.’
Annie thinks of the time her mum came home drunk with her arm in a sling.
The cops had driven her home after she fought someone. Another time she limped
through the door and blood was running down from her hair.
Sully stands and walks through the middle of the lounge room to the hallway.
Everyone watches.
Her mum drops into a chair at the dining table, which has been pushed into the
corner. A laptop is open in front of her.
Some kids outside scream.
‘Inside is boring,’ Annie says to her mum before she can load a game. ‘It’s
so hot.’
Their mum twists around in her chair. Her eyebrows pinch together.
‘I want plants,’ Russ adds. His face is stained pink, but he isn’t crying anymore.
‘Plants?’ her mum asks. ‘There’s fucking plants right there.’ She points to the
balcony and the palm trees on the other side of the railing.
‘They’re not inside,’ Russ says, almost smiling now.
‘Inside?’ her mum asks.
‘I want plants inside,’ he says, now leaning over his crossed legs, hands in front
of him. Annie isn’t sure where to look.
‘Yeah, and who’s going to water them?’ her mum asks. ‘You?’
He leans forward further—just enough to show he’s in the game. Annie runs
the tips of her fingers back and forth against the carpet until it hurts. She’s sure
she’ll make another burn mark.
‘We could have plastic plants,’ Russ says.
Her mum squints and shakes the idea out of her head. ‘I hate that,’ she says.
She holds her hands out in front of her as if cautioning them. ‘I hate plastic plants.
Gets us used to everything being fake.’
‘Hey. Hey,’ Sully says, as if calling a dog.
She looks to him.
‘Hey, Mum,’ Sully says, mocking Russ.
‘Just let the kids go, why don’t cha?’ he says. The couch creaks as he shifts to
the edge of the cushion and his hand falls on hers before she pulls away.
‘Come outside with us,’ Annie says to her mum. ‘We’ll go to the water.’
‘Not by yourselves,’ her mum says.
‘I said come with us,’ Annie says.
‘They’re old enough, aren’t they?’ Sully asks.
‘What do you think?’
Sully won’t raise his voice, but his lack of eye contact scratches something in her
mum as clearly as Russ has been tearing the couch open. Her mum talks back in a
controlled yell, so Annie can’t tell her to stop, because she isn’t yelling, not really.
‘You’re not being reasonable,’ Sully says.
VOICEWORKS • 31
• ANTHRAX •
Kelly Palmer
‘What? What did you say to me? Reasonable? You wanna talk reasonable? I just
forked out dough for two birthdays and you can’t shout me one pack.’
‘I was just thinkin’ we could have a chat while the kids are gone,’ he says and
shrugs, his eyes on the floor.
Her mum stares down at his head. ‘A chat? That’s what you want?’
Sully looks up at her mum, and when his eyes meet hers, he holds up his hands
for protection, flinches as if she had moved to hit him. Her mum snatches Sully’s
wallet off the table. She removes a ten dollar note.
‘Yeah, alright,’ Sully says.
Metal crashes and rumbles—the sound billows up from beneath them. Annie
jumps after Russ jumps first.
The dumpster had hit a pole in the carpark downstairs. But usually the sound
isn’t so much like a growl.
‘What was that?’ Russ asks.
‘Don’t go outside,’ her mum says.
‘Really, sweetie?’ Sully asks.
Annie stands with her arms stiff, held straight at her sides, and refuses to
breathe. She’s not sure what she is listening for until she realises the kids outside
aren’t laughing or screaming anymore.
‘Don’t open the door,’ her mum says and catches Annie’s dress before she
reaches the balcony.
Annie jerks back and stumbles. ‘Mum, I can’t hear anything.’
‘Do you want to be next? Don’t open the door.’
She pulls her dress out of her mum’s hands and stands still to prove she won’t
try it again.
Annie thinks about pretending to use the toilet and sitting on the lid for a few
minutes on her own. Instead she walks straight to her room. Russ follows, no
longer smiling, and Annie closes the door behind them.
Russ climbs onto Annie’s bed and twists the bottle of nail polish that Annie told
him yesterday not to touch. She sits on the floor, leaning against the door, and
watches her brother slather the tips of his fingers in gold polish, dripping glitter
in the folds of her sheets. She can hear the blunt charges of her mum and Sully
arguing. She makes out a few words, but forgets them quickly.
‘How long are we staying here?’ Russ asks.
Annie shrugs and throws him the remote. It lands on the bed, but he ignores
it. After, Annie realises Russ might have been asking if they’ll move to another
suburb again.
He says, ‘She doesn’t listen.’
Annie’s room used to be her mum’s. But two days ago, on Annie’s eleventh
birthday, her mum said that she and Annie could swap, so that Annie could have
her own room. Russ would share with their mum. When he found out, Russ turned
the TV up as loud as it would go and threw the remote at the wall. Now the paint is
chipped right in the centre of a pale rectangle where a drawing used to hang.
Her mum yells louder.
Annie hears, ‘You’ve never even had kids. You don’t know what it’s like, to
think of them dying all the time.’
Her mum’s words vibrate through her as if rolling with the soft thunder of a jet.
32 • VOICEWORKS
• FICTION •
‘Wanna leave? You can get out. I’ll throw you out.’
Sully groans.
‘Get the fuck out!’
‘Hey,’ Sully says sharply. ‘Hey, hey, hey.’
Annie opens the door and rushes down the hallway in time to watch her mum
push Sully from the couch to the front door. Sully steps forward as he trips,
holding his hands in front of his chest to keep his face from smashing into the
bookshelf or the door handle. He curses at her mum and bends his knees so it
looks like he might just drop to the floor and wait there until she gives up.
‘No!’ Sully says. His breath stammers. For a second Annie thinks he might have
a heart attack. When he is less than an arm span from the door, Annie’s mum
shoves harder. It takes Sully too long to work out he has to open the door himself.
He twists the handle and the chain catches the door. Annie swears she can smell
acetone funneling into the apartment. Sully stands there fumbling with the chain
and Annie’s mum punches him in the shoulder.
‘Get out!’
‘Mum!’
There is a rolled towel stopping the base of the door from opening too far. Sully
shuffles out, not having had time to look back before the door is slammed on him.
Her mum scoops the wallet and a pair of glasses off the coffee table and darts
onto the balcony, leaving the door open behind her. Annie pulls the top of her
dress over her mouth the way a firefighter at school taught her to do. When Russ
appears by her side, she instructs him to do the same with his sweater.
Annie’s mum hesitates at the railing, then pegs the wallet and glasses at the
ground. The sound is underwhelming—a quick tap at the concrete a storey below.
Annie hurries to her mum and reaches for the railing. Her mum swings around
and says, ‘Why do I have to get mad before you do anything I say?’
The world is so quiet that her mum’s voice seems to smother the whole block.
Annie steps back into the middle of the room. She shakes. Her mum slides the door
closed and flicks the lock down. She jerks the blackout curtains across the door
with one hand, her can now in the other. Instantly, the room cools.
‘It’s dangerous,’ her mum says.
‘Why would you do that?’ Annie says.
‘Don’t,’ Russ says to Annie.
‘Why do you always have to take her side?’ Annie asks him.
He says, ‘Because.’
A blur of light burns in the space between the drawn curtain and the wall. The
light seems condensed, powerful: a lamp in an interrogation room. Annie angles
her face away. Her mum sits at the desk. There is a pulse of silence where her
mum looks almost reverent.
‘I know,’ her mum says, looking at Russ. ‘I know, sweetie. I’m scared too.’ She
pouts, then holds her arms out. Annie almost laughs before Russ stands and buries
himself in their mum’s hug. Her mum’s eyes flick to her for only a second. Annie
squeezes her eyes shut and leans against a deep bookshelf packed with videotapes,
the labels crossed out, rewritten, and crossed out again. She’s seen all the films
and shows over and over again. There isn’t one about anthrax.
‘I don’t even know what anthrax is,’ Annie says.
VOICEWORKS • 33
• ANTHRAX •
Kelly Palmer
The dressing gown bunches a little at her mum’s shoulders, and her arms
around Russ slacken. She looks again at Annie through the corner of her eye.
‘I told you,’ her mum says.
‘Told me what?’
‘Shut up, Annie,’ Russ says. Annie can’t tell if he is genuinely afraid or if he just
wants to be held. He seems to hug their mum more often when he hates Annie, or
even when he hates their mum.
‘I bet it doesn’t even exist.’ Annie says, ‘There’s no such thing as anthrax.’
‘Yes there fucking is.’ Her mum jolts up, knocking Russ onto his feet,
and points to the window. ‘Yes there is. It killed a bunch of people in World
War One!’
Annie doesn’t need to check. Her mum’s tone is truth enough.
‘Wouldn’t other people know?’ Annie asks.
‘Oh, yeah, right,’ her mum says. ‘They probably want us all dead.’
‘Other kids are outside,’ Annie says.
‘And they’ll probably die.’
‘Mum!’
‘Annie!’ her mum mimics.
Annie slumps back into the shelf and looks at the floor.
‘Mum! Mum! Mum!’ her mum steps towards her, leaning down to her. ‘How do
you like it?’
Annie keeps her eyes straight at the floor and her hands at the back of her own
neck. She tries not to look at her mum’s face, which she knows will be twisted and
still like a monster mask. Annie says, ‘Why would I want to live if we were the
only people alive?’
‘You little shit,’ her mum says.
‘What?’
‘You’re a mean person, Annie. That was mean.’
‘I didn’t mean it like that.’
Her mum walks back, this time kneeling on the floor beside Russ, pulling him
to her chest. He holds her but stares wide-eyed at Annie. Maybe he’s confused,
maybe he’s hurt.
‘I’m sorry,’ Annie says.
Annie closes her eyes. She sees the anthrax drifting in front of the sun, the
shadows losing their edges. The anthrax, like baby powder, falls over rooftops, over
palm trees. The anthrax billows at the feet of the glass, seeps in under the door.
Annie wraps her arms around herself and coughs. It burns her throat like
a poison.
She stands.
At first, her mum pretends not to notice, but then Annie is sliding the chain
off the door. Annie is stepping outside into the stairwell. Annie takes the stairs
down, her hand hovering over the railing, then starts running when she hears
her mum at the door. When Annie’s feet hit the concrete and she feels the gum
of an oil stain, she doesn’t take the path to the street, but runs across the empty
space reserved for their car. She’s holding her breath. If she knew where to go, she
would run for a kilometre without stopping. On the other side of the driveway is a
narrow garden with brittle trees and a wooden fence.
34 • VOICEWORKS
• FICTION •
When she finds a paling with some give, Annie puts a foot against the fence
and pulls back with all her weight. She hangs off the fence until she trips backwards
with the plank in her hands. Annie ducks under the beam and steps through.
She stands under twisted trees that lean over the creek. Today the creek is at
low tide, so she sees the Telstra phone box, all those trolleys, and sticks spiking
out from the mud. Her bare feet are firm on the grass. No one else is using this
strip of green that lies behind the fences as a shortcut. Annie picks up some
macadamia nuts from the ground.
She can hear traffic from the Gold Coast Highway. She can smell fumes and
chicken salt and creek gunk and her own milky sweat. The leaves hanging above
glow a translucent green. When she reaches out to them, she can touch the sun.
Kelly Palmer (22) didn’t cry when she was born so her grandmother tried
sending her away. Now she teaches creative writing and cries all the time.
VOICEWORKS • 35
• POETRY •
It’s Almost Time
(now, this time,
here, in Leipzig)
By Holly Friedlander Liddicoat
Holly Friedlander Liddicoat (23) has previously been published
in Cordite, Otoliths, Seizure, Queen Mob’s Teahouse and the UTS
Writers’ Anthology. She lives and studies in Sydney.
36 • VOICEWORKS
• POETRY •
he dangles nikes over balcony
legs stuck through the metal bars
paint flecks snowing on his jeans
rust revealed. he picks at it
sucking on a dart
the window’s closed, hoping
she wouldn’t see—not that she cares
about the cigarettes.
watch the sun plunge fatly down, reds and browns
coming home to roost.
wake stand cook clean rinse wash sit sleep repeat.
she sits herself neatly inside
watching not watching sleeping
not sleeping. her entire being wants
to fuck wants with his cheaply:
but fucking needs talking
she’s sick
at the thought of this knowing
unknowing—she pulls
postcards from their walls,
the plaster comes.
she uncorks a red, leaves him
to his ciggies and rust specks
she hurtles down stairs, across
Ausstraße to the cemetery—anaemic
she sits on a bench in the autumn leaves
wishing she could stay there watching the going-down
sun that sparks once, then dims.
eventually he comes inside
eventually she comes inside
in bed
bone-tired
head to toe
head to toe
two crescents of barbed wire.
there had been years of Them
and now
just half-deaths and skin-flecks.
VOICEWORKS • 37
• NONFICTION •
THE
SURPRISING
PSYCHOLOGY
OF FOOD
By Bartholomew Pawlik
thE koala rarEly WritEs
monologues about the relative merits
of the eucalyptus leaf. That’s probably
because koalas are specialised eaters
—a species subsisting on a restricted
diet—and therefore experience less
food-related angst than us humans.
In his 2006 book, The Omnivore’s
Dilemma, Michael Pollan writes that
humans must navigate an ‘existential
food situation’: as omnivores we
can eat almost anything that nature
offers us. Historically, a lot of our
cognitive resources were invested in
deciding what was safe to eat and what
might kill us. But Pollan argues that
the abundance found at the modern
supermarket intensifies the omnivore’s
dilemma. We no longer have to worry
about what may or may not kill us—
incidents with packaged lettuce and
frozen berries aside—and so the choices
available to us can seem endless.
I’ve always felt that I’m responsible
for my own eating habits. Like most
people, when I go to the supermarket
I take a prepared list of what to buy—
and consequently eat. But studies
‘Carretera Austral (Route 7)’ is a comic by Harry McLean (23), who makes comics in Melbourne.
He previously studied philosophy and now studies publishing and communications. He likes
reading, running and drinking beer.
VOICEWORKS • 41
• THE SURPRISING PSYCHOLOGY OF FOOD •
Bartholomew Pawlik
in the modern psychology of food
have revealed that there’s a veritable
cornucopia of influences that shape
what we consume, from lighting
and music, to colours and shapes, to
location and visibility. Even at our own
dinner tables, there are factors outside
our conscious awareness that guide
our knives and forks. When, listening
to a Yale open course, I inadvertently
stumbled across a small sample of
this research, I became determined to
investigate these external influences
and see what they mean for our
everyday lives. If outside forces were
dictating our decisions, I wanted to
take back the driver’s seat and make
my own food choices. My investigation
led me from the local McDonald’s to
laboratories at Cornell University and
back again; the journey made me see
supermarkets and pantries in a brand
new way, ultimately leading to changes
in my own eating patterns.
One of the pioneers of this research
is Brian Wansink, a bespectacled,
sandy-haired American professor at
Cornell University. On 4 January 2008,
Wansink was named ABC World News
Person of the Week, demonstrating his
influence beyond college classrooms
and laboratories. In 2007 he received an
Ig Nobel Prize, a satirical award given
for unusual or strange achievements
in science. The award claims to
acknowledge achievements that first
make people laugh, but then make
them think, which is exactly how I
reacted to Wansink’s quirky studies.
Wansink’s award-winning research
involved a bowl of soup, which, like
the food in the Australian story, The
Magic Pudding, was never-ending.
Wansink and his colleagues offered
undergraduates a free meal in return
for completing a questionnaire, a
time-tested way of luring in university
42 • VOICEWORKS
students. The students entered the
laboratory four at a time, believing that
they were about to sample and rate a
new tomato soup recipe. Unbeknownst
to them, two of the bowls were rigged
with copper pipes leading to large
containers of soup; regardless of how
much they ate, their bowls would
never completely empty. To ensure
that no over-eager students picked
up a bowl, exposing the tube beneath,
undergraduates were asked to leave
the bowls on the table, ostensibly so
‘Wasnik’s awardwinning research
involved a bowl of soup,
which, like the food in
the Australian story,
The Magic Pudding, was
never-ending.’
they didn’t ‘get distracted’. Only one
person managed to spot the con, seeing
the copper pipe when he leant down
to retrieve a dropped spoon, giving up
the gig to the three students he was
seated with.
Wansink and his colleagues set
up the experiment to determine how
this never-ending food supply would
affect the amount the students ate. The
results were striking. People with the
Magic Soup Bowls ate over 60 per cent
more than people without them; most
of those participants were still eating
when the experiment ended, a full
twenty minutes after starting. Yet when
asked how many calories they thought
they had eaten, the students with the
never-ending bowls gave remarkably
similar answers to those with regular
bowls, with one student even expressing
how filling the soup was.
• NONFICTION •
These results point to the broader
theme of Wansink’s research: the
way we eat relies heavily on external
cues. His team has found that people
given free popcorn eat more if it’s in a
larger tub; people using smaller plates
eat less; people using bigger spoons
eat more; and people presented with
greater variety of foods eat for longer.
These sorts of cues even influence our
conscious experience of hunger. You
may have heard that our stomachs
don’t realise that they’re full until
twenty minutes after eating; according
to Wansink it’s true. Lacking the cue
of an empty bowl, the college students
kept eating the soup, and their bellies
didn’t tell them to stop. Yet despite
all of the research, most people would
claim that they’re not influenced by
seemingly trivial things like the size of
a plate: of course, other people might
be, but not me. When I shared these
findings with a close friend of mine he
replied: ‘That’s ridiculous’. I told him
that it’s true and there’s a lot of science
showing that it works. ‘I believe you,’
he said, ‘but it shouldn’t!’
Tech behemoth Google have
transformed their offices into realworld testing grounds for Wansink’s
findings. The company is famous for its
excellent working conditions, offering
employees all kinds of freebies and
benefits, including free meals. Google
co-founder Sergey Brin once announced
that no employee should be more than
two hundred feet from food. But there’s
a downside to all of that generosity:
Google has told new recruits that it
may have an impact on their health.
You can’t offer people candy without
consequences. When the company
became concerned about employee
health, they turned to Wansink’s ideas.
In one experiment, affectionately
dubbed ‘Project M&M’, Google moved
their free M&Ms to opaque containers,
hiding the sugary deliciousness inside.
They also put healthier snacks—
including dried figs and pistachio
nuts—in visible, transparent glass
jars. The results were astounding. In
Google’s New York office alone, their
employees consumed a 3.1 million fewer
calories from M&Ms across a period
of seven weeks. A similar intervention
encouraged employees to drink more
water. Google placed bottled water
behind transparent glass at eye level,
and moved their fizzy drinks behind
frosted glass on bottom shelves. Across
another seven-week period, their
employees drank 47 per cent more
water, and at the same time, they took
in 7 per cent fewer calories from the
sugary drinks.
External cues don’t just affect what
we eat at the dinner (or laboratory)
table, they also affect what we buy
in the first place. And marketing
companies know it: in some cases,
they’re the ones doing the research.
The food and grocery industry is worth
114 billion dollars in Australia alone.
There are fast food joints that want
us to upsize our meals, restaurants
that want us to order dessert, products
that compete for our attention on
supermarket shelves—supermarkets
who themselves want to sell products
for the largest profit. In order to see
if the academic research I was reading
lined up with the reality of Australian
life, I decided to put down the books
and head back into the world armed
with this new knowledge.
I made a trip to my local Adelaide
supermarket, the Frewville Foodland,
which had recently received the award
for best international grocer. When I
walked in, I was greeted by rows of
winter melons, green paw paws, and
dragon fruit, underscoring the variety
VOICEWORKS • 43
• THE SURPRISING PSYCHOLOGY OF FOOD •
Bartholomew Pawlik
of the grocer. Have you noticed how
supermarkets always lead you into the
fresh food section when you enter?
It’s no accident, it’s carefully planned.
The produce section has everything the
supermarket wants to be associated
with: the wholesome and the healthy.
I was always confused as to why my
local Coles keeps fresh produce on ice,
which seemed much less convenient
than a refrigerator. It turns out it’s
yet another marketing ploy. According
to marketing guru Martin Lindstrom,
the ice is another signal of freshness.
Research has found that the produce
section creates a ‘health halo’. If you
grab your fresh food first, you actually
end up spending more money—picking
up that banana gives you a licence to
purchase those Mars Bars, guilt free.
In Frewville’s fresh food section,
they had a live pianist, a man with
dreadlocks tied up into a tight pony tail
and a short black goatee that framed his
face. He wore a black shirt, sunglasses
tucked into the collar, and played a
rendition of the Beatles song, ‘While My
Guitar Gently Weeps’. While most local
supermarkets might not have a live
act, it’s impossible to ignore that they
always—always—have music playing.
There’s a reason for it: research shows
that music makes people buy more.
The list of subtle manipulations goes
on. Items that appeal to children are
put at their eye level; products on sale
are at the height of their parents’ faces;
home brand products are on the bottom
shelves—you have the inconvenience
of bending down if you want to grab
those savings. And, like casinos,
supermarkets are made deliberately
difficult to exit—just how do you get
out if you haven’t bought anything?
After exploring the research, I
finally took a close look at my own food
habits. In particular, I thought I could
44 • VOICEWORKS
benefit from culinary thoughtfulness in
my workplace. I’m a crisis counsellor at
Lifeline Australia, working night shifts
talking to people who are distressed,
struggling with mental health issues,
or even contemplating suicide. It’s
a stressful job at times, as you can
imagine. Regardless of the day’s ups
and downs, I have to be there for other
people in crisis. People’s emotions
can be intense, yet people often have
logical reasons for their distress, which
are often only revealed once someone
listens without judgement.
In such a stressful work
environment, it’s hard to get through
the night without a snack. Salads, it
seems, aren’t satisfying. Maybe it’s the
stress. Research suggests that stress
hormones, like cortisol, can turn people
towards sugary, high-fat comfort foods.
If I don’t plan for a late-night snack,
I’m faced with an obstacle: McDonald’s.
The big ‘M’ sign beckons, luminescent
in the dark of night, promising warmth
and comfort and satisfaction. After a
hard night, it’s hard to say no.
As a practising psychologist, I know
there’s a danger here: I’m worried
that I might form a habit. Ha-bit. It’s
a small word, seemingly inane, but
those two syllables have a striking
power. Habit is character, Aristotle tells
us. There’s a charming sound bite in
neuroscience that ‘neurons that fire
together, wire together’. Every time we
act out a habit the neurological wiring
supporting it becomes a little stronger.
We can’t simply undo or remove those
pathways; we have to build new habits
and connections. Eventually these new
neural links will be stronger than the
previous ones, and the old wiring will
fade from disuse.
Cues from our environment can
become triggers for our habits, a fact
that any introductory psychology
• NONFICTION •
student is familiar with. Ivan Pavlov,
a German scientist, rang a bell before
feeding his dogs and, well, you probably
know the story. Over time the dogs
started salivating at the sound of the
bell, even if no food was served. Their
brains associated the bell with food; a
neural connection had been forged. I
was worried that I would be sculpting
my own, unwanted, connections in my
brain: a drive home equals McDonald’s.
This may help to explain why selfcontrol is, for the most part, unrelated
to eating habits. Many research
psychologists argue that self-control
is a limited resource. We only have so
much before our tank runs dry, leaving
us vulnerable to temptation. Yet we
face hundreds of food choices each day.
When we have a cookie in front of us,
it’s easy to say no the first time. But if
that cookie remains, it will call to us
again. We tell ourselves ‘no!’ a second
time. How long can we really last?
Eventually, with our defences worn
down, we’re likely to give in.
People who maintain healthy eating
habits manage their environments.
They know that the fight is best preempted, because otherwise it’s a losing
game. The cookie is put away, out of
sight, or not bought at all. They pick
their battles with the shopping list, not
the pantry. Brian Wansink’s research
demonstrates the power of being aware
of, and changing, our surroundings.
For example, he found that simply
downsizing household plates can reduce
calories consumed at meals by 22 per
cent. What did it all mean for me, in
my workplace predicament? Well, the
best ways to avoid spending money
on unwanted fast food were simple:
pick a different route, thereby avoiding
the golden arches, and plan a drivehome snack in advance. Plus, instead
of taking a whole bag of chips, I chose
a more temperate option: putting a
smaller portion into a Tupperware
container. It’s not rocket science. It
doesn’t need to be.
Michael Pollan writes in his book, In
Defense of Food, that for most of human
history we haven’t had to ask what to
eat, we simply ate what our parents
ate. But in today’s world many people’s
diets differ from those of their parents
and grandparents. Food trends now
change several times within a single
‘There’s a good chance
the potatoes you buy
at the supermarket
are the same species
that has been used
by McDonald’s, the
Russet Burbank.’
generation—kale and quinoa aren’t
exactly traditional Australian foods.
But this reflects another, much larger
change: we live in an increasingly
global and interconnected world.
Our diets used to be at the mercy of
the seasons, but now we can import
Mexican mandarins, Brazilian bananas
and American apples.
This means that our choices have
global implications: they are bigger
than us as individuals. McDonald’s
serves as a prototypical example,
a company so big that its business
decisions affect food infrastructure
worldwide. There’s a good chance the
potatoes you buy at the supermarket
are the same species that has been used
by McDonald’s, the Russet Burbank.
That specific potato has become
dominant because its size met the
needs of McDonald’s, perfect for their
long, skinny french fries. That choice
VOICEWORKS • 45
• THE SURPRISING PSYCHOLOGY OF FOOD •
Bartholomew Pawlik
has filtered all the way down to our
own kitchens: farmers have adapted
their infrastructure to grow these
particular potatoes because McDonald’s
is such a large commercial buyer,
meaning that there are also more of
them available on supermarket shelves.
But the supermarket is a democracy.
We vote with our hands every time
we pick up our groceries—if we buy
fair trade goods, companies will
produce more of them. The widespread
use of the Russet Burbank has been
criticised as it uses an intensive
amount of water and requires the
heavy use of pesticides. In response
to that criticism, McDonald’s has
moved towards developing and using
more environmentally friendly tubers.
Changing consumer preferences has also
led to the use of free-range eggs and
rainforest-friendly coffee at your local
Maccas. What you choose to eat matters.
The eighteenth-century French
gastronomist Jean-Anthelme BrillatSavarin said that gastronomy governs
the whole life of man (and, of course,
woman). Now, in the twenty-first
century, our food choices have
consequences beyond our own lives.
Michael Pollan tells us that eating is
always an ecological act, a political act.
If what we eat can change the world,
it behoves us to take responsibility for
our choices. We need to take back our
culinary decisions from the companies
that are solely driven to empty our
wallets. The next step for me will be
to go beyond reducing my workplace
calories—to investigate how I can eat
ethically, and build habits to make
those choices easier. Maybe, just
maybe, we can all make a difference by
choosing a smaller bowl of soup.
Bartholomew Pawlik (25) is a psychologist based in Adelaide. He’s previously been published
in Lateral Magazine. You can find his musings on literature, philosophy and science at
rationallycurious.com.
46 • VOICEWORKS
• POETRY •
A More Modern Torso
—After Rilke
By Hugo Branley
My body in a certain light
shines bronze.
My arms stretch to heaven.
I could advertise cologne.
My strength is careful;
it ripples in the sun. Women
stare. The generous application
of bronzer. My breasts
have been compared to apples,
missiles, generous sharing
handfuls. Men
stare. I am utterly hairless.
I spend a long time
in single positions, each pose
an act of love.
Tourists stop. They snap
the horizon between my thighs
looking for new vistas.
Filters. Caloric efficiency.
Even my sweat
cannot be trusted
for shine. I sculpt
my hands into giant baskets,
as though to carry the infant
Moses. Slow
twitching. My hips smirk,
down in the dark
where there is no spark
of procreation. No place
from which I am not seen. Look.
Must I change my life?
Hugo Branley (22) was born quite young and has no real memories of how it happened.
His work has been published in Demos, Knack, Woroni and the Sydney University Anthology.
VOICEWORKS • 47
• FICTION •
—AND ANYWAY,
WE PROMISED
YOU A STORY,
DIDN’T WE—
By Jonathan O’Brien
—WE did, yEs—
—so we might as well get
on with it. Pass me my drink, would you—
—which one’s yours?—
—the lightcoloured one; the cider. Thanks. Anyway. We were driving through town the other
day, on our way to Makin’ Mattresses—
—well, I was driving. You still had your
hand in that cast—
—semantics, Bruce. We were passing around where all the big
offices are, and that’s when we see, going the other way down the street, sirens
blaring, is half a dozen fire engines—
—it was two, hon. Two fire engines—
—but it
was two big ones, wasn’t it? Might as well’ve been six. So we see these six sirens
go past, and Bruce, you said something like, what, Strewth or something, in that
stupid way your father always used to, and craned your head backwards and
VOICEWORKS • 49
• —AND ANYWAY, WE PROMISED YOU A STORY, DIDN’T WE— •
Jonathan O’Brien
almost crashed the bloody car—
—we were fine, Sandy. We weren’t gonna crash.
We were fine—
—we got honked at—
—by an eighty-year-old—
—still honked at—
—her arthritic left hand probably slipped. Christ. We didn’t almost crash. That’s
the important bit. Anyway, so of course Sandy says—
—well of course I say, Bloody
hell, Bruce, what d’ya reckon’s going on with those engines? Cause there’s at least
half a dozen—
—two—
—of them buggers—
—and she makes me do a U-turn at
the next intersection, crazy woman, can you believe it? Are they even legal in the
city?—
—I’m sure they are, dear—
—I was asking the others—
—I know, but besides.
You know I know best—
—don’t pull that with me—
—but I’m just a sweet
little thing—
—you stop that right now—
—so he chucks the youie and we set off
behind those engines, right down into the Valley, sirens all crazy. It’s midday mind
you, so we haven’t really got their lights to follow. It’s just noise and—
—you make
it sound harder than it was—
—you almost got lost. If I hadn’t been there to tell
you which way they went, we’d’ve been—
—fine. We’d’ve been fine—
—you’re deaf
in one ear, that’s your problem. All those years of rock n roll when you were a
kid—
—that has nothing to do with it—
—it has everything to do with it. We almost
lost the fire engines cause of Metallica—
—are we going to actually tell the story,
hon? C’mon, get off your phones guys, I promise it gets good. So we follow the fire
trucks out for a few kays, and sure enough, we pull up at a bank. Now, let me set
the scene. Two cop cars—
—there were definitely more than two cop cars, Bruce—
—nah. The whole day was groups of two. Noah’s ark—
—you know that isn’t how
it happened. I was wrong about the fire trucks, but there were at least five cop
cars. Promise. Swear on my bleeding heart—
50 • VOICEWORKS
• FICTION •
—so there were two cop cars already
there, and an ambulance that shows up later, but for now it’s just the fire trucks
and the coppers, and we’re like, Oh shit, what’ve we followed out here? Right?
Because I mean, shit, we were waiting any moment for a guy in like a balaclava
to pop out the front door carrying like a damn ATM or some shit, on a trolley or
something, ready to dump it in his getaway car, which, lemme think, was it a ute?
Did they say on the news—
—it was a ute, yeah—
—right, so we’re kinda in park, more
or less in the middle of the road, watching the whole thing, and I turn to Sandy and
I say—
—he says something like, Oh shit, Sandy. We gotta get outta here—
—I didn’t
say it like that—
—you did. You were scared shitless, hon—
—I wasn’t—
—Bruce—
—Sandy—
—you were scared shitless—
—eff off—
—I’ll eff you later, if you’re g—
—I hate you so much sometimes—
—yeah, but you’re covering a—
—don’t. Effin
hell, Sandy. Don’t bring it up in—
—let’s not get all shy now Br—
—I’m gonna get
another drink. I’ll get you all another round. All five of you keen? What you just
had is good? Great—
—so anyway, he was scared shitless—
—I can hear you—
—I love you honey. Anyway, Bruce kinda eases up on the clutch, and so of course
that means we’re stuck there, awkwardly, and the aircon’s shat itself, and you
know what the weather was like last week. Stinking. So we’re kinda sat there, and
he’s swearing at the gear stick, sweating and not just from the heat, and that’s
when we see the kid jump out from round the back of the bank. Makes a run for it,
right down the driveway and towards the road and—
—and that’s when he slams
into the car. Our car. And that’s when it’s Sandy’s turn to scream—
—so you admit
you were scared—
—the point is that he slammed into the door and Sandy turned
so fast she whacked herself as well—
—bruised myself through my cast—
—well you
shouldn’t’ve punched through that window in the first place, should you?—
—shut up.
VOICEWORKS • 51
• —AND ANYWAY, WE PROMISED YOU A STORY, DIDN’T WE— •
Jonathan O’Brien
I was upset—
—so the kid dives into the back seat. I swear, he flies in through the
back door and he swings it open so hard it almost comes off its hinges. Do car
doors have hinges? Is that how it—
—and the kid, when he’s in the back, I say kid
because he wore a beanie and looked prepubescent, the kid just says, Drive. And so
what d’ya reckon Bruce does? He stalls the bloody thing—
—I did, it’s true. God,
that was the most awful moment. I felt my heart stop beating altogether, I reckon.
He yells, Drive. And I. Christ, sorry—
—you’re all right, dear, it’s just—
—no, no, I’m—
—you’re?—
—I’m fine. I fucking start the car and I fucking drive, and I don’t think,
I just drive, he had a knife, you know, and I started to drive before I saw the
policemen filing out of the bank and towards us and the screech of the tyres—
—Bruce,
slow down. It’s okay—
—I know—
—yeah?—
—yeah—
—okay. So we drive away,
and he’s got that bloody knife near the gearstick, right between us, so he could
slice either of us at any time. Now, I betted he’d’ve sliced me more likely, since
I wasn’t driving, so I’m scared too at that point, of course I’m scared, cause this
isn’t just a fire engine and some coppers, this full-on Bruce-doing-eighty-in-afifty-zone kinda shit. And we just keep going, like, this guy just wants us to keep
going, he keeps yelling left, left, right, left, right, and Bruce is doing his best, but
sometimes the kid yelled two things at once, and it was impossible—
—impossible—
—and the kid’s just getting angrier, you know? Can’t blame him for being all
hot-headed, I guess, since he was wearing a silly bloody beanie in the middle of
the bloody day. No wonder he thought robbing a bank was a good idea—
—he was
on drugs too, hon. That was a big factor—
—he tried to kill you—
—that’s a little
harsh—
—you’ve still got that cut, but. See, just under your collar. No, don’t hide it,
Bruce. C’mon. Yeah, there it is. Fucker stuck out a knife and hooked it right round
Bruce’s neck. Said if he didn’t start doing ninety he’d cut harder. Said if Bruce
braked at all the momentum’d do the work for him—
—I could hardly breathe, and
the kid knocked off my bloomin glasses—
—and the cop cars were behind us this
whole time, sirens and everything, lights going even though it was daytime, and
we’re just kinda following this crazy kid’s instructions, and—
52 • VOICEWORKS
• FICTION •
—this is where the
story gets good—
—because we’re out on the highway now, with a kid and a couple
sacks of cash in the back, and just half a dozen cop cars behind us—
—I wouldn’t
say that many—
—I swear to God, Bruce, if you don’t shut up about numbers right
now—
—sorry. Anyway, they were gaining on us, and for the first time it feels like
getting Frank to soup up the car was a good idea—
—except it made us look more
suspicious since the bloody thing wasn’t roadworthy—
—it was fast though—
—it was fast—
—where is Frank, anyhow? He said he’d be here. He was meant to
hear this story. I’ll have to tell it to him some other time—
—just make sure I’m
around. So you don’t go fibbing about how brave you weren’t. I know how you
and Frank get, out in that garage of his, with those Rocky Balboa posters and that
home brand jerky he always leaves lying around. Halfway through a carton each.
But I suppose he’d have to be drunk to believe the version of the story where you
were the brave one—
—why am I moving in with you?—
—you can pull out if
you want. No. Don’t wink at me. Goddamn. Just tell the bloody story. We take a
turnoff, and half the cop cars don’t merge fast enough—
—half being one—
—half
being three—
—whatever—
—the point is, we’re still being tailed, but less intensely
I guess. And the kid starts taking us down weird streets, but less randomly and
he’s only talking when he needs to and he’s taken the knife away, which is around
when I noticed the blood on Bruce’s neck. But of course I don’t say anything,
pretend not to notice, and Bruce is just driving, driving, driving—
—You’re my
accomplices, the kid says. Messed up if you ask me. Says, You run with me, you live
or die with me. You go to jail with me. You go free with me. Got it? and of course we
both nod, and he says for us to fucking say it and so we fucking say it and he nods
and slumps back, starts giving directions again, and he starts asking me how good
the car’s suspension is—
—I never liked Frank till that moment—
—you don’t like
Frank?—
—well I do now, obviously—
—what’s wrong with Frank?—
—nothing, nothing’s wrong with
VOICEWORKS • 53
• —AND ANYWAY, WE PROMISED YOU A STORY, DIDN’T WE— •
Jonathan O’Brien
Frank. Just the way he talks sometimes, the way he hangs round a lot. Lots of
stories about girls, you know? You must’ve noticed—
—no. We all love Frank. Right
guys? See? God, Sandy I can’t—
—shit, I’m sorry, Christ. Point is, he knows his
suspension, so when the kid has us turn off the road, right then—
—you keep
saying us, but this was certainly me—
—fine. Bruce expertly manoeuvres Michaelbloody-Schumacher-style right off of the fucking tarmac and onto the bloody dirt
and through the trees—
—you gotta imagine tight corners, split decisions, still that
one cop car behind us, bouncing through the woods. You gotta imagine the thoughts
going through my head. I didn’t have my glasses, remember? And I was just kinda
zooming through a blur, thankful again for Frank. Could someone text him by the
way? This is unlike him—
—he’s probably floating off somewhere—
—and then I
hear this huge slam and crash behind us, and there’s still that cop siren going, and
then there’s another sound only it’s more like a creak, like a hinge or something,
not like a car door, like a door with actual hinges, and then it’s way behind us, and
then there’s quiet, and the kid’s just staring out the back window and then at us
with these death eyes and then he says—
—Stop—
—and I bring the brake right
down, and we’re all flung forward—
—and I bruise my bloody hand through the
cast again—
—and then we’re out in this forest, and there’s just the sound of the
three of us breathing. We sat there for, oh, I don’t know—
—about ten minutes,
I’d say. At least. Bloody kid doesn’t move. Dunno what he was doing. Listening,
probably. And then he just bolts. Bloody kid just runs off into the woods with his
sacks of cash. And we’re sat alone in the car, sweating and quiet, and we watch the
kid til he disappears—
—no. He said something to us before he disappeared—
—no he
didn’t. What’d he say?—
—he said, Thanks—
—he did not—
—he did though, and it
was beautiful, Sandy. So genuine that, that’s why I—
—that’s the reason you
proposed?—
—I was blown away by it. His authenticity, you know? Really, I
couldn’t not ask—
—I can’t bloody believe that’s why, Bruce. I mean, guys, he got
54 • VOICEWORKS
• FICTION •
down on one knee then and there, you know, popped the question and everything. I
thought it was sweet. In the middle of the bush, as it were, and just like high school
again, what with us in the back like that—
—Sandy—
—what, like these guys are
gonna care where we fucked—
—well, they don’t need to kn—
—it’s not like Frank’s
here to hijack the conversation just cause we talked about fucking—
—where is he?
Someone send him a text. He has to hear this story soon, I—
—the version where
you save the day, or the true version?—
—that’s not the point and you know it,
Sandy—
—I’m just stirring and you know it. Oh, c’mon Bruce, I’m just—
—the point
is—
—right, sure, the point is we’re—
—we’re getting married in July and you’re all
invited. Frank too. Yes, thank you—
—thanks. I know—
—yes, cheers indeed.
Jonathan O’Brien (20) used to think formal experimentation was just what you
did at the afterparty of your high school graduation. jonobri.com / @jonobri.
VOICEWORKS • 55
56 • VOICEWORKS
• NONFICTION •
BAJTAR
PARADISE
By Nathan Mifsud
Both my nannus, aftEr they
migrated to Australia from Malta,
purchased farmland. Paul had a 102acre property not far from Goulburn.
My most vivid memories there are tied
to the land, a rolling mass made dense
with association, individual synapses
linked to each bump and curve of the
hard dirt roads. I can instantly recall
the spot where a red-bellied snake
bit me, the rabbit warren visited at
dusk, the grassy slope where we shot
clay pigeons, their graceful arcs and
violent bursts superimposed on a
quintessential pastoral backdrop. I
remember waking my nanna, Doris, to
wander the frosty paddocks together,
picking up thin sheets of ice formed
from puddles overnight. And if I close
my eyes, I can imagine the snap of gum
branches falling and the whispering
olive grove, cultivated on a fertile
hillside—a distinctly Mediterranean
labour of love.
Andrew had a different, smaller
farm, more typical of his homeland. It
was not a place of zoological diversity,
like Paul’s—no roaming cattle, no
aviary, ferrets or guinea pigs—only
possessing a modest chicken coop.
‘Birthday Party Matches’ is by Ania Gareeva (23), a Russian-born artist, who studied
in Sydney, the UK and Japan. She loves travelling, Soviet animation and cats.
VOICEWORKS • 57
• BAJTAR PARADISE •
Nathan Mifsud
The land was not for grazing, but
for food, especially rows and rows of
zucchini, enormous, coarse-skinned
and deep green. In the centre of the
farm: Nannu’s shed. Every bolt drilled
by him, every steel beam. My memories
here blur into one: bright, sweaty days,
cold cans of Kinnie, hands red and black
with rust and dirt, washing them with
soap like sandpaper. Outside the shed,
we roamed a labyrinthine graveyard
of machinery, its tangles of spider
webs and artificial topography. Rising
above it all, his hand-built windmill,
guillotine blades creaking in the wind.
A no-nonsense place, but one whose
rough edges were rich material for an
active imagination.
Tall walls of overgrown prickly
pear lined the tractor path around the
perimeter of Andrew’s dam—the same
dam where he taught his daughters
to swim by throwing them into its
murky waters. Those looming, thorny
structures crowded the edge of the
farm with their rotting pads and sickly
sweet scent, and standing beneath
them as a child, far from the safety
of Nannu’s presence, turned real life
to fantasy. For to creep through that
spooky tunnel replete with crows and
hidden snakes, alone or in the company
of my brothers, was a quest with no
reward but the sunlight at its end,
the open vegetable fields beyond the
dominion of the prickly terror. Freely
facing those zombie cacti was the
surest test of courage.
Introduced to Australia by colonists in
1788 to establish a natural dye industry,
prickly pear (genus Opuntia) was at
first unremarkable. However, when
the species now known as common
pest pear (Opuntia stricta) entered in
58 • VOICEWORKS
the 1800s as hardy stock fodder for
use in drought years, it proceeded to
invade the continent with a ferocity
like few other weeds since. O. stricta
encountered favourable climes and
no serious enemies, and its plentiful
coloured fruits attracted birds who were
instrumental in its relentless, wide
sweep over the land.
‘...in contrast to
Australia, Maltese
people love the prickly
pear, where it is known
as bajtar tax-xewk
(‘spiny figs’).’
Despite increasingly desperate control
attempts such as poison, excavation
and burning, crushing with livestockdrawn rollers, and even destroying
tens of thousands of emus, crows and
magpies who had helped disperse the
seeds, by 1920 the common pest pear
had managed to infest fifty-eight
million acres across New South Wales
and Queensland. A trail of destruction
was left in its wake—in part, manmade: Judith Wright notes, in Cry for
the Dead, that poison drums emptied
in the ecological fight against the pest
soon leached into waterholes and creeks
across the country, leading to the death
of colonists’ livestock. This was a cruel
irony, since those cattle and sheep had
prepped the land for Opuntia’s conquest
in the first place, by degrading native
grasslands previously managed by
traditional Aboriginal burning practices.
The prickly saga reached its zenith
in 1926, when, following six years
of evaluation by the Queensland
Prickly Pear Land Commission, over
three billion eggs of the Argentinian
cactoblastis moth (Cactoblastis cactorum)
• NONFICTION •
were bred and distributed. In their
larvae stage, the grubs work together
to chew a tunnel through the tough
surface of the plant, and then devour
the soft interior. Less than a decade
later, the O. stricta infestation that
had haunted rural settlers was mostly
eradicated. The effectiveness of
Cactoblastis as a biological agent was
as stunning as the initial spread of the
noxious weed they were introduced to
control, a success later mimicked in
other parts of the world.
Malta, the homeland of my
grandparents, is a tiny cluster of islands
a stone’s throw south of Sicily—the
entire nation is 78,000 acres, a blip
in the Antipodean arm of the O. stricta
empire at its peak. However, in contrast
to Australia, Maltese people love prickly
pear, where it is known as bajtar
tax-xewk (‘spiny figs’). As testament,
in 1975, soon after Malta became a
republic, the heraldic coat of arms was
replaced with an unceremonious design
that featured prickly pear on a coastline,
an emblem which endured until 1988.
Perhaps a reason for this difference in
endearment is that O. stricta is absent.
Instead, the slightly less troublesome
O. ficus-indica is found in every open
space across the Maltese islands, used
as impenetrable farm dividers and
protection from strong prevailing
winds, and celebrated for its summer
fruit and saccharine liqueur.
To tell O. stricta and O. ficus-indica
apart, you need only look at the plants
straight on. The former is unlikely to
reach your shoulder, ruining arable land
by covering vast swaths in low, dense
scrub. Meanwhile, the latter species,
at a height of up to five metres, can
dwarf any human, and must have been
the menacing but non-invasive species
enclosing Nannu’s dam. How did O.
ficus-indica come to inhabit Andrew’s
farm? Before beginning the six-week
voyage to Australia in 1951, Jane—his
wife, my nanna—wrapped a stem of
beloved prickly pear in a shirt and
posted it to him in a discreet package.
It cracks me up to think about this
simple act—the knowing rebellion
against biosecurity, yes, but more so
how it represents an expression of
fondness for a plant better known, in
their new country, as a scourge.
It also niggled at me. They were
not pretty plants, after all. I wondered
if there was something deeper to the
botanical attachment which explains
the cactus in every second Maltese
yard, something left unsaid by Nanna.
Searching YouTube, I came across a
perspective which hints at the cultural
memory bound into prickly cladodes,
even those sprung from different soil.
In one video, a farmer from southwestern Sydney, standing singlet-clad,
sketches the history of the resplendent
O. ficus-indica plants behind him,
with distinctive Australian birdsong
audible in the background: ‘During
the wartime, back in Europe, in Malta
where I come from, they ate a lot of
[prickly pear fruit] because, uh’—here,
he pauses and looks at the ground—
‘we were nearly starved. So uh, I
recommend that you try it one day, but
be careful when you peel it.’
He refers to the Siege of Malta
between 1940 and 1942, in which
the Axis powers determined to bomb
the country into submission because
of its strategic importance in the
Mediterranean, straddling vital supply
and reinforcement routes. For over
two years, starting from the day
after Mussolini aligned Italy with the
German forces, Malta became the target
VOICEWORKS • 59
• BAJTAR PARADISE •
Nathan Mifsud
of several thousand enemy air raids,
severely choking food supplies to its
beleaguered population. In particular, a
terrible stretch of 154 consecutive days
and nights, which brought them to
the brink of surrender and starvation,
proved the most sustained bombing
attack of World War II. As testament to
the resilience of the Maltese, the George
Cross—the highest possible British
military decoration for civilians—was
awarded for the first and only time to
an entire people, and is now woven
into Malta’s national flag. Little
wonder, then, that sweet fruit borne by
widespread local cacti became a subject
of adulation. That across an ocean,
the sight of them, populous, gnarled
and dominant in an otherwise foreign
environment, provides some comfort.
Following the war, with their country
ravaged and unemployment high,
thousands of Maltese left for l-art fejn
hemm futur (‘the land of the future’)
with the aid of Australia’s first assisted
passage agreement since the Ten
Pound Poms. According to historian
Barry York, 55,000 people—one-sixth
of Malta’s population at the time—had
settled in Australia by 1966. Beyond
the different cultural and spatial
dimensions to become accustomed
to, these dislocated islanders had to
contend with that common, alienating
barrier: their limited command of
English. Their highly distinctive Semitic
language, which had survived over a
thousand years of economic and military
incursions to the Maltese archipelago,
was only useful within their post-war
communities. Indeed, even within
these linguistic havens, their new
surroundings defied description;
Manwel Nicholas-Borg, a prolific
60 • VOICEWORKS
Maltese-Australian poet, said that to
adequately capture their experiences,
writers had to appropriate many English
words, such as buxx (‘bush’).
Many of the migrants were
considered unskilled, and, for better
or worse, labour-intensive work
is not language dependent beyond
the operating instructions of each
task. My paternal grandfather, Paul,
was a prototypical example of what
fuelled Australia’s post-war industrial
development, gaining employment
at a steel pipe manufacturer shortly
after migrating and remaining there
for the rest of his working life. Similar
narratives played out for scores of
young Maltese men. A bona fide
immigration success story, then—but
in fact, this was a case of third time
lucky. As Stephanie Affeldt documents
in Consuming Whiteness, Maltese workers
were severely discriminated against
in two earlier periods of workforce
replacement: following the departure of
Pacific Islanders from Queensland sugar
cane fields in the 1880s, and following
World War I, when Maltese immigration
was, for a time, halted altogether, even
as migration schemes were arranged for
their Spanish and Italian neighbours.
The labour movement responsible
for the political pressure which lead to
these exclusions had concerns that were
racially motivated. Notwithstanding
their British citizenship, the Maltese
were feared as ‘a primitive, dark
race’; as late as 1916, Worker, a union
newspaper, implicated them in a ‘deeplaid scheme […] to bleed out Australia
of its white manhood by conscription
[and] infuse the colored and cheap into
the land’. That same year, a 214-strong
boatload of Maltese agricultural
labourers was refused permission to
disembark in Australia, ostensibly
because they failed the dictation test,
• NONFICTION •
which had been administered in Dutch.
This was not an isolated event. Before
their change of fortune in 1946, the
Maltese were the second-largest group
of people, after the Chinese, to be
prohibited from immigration due to the
caprices of the White Australia Policy.
The public debate over Maltese
‘whiteness’ can be read into a cover
cartoon of the Worker from 1916, in
which a piebald Trojan horse, newly
arrived on an Australian shoreline
as a ship bearing conscripts departs,
secretly hosts the ‘coloured’ workers
whom the labour movement protested.
The Maltese were the piebald horse, the
immigrant group whose complexion
and honourability was whitewashed
by their well-intentioned supporters,
the people who were harbingers of
a ‘coloured’ invasion that would be
difficult to dispel. Extending the ugly
metaphor, the cartoonist invoked a
then-national obsession with the
eradication of an agricultural invasion:
right above a large sign reading ‘White
Australia’, as if the loathsome seed
had fallen from the cloth of the piebald
migrants and newly germinated in
the sand, is the subtle illustration of a
fledging prickly pear plant.
Miskina dik it-tajra li titrabba f’art hażina.
‘Pity the bird that is reared in a barren
land’, goes the Maltese saying, perhaps
speaking to the isolation felt by those
early migrants. Fortunately, Australia
ended up a blessing for those who
arrived in the literal and demographic
waves of the 1950s and 1960s, and
when multiculturalism was embraced
in the 1970s, the Maltese community
became an integral part of their new
country. At the same time, the quality
of life on the islands began to recover,
and industry in Australia began to wind
down. The number of Australians born
in Malta peaked in 1981, and Maltese
entries have dwindled ever since. The
overall rate of immigration now tips in
‘...across an ocean,
the sight of them,
populous, gnarled
and dominant in an
otherwise foreign
environment, provides
some comfort.’
the other direction, as some migrants
return home, and newer generations
seek the eternal Mediterranean sun.
I made my first visit to Malta in
2015, a privilege of leisure ultimately
made possible by my grandparents
having endured the reverse trip some
sixty-odd years earlier. It was not
intended as a cultural pilgrimage, but
truthfully could not have been anything
else. I met open-armed relatives who
had known me only as a child, or
not at all, and went to the cemetery
where half my forebears are buried. I
visited the Rotunda of Mosta, whose
impressive dome was pierced by a
Luftwaffe bomb in 1942. The bomb
fell—with luck, unexploded—among
three hundred locals gathered for
mass, one of whom was my greatgrandmother Teresa, then a little girl.
In the end though, I was most
interested in assaying the outskirts
of the towns, getting lost in the maze
of farms which still constitute most
of the land area. It was easy enough
to cycle from coast to coast, moving
rapidly between urban and rural zones,
when the longest dimension of the
main island is only twenty-seven
VOICEWORKS • 61
• BAJTAR PARADISE •
Nathan Mifsud
kilometres. The rocky hillsides were
oddly reminiscent of the Southern
Tablelands, a topographic antipode
of the Parkesbourne farm my dad’s
parents had cultivated to retreat from
Sydney suburbia. The difference, of
course, was that these hillsides included
a hearty dose of Opuntia. Each spiny
copse I passed reinforced the notion
that the biota surrounding us shape our
experiences and, over time, sneak into
our identities.
It was while visiting my mum’s
relatives that the place of the prickly
pear was cemented in my mind.
We went to our ancestral home in
Mellieħa, where the house has sat
unoccupied for years. My great-aunt
(who lives a few doors down the same
street) had to spray the lock to pry the
door open. I entered cautiously, not
knowing what to expect. Dust carpeted
the traditional patterned tiles beneath
my feet, and apart from a religious
icon—striking in its dim, spare
surrounds—most contents were long
removed. I walked down the narrow
hallway, towards a band of sunlight.
In the enclosed backyard, I was
greeted by none other than a healthy
specimen of you-know-what. It
became obvious that I could no longer
consign the humble bajtar to childhood
nightmares—it is part of the family.
Nathan Mifsud (24) analyses electrical brain activity in his
spare time. He dedicates this piece to Andrew and Paul.
62 • VOICEWORKS
• POETRY •
tectonic
By Chloe Mayne
storm-bellied clouds hang hazed
like sheets, gauze-netted nest
gently hemming me in
i lie here, dormant for days
curling and slowly unfurling, watching
the hands in moving pictures as
they press palms to flushed cheeks,
stamps inked with blotted breath,
conversing in secretive tongues
like effervescent ear whispers,
submerged and sinking sighs or
the titanic heave and swell
of your shoulders, tectonic plates to me.
Chloe Mayne (24) is a rainbow trout swimming in watermelon tides.
VOICEWORKS • 63
• FICTION •
VERTICAL
WINE
TASTING
By Mikaella Clements
Vertical wine tasting (n.) different vintages of the same
wine type from the same winery are tasted, emphasising the
differences between them.
it Was a diffErEnt species. The way she moved, the jerky way she took off her
coat, the half-flung elbow near straight into the maître d’s face without a moment
of self-awareness. Julia sat at the table with one arm resting on the back of the
chair, half leaning to the side, unable to look away. Everything took so much more
effort. Everything was full of overcharged energy. By the time Rachel made her
way over to lean down and kiss Julia hello, Julia expected her to be out of breath.
‘Hiya,’ Rachel said, and slipped into her chair. ‘Sorry I’m late. How was work?’
‘Fine,’ Julia said, and rolled her eyes. ‘Busy. Your boss is an idiot.’
Rachel laughed, looking guiltily delighted, the way she always was when Julia
let her in on some office politics that Rachel wasn’t privy to. ‘She’s nice to me.’
‘That’s why she’s an idiot,’ Julia said, lifting the bottle of wine and filling
VOICEWORKS • 65
• VERTICAL WINE TASTING •
Mikaella Clements
Rachel’s glass. She preferred red, but Rachel had told her, laughing and grimacing,
that she’d once had a very bad night on red wine and couldn’t drink it anymore; it
was fine. Julia would just order the salmon. ‘She’s nice to everyone.’
‘Mm, well,’ Rachel said. ‘Are you hungry?’
‘Yes,’ Julia said. She gestured at the menu. ‘Order, and then you can tell me
about your day.’
Rachel did, looking pleased. She still started every evening shy, like she was
sure she was boring Julia, which was charming in its brevity—Rachel was funny,
and gained courage from being funny, and the more Julia laughed the easier Rachel
spoke. They drank two bottles of the white without even noticing, and then Rachel
was cracking at the top of her mousse concoction while Julia ate small slivers of
goats cheese and said, ‘No, go on, you were saying that Emil in marketing—’
‘Yeah, he keeps trying to talk to me about all the weird sex he has,’ Rachel said.
Her laugh was more of a cackle—wild and delighted and rude. She didn’t have
to worry about it making her sound old. She still used witches as an aspiration.
‘The best bit was his new theory that because he likes sometimes being, I dunno,
whipped and told he’s a sissy, he reckons it’s queer sex. He told me that he’s
queering heterosexuality.’
Julia laughed. ‘That’s the problem with the way gay culture is evolving at the
moment. There’s a place for everyone, even straight people.’
‘Uhm,’ Rachel said. ‘Well, I’m not sure I agree with that.’
‘You know what I mean, though,’ Julia said, uninterested in getting into another
debate about politics with Rachel. Rachel still took everything too seriously, too
personally; sometimes when they argued she would cry, furious, and declare that
it didn’t mean anything and that Julia still had to listen to her, when Julia just
wanted to quieten her down, stroke her hair, let her be calmed.
‘Yeah,’ Rachel said, and then offered Julia a grin. ‘I used to tie my ex up. In case
that interests you.’ She waggled her eyebrows.
‘You want to tie me up?’ Julia said, amused.
Rachel shrugged. ‘Whatever. The other way, if you want.’
‘We don’t need to do any of that,’ Julia said. She reached out and cupped
Rachel’s cheek in her hand, turning Rachel’s face to hers. Rachel met her gaze,
looking embarrassed. ‘You’re very sweet.’
‘Don’t talk down to me,’ Rachel said.
‘I’m long past the age for experimenting with things like that,’ Julia told her.
‘Lots of people discover this stuff later. To spice up their life.’
‘But I don’t need to do that,’ Julia said. She reached for the bottle of wine and
topped up their glasses. ‘I have you.’
Rachel huffed out a pleased breath and took the wine in a bony-knuckled grip.
She looked distracted, and her hair was falling strangely from where she’d run her
hand through it a few moments ago. Julia wanted to fix it, but she had a strange,
awkward feeling about it. Rachel’s knuckles were still red from the cold.
Outside, waiting for the tram, Julia was idly explaining one of the many ways that
Rachel’s boss had gotten in her way today when Rachel’s phone rang, cutting her
66 • VOICEWORKS
• FICTION •
off. Rachel glanced down at it with her thumb already hovering over the mute
button, then paused.
‘Ah, man,’ Rachel said. ‘It’s, uhm, it’s Shiv, do you mind?’
Julia shook her head. ‘By all means.’
‘We’re trying to do the staying friends thing,’ Rachel said apologetically, but
didn’t wait for Julia’s answer, picking up the phone and swivelling her shoulder in a
tense block to Julia, pacing a few steps away and answering with a too-bright, ‘Hi!’
It was strange, trying to remember how it felt with just the one significant ex,
the way one person could cast a shadow where three or four could not. Rachel had
been with her ex-girlfriend, she’d told Julia, for three years—a blink of an eye,
really, but it loomed over Rachel like a mountain she was still stumbling down.
Julia took out her own phone and scanned through emails, yawning, glancing
up now and then to check the dark street for the good-natured ambling approach
of the 86. When she heard her name, she tuned back into the one-sided
conversation, feeling acutely foolish.
‘Julia, yeah,’ Rachel said, with a quick, warm look over her shoulder and a wink.
‘Yeah, it’s going great. We’re having lots of fun. Mostly we just fuck and eat.’
Then, defensively: ‘What? Fuck you, I wasn’t—you were the one who asked—’
Julia walked forward into the street and raised her hand for the tram. For a
moment everything was the sound of brakes shrieking and the roar of traffic, but
not before she heard Rachel say, voice crumbling low and tender, ‘No, I’m sorry.
Hey, kid. Don’t be upset. Please don’t cry.’
As she climbed onto the tram, Rachel followed, loose-limbed and faintly
annoyed. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘It’s really fine,’ Julia said, and Rachel hesitated before sitting down across from
her. Their knees knocked; Rachel’s faded jeans against Julia’s bare skin, the loose
floral print skirt of her dress riding up. Rachel’s bright, unadorned face still held
the vestiges of irritation with her ex, but her boot tapped slyly between Julia’s feet.
They only ever went to Julia’s house, for obvious reasons. Rachel trailed a hand
down walls that Julia and her sister had painted freshly only a year ago, fingered one
of the long-stemmed fresh flowers in their vase, looking pleased. Outside the window
the jacaranda trees knocked gently against glass, purple and gold in the street light.
‘It’s just such a nice place,’ Rachel said now, as she said inevitably at some point
in every night, and Julia laughed and caught her hand, drew her into the bedroom.
She let Rachel press her up against the wall, eager and mouthy. She ignored the
impatient noises Rachel made, kissed her nice and slow until she was ready to take
Rachel to her bed, fresh laundered sheets and Rachel shaking beneath her.
‘You’re so pretty,’ Rachel said, breathless.
Rachel came loudly, that sweet note of surprise in her voice. There was
something indulgent about how noisy she was during sex; Julia thought it might
have something to do with the way there were no roommates to overhear them in
Julia’s house. It made Julia laugh. She kissed Rachel, hand in her hair, holding her
steady while she bucked and clamped her thighs around Julia’s hand.
‘You’re lovely,’ Julia said, laughing again, kissing Rachel’s cheek and the corner
of her mouth. Rachel blinked hazily at her, curled into Julia’s body. She nestled
in and was quiet except for her ragged breathing. Julia yawned. ‘God, I need a
shower. Come on.’
VOICEWORKS • 67
• VERTICAL WINE TASTING •
Mikaella Clements
‘Hang on,’ Rachel said, something strange in her voice, and then, ‘Ah, fuck,
sorry. Look, I’m going to cry.’
She said it so matter-of-factly that it took Julia a minute to parse the words.
As she said, ‘What?’ Rachel burst into loud, heaving tears, sobs that seemed torn
out of her chest.
‘Sweetheart,’ Julia said, alarmed. She tried to hug Rachel closer and push her
back by the shoulders to see her face at the same time. It didn’t work.
Rachel shook her head and clutched at Julia’s back, digging her hands into
Julia’s ribs. ‘I’m fine, I really am,’ she said, or tried to, within the violent wrack of
an unnamed grief. She pressed her face into Julia’s neck, and Julia felt the moment
of rabbity annoyance—she didn’t like it when Rachel touched her neck, and Rachel
would never stop doing it—before she stroked Rachel’s back and held her close,
rocking her slightly.
‘There, there,’ she found herself murmuring, a parody of comfort. ‘It’s all right.
Let it all out and then we can fix it.’
She watched the radio clock on the bedside table. It didn’t take long: less than
three minutes from Rachel’s warning to when she subsided into sniffles and drew
back, rubbing her hands over her pink-stained face and shaking her head.
‘Sorry,’ she said.
‘What happened?’ Julia asked. ‘Are you all right? Did I do something?’
‘You’re fine, just fine,’ Rachel said.
‘It’s not...’ Julia hesitated. ‘Did your ex say something?’
‘Shiv?’ Rachel looked honestly surprised. ‘Nah. I’m not upset. I don’t know,
sometimes that just happens to me. The endorphins or something.’
‘It’s not because anything is wrong?’
‘Nah.’ Rachel looked quite normal now. She stood up, crossed the room and
went into the ensuite bathroom. Julia pushed up on one elbow and watched Rachel
blow her nose on a strip of toilet paper. Tissues sat untouched on her dresser. ‘I
can never tell what brings it on. It’s fine.’ She came back to lean in the doorway,
and stared at Julia, smiling in an almost awed way. ‘You look like you’re in a movie
right now.’
Julia scoffed.
‘No, you do,’ Rachel insisted. ‘With the sheet pulled up like that—you look like
a French movie star.’
‘I’m too fat to be a movie star,’ Julia said.
‘Oh, whatever.’ Rachel rolled her eyes and wandered back into the bathroom,
picking up Julia’s hairbrush. ‘I’ve got a massive sex knot. Thanks a ton.’
The worst of it was that she wasn’t fat, not really, Julia thought. She would
never have a flat stomach again, and her breasts were heavier than they had
been all her life, but her legs were still strong and toned and her biceps slim. It
was just that Rachel with her knobbly knees and elbows and her strange conical
breasts made Julia see all the work that went into her own body—the hours on the
treadmill, the pilates, the countless plates of fish with steamed greens. Julia’s body
had bowed to her with fury and reluctance, while Rachel shambled about, coltish
and unaware. Julia didn’t know how middle-aged men with their beer bellies and
their untamed body hair and their bald spots could bear it.
In the bathroom, Rachel still sniffled. When Julia looked over Rachel was
68 • VOICEWORKS
• FICTION •
leaning against the sink, running her fingers over her inner forearm, petting
soothingly at herself.
That Friday they went to the pub together. At first it was meant to be a party, one
of Rachel’s friends’ twenty-second birthday. Julia had been noncommittal about it
until Rachel finally cornered her in the office one day, laughing and bouncing on
her toes. ‘You can’t keep avoiding it! Come on, it’ll be fun.’
‘I don’t know if parties are really my scene anymore,’ Julia had said.
‘We went to a party last week.’
‘That was different,’ Julia said. ‘It had—’
Rachel made a silly face. ‘Grown ups?’
‘Well.’
‘I promise we’re all very well behaved,’ Rachel told her, mock serious. ‘You
won’t need to call anyone’s parents.’
‘I don’t want people worried I will.’
‘They won’t,’ Rachel said. ‘They’ll like you a lot, just like me. I want to
introduce you.’
‘Rachel,’ Julia said, and sighed.
‘Well, if you’re really against it, I think there’s also a couple of my friends who
are just going to the pub that night. It’ll be more low-key. We’re just going to
hang out and have a few drinks.’
‘Fine,’ Julia said, relieved. ‘That would be fine.’ Rachel looked around
surreptitiously before hugging her tight; it was only later that Julia realised, not
without a touch of admiration, how neatly Rachel had manoeuvred her.
The pub was fine, anyway. A gaggle of girls in skinny jeans and hard,
unforgiving bobs. They settled in, ordered their gin and tonics, and immediately
started gossiping.
They involved Julia, in bits and pieces. Occasionally Rachel leaned forward and
offered a story about her, an anecdote always meant to show Julia off. Julia had
the sense that Rachel had forgotten where she was, what year it was. She didn’t
think that was her being petty or jealous; she didn’t even feel particularly upset
about it, just coldly sure, and more so when Rachel’s hand tightened on her thigh
and then slipped away, up into the air, like a signal for traffic. Julia looked up
to see a new girl hovering over the table. For one awful moment, she made eye
contact with Julia.
‘Shiv,’ one of Rachel’s friends said, and there was shock and thrill in her voice.
Julia resisted the urge to roll her eyes.
‘Hi,’ Shiv said. She was taller than Julia had imagined her, and her face was
sharper. She looked at Julia and then away again; she smiled, awkward. It was
embarrassing to watch. ‘I didn’t realise you guys were here.’
‘Hey,’ one of Rachel’s friends said, and everyone was strangely silent. Shiv
stood in the hush of it like an actor in the wings, about to take the stage.
‘I don’t think we’ve met,’ Julia said, holding out her hand. ‘Julia.’
‘Shiv. Hi.’ They shook, and Julia tried to curb her frustration at this group of
girls, quiet and watchful. ‘Nice to meet you,’ Shiv said.
VOICEWORKS • 69
• VERTICAL WINE TASTING •
Mikaella Clements
‘What are you up to?’ Rachel asked, leaning forward, chin propped on her
fist. She looked suddenly more relaxed, her whole body loose and easy. ‘Are you
meeting—’
‘Emma, yeah,’ Shiv said. ‘I’m early.’
‘Buy you a drink,’ Rachel offered, and excused herself from the table with a
quick squeeze to Julia’s shoulder. ‘You want anything, Jules?’
‘Another glass of the sauvignon,’ Julia said. ‘Thanks.’
She watched them at the bar. Shiv was taller than Rachel, which was hard to
reconcile with the way Rachel talked about her, though perhaps it did make sense
in terms of Rachel’s swagger, the way she threw herself around, her shoulders
straight and her chest pushed forward like she was trying to take as much space
up as she could. Julia remembered Rachel’s comment about tying Shiv up and
wanted to laugh.
Rachel was talking fast and gesturing like she would take someone’s eye out.
Shiv watched her closely, tracking every movement. Julia stood up and went to join
them by the bar. She put her hand on Rachel’s shoulder, handing back the touch,
and Rachel looked up and grinned.
‘Was I taking too long?’
‘You’re too short,’ Julia said. ‘They won’t notice you unless you pay attention.’
Shiv raised a hand and signalled the bartender.
‘Ah, man,’ Rachel told her, ‘You’re showing off.’
‘I’m being helpful,’ Shiv corrected, and smiled at Julia like they were sharing
a secret.
Rachel turned and ordered, handed out the drinks when they came. She
paid, giving Julia a strange look as she did so, almost guilty, probably worrying
about how little she paid for things in their relationship. Julia palmed the back
of Rachel’s head, stopping just short of ruffling her hair, and Rachel flung her
another quick look, pleased this time.
‘So you work with Rach,’ Shiv said, ‘right?’
‘Yes,’ Julia said. ‘In a different department, though.’
Shiv nodded and asked what she did, and Julia explained it to her; realised with
gentle surprise that Shiv seemed more mature than the rest of Rachel’s friends
and that the creeping unease that had been stealing through her all evening
was dissipating like steam. For the first time she thought of Shiv and Rachel’s
decision to stay friends not as something that pointed to how young Rachel was,
how unable to let go of anything once important, but rather as something adult.
They seemed adult, the way they talked to each other: close and friendly and
not melodramatic.
When Shiv’s friend arrived, Julia and Rachel drew themselves away, back to
Rachel’s friends, easy as anything.
‘Rach,’ Shiv said, and Rachel turned back smoothly, like Shiv had twitched a
leash in her hand, like her feet were gears slotted into the floor, like the movement
was pre-programmed. ‘Are we going to get that—that coffee soon—’
‘Yes,’ Rachel said. ‘Yes. I’d like that.’
They stayed for another two hours with Rachel’s friends, until Julia was tired
and overly tipsy, a headache throbbing, and then she drew Rachel up and went to
hail a cab outside. Rachel kissed Julia possessively, her hand on Julia’s thigh.
70 • VOICEWORKS
• FICTION •
‘That was nice,’ she said. Her voice was warm and careless in its ownership,
dangerous like a king addressing his troops. ‘It was good to see Shiv. I’m glad you
met her. She needed to meet you, if we were going to stay friends, and—she’s
good, isn’t she?’
‘She seems very nice,’ Julia said, resenting the subject, but Rachel nodded as
fiercely as though Julia had given a speech in Shiv’s favour. Her eyes were bright.
She raised Julia’s hand to her mouth and kissed her palm.
They went back to Julia’s house and had clumsy sex, half given up on—‘I’m
too drunk,’ Rachel said, laughing, apologising, rubbing her palms roughly over
her face—and then Julia pulled Rachel into her side. She liked Rachel’s penchant
for cuddling. It was nice to wake up in the night and know someone was there.
Tonight, though, Rachel was distracted, face lit up with something that was not a
smile, something pure and hard inside her that Julia couldn’t touch.
Julia thought about brushing her teeth, but she was too tired to stand up now.
‘I need to pee,’ Rachel said suddenly, and swung herself out of bed, flat feet
hitting the floor with a thump. Julia rolled onto her side to watch her, the way
Rachel stormed into the bathroom, waiting until the last minute for this, like she
would wait until the last minute for everything. She left the door open, uncaring of
Julia’s attention. She sat on the toilet with her underwear caught around her knees
and flexed her toes on the floor, heels up like she was on tiptoes, and then she ran
her hands down her own shins, idly testing the prickle. Her bones hadn’t settled
yet. When she stood up to wash her hands, Julia could see her watching herself in
the mirror, looking newly fascinated.
Mikaella Clements (24) is an Australian currently based in the UK. She has been
published in The Toast, Witch Craft Magazine and The Establishment, among others.
VOICEWORKS • 71
• POETRY •
Gigi Hadid
By Gina Karlikoff
Gina Karlikoff (21) is a creative writing student at UTS.
She performs as Kimchi Princi.
72 • VOICEWORKS
• POETRY •
All I can really think about is
whether or not this is going to make me
look hot
and I mean hot.
I’d like to think that I’m too smart
to think I look fat or
to look like I give a fuck
but the thing is
when the wind
presses this dress
to my arse
with my thumb
to my phone
I can’t help but hope,
‘do midnight squats pay off?’
I delete the tweet
and rub my eyes
looking at Gigi
looking at me,
the screen
curling into new places
of the same old
sunshine
slapped onto her stomach
in that Seafolly ad,
shit,
surely she’s
dumb.
As if that’s enough
to stop me from clicking
‘Buy Now’.
VOICEWORKS • 73
• NONFICTION •
BY THE
HALF DOZEN
By Ellen Wengert
thE yEar i turnEd eight, I made my
own birthday cake. It was supposed
to be a three-tier chocolate gateau
with strawberries and cream, but my
grandmother set the oven temperature
too high and it all fell apart. The
blurb in the recipe book described it
as an ‘elegant cake for very special
occasions’, with a difficulty rating
of three cartoon chef hats. I tried to
glue the broken pieces back together
with icing, determined to replicate
the elegance in the picture, but
couldn’t get the consistency right.
Not enough water and then too much.
I was still in the kitchen frantically
pressing sliced strawberries into the
74 • VOICEWORKS
dripping chocolate mess when my
friends started arriving for the party.
I could hear them with their parents
in the living room being introduced
to my newborn sister, my very special
occasion having been hijacked five
days earlier by Lydia’s overdue arrival.
Between the incessant crying and the
nappy changes and the feeding at all
hours, no-one had remembered to
organise party games or bake a cake or
put together lolly bags. I actually felt
sorry for my friends, having to attend
such a crap party. Instead of pass-theparcel, we watched the lingering adults
pass Lydia around. When that got
boring, we pulled cherry tomatoes off
• NONFICTION •
a vine in the backyard and pelted them
at each other.
I have it on good authority that my
conception was unplanned. My parents
were in their early twenties and had
relocated to Canberra for government
jobs after finishing arts degrees. In
addition to paid employment—Dad as
an archivist at the War Memorial and
Mum as a library assistant at one of
the universities—they got me. I was
a clingy, difficult baby and they were
ill-prepared for how much I cried and
how little I slept. But they enjoyed
being parents, I think. Everything
from that time was documented. All
of the early milestones were artfully
captured on Super-8 footage: the first
time I rolled over, first tantrum, first
steps. Every early drawing was carefully
catalogued in scrapbooks and stored
away for posterity.
Isabel was born two years after
me, in Brisbane. There are photos of
us together at the hospital, Issy in
a knitted cap, swaddled in blankets,
and me with a bright pink ‘big sister’
ribbon proudly pinned to my jumper.
Mum and Dad made sure to divide their
attention equally between us. Around
the same time they bought me a Baby
Born. I named her Cindy, after the
youngest of the Brady Bunch.
When Walter came along, I was
thrilled. A brother and a sister, one of
each and the best of both. He doubled
and diversified the casting pool for my
elaborately crafted and tightly regulated
games. We used to play this one called
‘boats’, which was really more of a
theatrical piece—an ongoing saga about
a woman at sea. I directed the entire
thing and always got to be the main
character. The two other parts—servant
and sea monster, for example, or
husband and child—were assigned not
on merit but according to my preferred
sibling of the day. For hours we’d jump
between the single beds in our shared
room, careful not to make contact with
the turbulent ocean below, carpeted
as it was and strewn with books and
toys. At one point, there was a variation
of the game called ‘cars’ but it was
never as fun.
Walter idolised Issy and I and would
do just about anything we told him
to. Most of the time, we used him as
a pawn or a bargaining chip against
each other (majority rule) but our
dynamic shifted regularly and at other
times we would gang up and tease him
mercilessly. Although a fast learner, he
struggled for a while with the alphabet
and would write things backwards,
which we found hilarious. He also made
a lot of random declarations, a personal
favourite of which was, ‘Tongues
are for licking lollipops!’ It came out
of nowhere one night at the dinner
table and for months any mention of
lollipops would set us off in sporadic
fits of laughter. At his first birthday
party—as he was hoisted up and over
the cake to blow out the candle in
front of an assortment of guests and
a brand new video camera—Walter’s
pants fell down. We sent the VHS tape
in to Australia’s Funniest Home Videos but
never heard back.
Clare was born at home, delivered
in the front bedroom of our house
by an on-call midwife. I was six,
Issy was four and Walter was two.
Home births were a bit of a trend in
Mum’s friendship circle at the time.
I arrived home from school with my
grandmother earlier than expected,
right as the midwife carried a pile
of blood-soaked towels out of the
room, which allayed any suspicions
I might have later had about Clare—
outrageously tanned in a family of
freckles—being adopted. But other
VOICEWORKS • 75
• BY THE HALF DOZEN •
Ellen Wengert
than morbid curiosity about the birth
itself, I was fairly ambivalent about her
arrival. It marked my official transition
into the role of responsible eldest child.
For the first time, I had to do actual
chores. I dried the dishes after dinner
each night, cleaned the bathroom
and hung out freshly washed cloth
nappies to dry. When Mum was busy,
I’d supervise the other two while they
built Lego spaceships or made magic
potions in the backyard out of water
and dirt. It was a pretty boring period. I
returned to school after a long weekend
and—not wanting to admit I’d spent
the past three days bored at home after
everyone else recounted family trips
to Dreamworld and Australia Zoo—
told the rest of my grade one class
that I had in fact gone to Disneyland.
I was unsure of Disneyland’s actual
location but confident it sounded more
impressive than anyone else’s weekend.
The teacher knowingly remarked that
it must have been tricky for my parents
to travel so far with the new baby and
that us older kids must have been a big
help. Issy and Walter and I were always
referred to as a collective entity. We
became ‘the big three’ and Clare—for
all of eighteen months—was the baby.
With Lydia, we were five. I’m still
not really sure how it happened. There
was no social or religious context for
it and no family precedent. Mum has a
younger brother and a much younger
sister. Dad grew up with two older
sisters, and an older brother who died
young. I’ve asked them since how they
wound up having so many kids and
Mum’s default answer is ‘one after the
other’. It was a lot of people in not a lot
of space. We fought often but probably
not as much as could be expected.
There were some notable injuries: I
once threw a fist-sized rock at Issy’s
head from a top bunk. Issy once chased
76 • VOICEWORKS
Walter down a flight of stairs and he
fell and split his chin open. Walter once
hurled a large Tonka truck at Clare
when she was just learning to walk.
And Clare once whipped Lydia with
a rope and timber swing that hung
from a tree in the backyard, resulting
in a row of stitches through Lydia’s
hairline. Because of the range in our
ages, serious altercations were usually
limited to two or three participants and
rarely involved us all. While Issy and I
were at war over clothes, CDs and lip
gloss, for example, Clare and Lydia were
fighting non-verbally over Little Tikes
and Fisher Price toys. Mostly there was
just a lot of competitiveness and yelling.
We talked over one another all the time
and argued about who was eating what,
who had exceeded their allocated time
on the computer, who was the rightful
owner of which lowly possessions,
and who should at any given point
be in control of the TV remote. My
grandparents always left our house with
headaches, brought on, they claimed,
by the near-constant undercurrent of
indiscriminate bickering.
We knew two other big families
growing up: the Gablers, who were
rich and had a huge house, and the
Treloars, who lived in the country and
were homeschooled. Neither made for
a particularly comforting comparison
but they were both quintets like us and
could relate, at least. Everyone else was
always forcefully vocal in their surprise.
‘Five kids!’ people would say. ‘Gee,
your parents must have their hands full.’
‘Five kids!’ a classmate at school
once said. ‘That means your parents
have had s-e-x five times. Gross.’
‘Yeah, haven’t they heard of
condoms?’ said another.
I had campaigned long and hard
to have us sent to different schools to
avoid such interactions but my parents
• NONFICTION •
firmly believed we should have an
equal education. After class each day,
I’d reluctantly round up my siblings
and either wait with them under the
building for Mum or walk them the
fifteen minutes home. As the eldest,
and as a generally quiet, well-behaved
over-achiever, I set a benchmark
for the others. I got to just be Ellen,
while they were Ellen’s sisters and
brother. One other advantage of being
the eldest was getting first dibs on
hobbies and interests. When I chose
after-school drama classes, Girl Guides
and the violin, for example, it was
easier just to sign Issy up for the same
extracurricular activities. Much to my
horror, Issy excelled at drama and
quickly moved up through the levels to
the advanced group, while I was stuck
waving my arms around week after
week, pretending to be a tree with the
beginners. At Girl Guides, I proved to
be the superior knot-tier and firebuilder but Issy made more friends
and I usually had to beg to join her in
the cool, popular girls’ cabin at camps.
I was better at violin but it hardly
mattered when she turned out to be
better at singing. My parents—tired of
our feud and of continually reaffirming
that we were equally talented—
reluctantly agreed to adjudicate a singoff. We queued the credits on our VHS
copy of Titanic and flipped a coin. I gave
it my all and then smugly rewound
the tape for Issy. Her rendition of ‘My
Heart Will Go On’ won by a landslide.
Sometimes when I met new people,
I lied and told them I only had three
siblings. Sometimes two or one. It
was easier that way and eliminated
the embarrassment of being different.
Except that a couple of times I forgot
which edited version of my family I’d
given to whom and got caught out in
the lie. It also felt a bit uncomfortable,
morally, having to choose which sibling
(or two or three) to erase. Then one
afternoon, my aunt brought over an
ultrasound picture (her first baby) and
a pull-apart fruit loaf with lurid pink
icing. I was busy picking the sultanas
out of my piece, not really listening to
the conversation, when someone asked
about her due date.
‘The last week of August,’ she said.
‘Ours is due around the same time,’
said Mum.
I started listening then.
‘Our what?’
‘Mum’s pregnant,’ said Dad.
‘She’s what?’
‘Pregnant,’ said Mum.
‘What? Are you serious?’
‘Ellen—’ they both said.
I focused on the stupid fruit loaf
through the hot angry tears and told
Mum and Dad I hated them. Despised
them, in fact. They promised it would
be the last baby and tried to explain
that they were as surprised as I
was. They also said I’d get my own
bedroom—finally—if it was a boy.
Elizabeth was born six days after my
cousin. We called her Betty as a bit of
a joke at first, but it stuck. In addition
to us ‘big three’ there were now three
‘little girls’. That stuck too. At some
point during those first few months,
I retrieved Cindy from a plastic tub of
old toys in the back of my cupboard
and presented Betty with the doll.
The intervening years had not been
kind; Cindy’s lips had turned a weird,
jaundiced yellow after being left too
long in the car on a hot day, and her
plastic limbs were badly deteriorating.
When Mum saw Betty sucking on
Cindy’s atrophied leg, she pried the
Baby Born away and suggested it might
be time to throw her out. I was by
this stage almost twelve and far more
interested in sleepovers and out-of-date
VOICEWORKS • 77
• BY THE HALF DOZEN •
Ellen Wengert
Girlfriend magazines borrowed from the
local library, but surrendering that doll
was a harrowing episode nonetheless.
Over the ensuing years, our house
seemed almost to expand and contract;
there were times we fit around each
other with surplus space, and times
we drove each other, and our parents,
to total despair. But somehow we all
managed. A lot of things about me now
can probably be attributed to having
grown up as the eldest in a big family.
I’m organised and independent, though
I don’t like being alone for extended
periods of time. I still talk and eat
quickly. I’d like to think I’m resilient. I
can’t concentrate without background
noise. I’m not very good at sharing.
I can still be bossy as hell. Despite,
at various times, sharing bedrooms
and extra-curricular activities, the
others have all been able to carve out
individual identities too. Issy is an
archetypal free spirit, graceful and
fiercely creative; Walter is the smartest
person I’ll probably ever know and
one of the funniest too; Clare is still
outrageously tanned, beautiful and
determined, almost (but not quite) to a
fault; and Lydia is generous and kind,
sharp-witted and wonderfully sarcastic.
Betty’s interests and strengths evolve
all the time but at the moment, she’s
obsessed with sport, music and politics.
She’s precociously insightful for an
eleven-year-old and has a knack for
poetry. And in some other ways, she’s a
lot like me, the other bookend.
It’s hard to get the six of us together
these days. It only really happens at
Christmas and on birthdays, although
our family has more of those each year
than most. Our collective childhood was
punctuated by some pretty memorable
birthday cakes and parties. Like the
gingerbread castle an aunt made for
Walter one year. It had turrets filled
with multicoloured popcorn and a
chocolate wafer drawbridge over a
blue jelly moat. Other birthday cakes
were made to resemble a mermaid, a
swimming pool, a barnyard, an iPad,
a car, a train, and various garishly
decorated numerals. Then there
were the themed parties: cowboys,
princesses, pirates and under-the-sea.
There are funny-in-retrospect stories
about duplicate presents, mixed-up
dates and invitations sent out too late.
But it’s the misshapen chocolate cake
and the cherry tomato skirmish from
my eighth birthday that we laugh
about the most. The story has become
a persistent in-joke, part of an inane
repertoire that keeps us at the dinner
table long after the plates are cleared
away. These are the times I’m most
glad that we’re six. That us ‘big three’
have the ‘little girls’ and that all of us
have each other. I could never really
choose a favourite. They annoy and
frustrate and amuse and uplift in equal
measure. But if forced to, I’d probably
pick Betty. I think we all would.
Ellen Wengert (22) lives in Brisbane. She recently completed
a Bachelor of Arts and isn’t entirely sure what to do with it.
‘Slow Burn’ is by Julia Trybala (24), a Melbourne-based artist. Her work examines the
everyday through assembling and mapping certain moments, memories, people and places.
78 • VOICEWORKS
• POETRY •
Apples
By Jocelyn Deane
In bed he would chew apples with his mouth open,
noise collecting like bats in the cave of his strawberry
sheets; an extra schlock sound, an overture to chewing
as if he were drowning on apples. His smile
aspirated, the voice barely a recognition. Vocalisations
were fingers maintaining the dribble of his face,
the infectiousness of eyes, suspecting
he would have to speak to anyone other than him
self. In the adjacent bunk someone muttered jumbled
Cantonese-English-Mandarin, with tonal accents
on front plosive vowels, as if there were bees inside him
or one vast staring one, its pliant spindling deep
legs on his chest, its face quivering.
He covered his head with an iPad-illuminated blanket,
spoke to Nepal (his sheets the bass register
of all speech), Skyping relatives, asking furtively
—as if forbidden, prone as if
a hostile listening—if anyone was hurt.
Jocelyn Deane (22) was born in London, before moving to Australia in
2001. They’ve written for Phantasmagoria, Australian Poetry, Seizure,
Ogre Magazine, Moss Piglet and Ginosko Journal.
82 • VOICEWORKS
• FICTION •
ROADKILL
By Lauren Farquhar
charlottE accElEratEd doWn thE rural road, hitting ninety kilometres per hour
as she passed the road sign marked sixty. As usual, she let her adrenaline drive her
home. It was usually pitch black when she got out on these roads, with only her
headlights to guide her, but the moon was peeking through the trees tonight.
It had rained that afternoon. Now the storm had passed and the bushland
hummed with the sounds of cicadas and mosquitoes. She passed a spot where the
crooked gum trees formed the shape of a cat; this strange effect always made it
seem like the bushland was fucking with her.
She swerved around the next corner. There were two foxes playing in the middle
of the road. The hi-beam headlights caught their wild stares, thrown out of the
darkness as they froze mid-chase. She slammed on her brakes, her mind forced
into gear. One fox darted back and the other yelped. She heard whimpering from
underneath the car.
She listened as her ABS brakes shuddered. Her hands shook and she tried to
banish from her mind the image of a car on its roof.
With the hazards on, she got out of her car. Blood was splattered against the
driver’s side wheel, hubcap and mudguard. The crying was getting louder. As
VOICEWORKS • 83
• ROADKILL •
Lauren Farquhar
she crouched down she could see the fox, a female, still lying under the back half
of the car. Its front right leg was torn from its furry abdomen, caught under the
wheel. Blood pooled around it.
‘Shit.’ Charlotte jumped in the driver’s seat and slowly rolled the car forward
until the fox was accessible, shaking on the cold road. She ran to the back and
popped the boot, grabbing a leash and towel from in amongst the junk. Grimacing,
she slipped on a pair of leather gloves and pulled her jacket on over her shoulders.
She approached the vixen with caution as it snarled at her.
As it thrashed, she growled too. The fox clawed up onto its three legs and
wobbled, dizzy. Charlotte pounced and tackled the creature. She managed to pin
the remaining left front leg under the fox’s body while keeping its head locked
under her arm.
The fox stunk of grime and the meat of previous kills, and Charlotte gagged.
She looped the leash and slung it around the remaining upper leg, squeezing hard
and waiting for the blood flow to ease before knotting her makeshift tourniquet.
The fox nipped at her jacket and Charlotte glared back. Foxes carried so many
germs in their mouths. ‘Dirty monsters,’ her father used to describe them.
‘I’m trying to help.’
With particular difficulty, she lifted the beaten fox onto the towel, wrapping
its lithe body tightly enough so it couldn’t move. It tried to bite her, but it was
getting more and more disoriented. Eventually, it gave up and simply looked at
her, suspicious.
What on earth was she doing? Charlotte got up and looked at the car then the
fox. The poor thing might not survive the night. It had lost too much blood. But she
couldn’t just leave it either. It would be all alone; its mate was nowhere to be seen.
The next challenge involved getting the fox into the car. Cooing, she began to
stroke the towel-wrapped vixen, which helped stop the shaking. What was her
plan anyway? This was a feral fox. Tonight would probably end with her needing
stitches and having to deal with a dead fox in her house. She pushed away those
thoughts—she just needed it to trust her and calm down.
‘Ouch!’ Just as Charlotte started to slide her hands under the trembling body,
the fox bit her arm. Luckily her sleeve took most of the hit, but it still fucking
hurt. She’d need a tetanus shot now. She growled at it, grabbing the nape of its
neck like an angry mother. It was pinned, panicked and in no position to stand its
ground. Carefully, she lifted it and placed the bundle on the back seat, strapping
the seatbelt around it. The creature was not going to go berserk in her car.
Charlotte stopped. It was quiet but something was watching her. She heard
rustling behind her, and panting. Behind a tree in a nearby yard she saw the
glowing eyes of the male fox, staring at the car. She shuddered and hurried back
into the driver’s seat and drove slowly up the final stretch of road to her house.
At home, after parking under the creaky tin carport, Charlotte grabbed her
father’s overturned wheelbarrow from over near the tractors and wheeled it to the
car as quietly as possible, avoiding the rusting machinery, which was overgrown
with shrubbery. She got to the car and lifted the fox out of the backseat.
Wheeling the bloodied thing to the back door was nothing. Avoiding the piles
of junk on the veranda had become second nature to her. Getting it into the house
would be a little different, she thought. But then she spied the laundry basket.
84 • VOICEWORKS
• FICTION •
Gently, she carried the fox in the hardy basket, its skinny body breathing in
and out so fast, still panicked. In the downstairs bathroom Charlotte dumped the
creature into the shower recess. She quickly shut the door behind it. It jumped on
its remaining legs to claw at the glass door, rattling it loudly.
‘Stop that,’ she hissed.
Charlotte left the bathroom and grabbed a bottle of vodka from the dusty back
of the pantry. She headed for the shed where she would find the old dog muzzle
and more towels. She took bandages from the first aid box and mincemeat from
the outdoor fridge, where they kept the dog’s feed.
The veranda was cluttered. Charlotte’s mother hadn’t really looked after the
place since Dad’s accident. She hadn’t really looked after anything at all; she’d
barely stepped outside. Again, the image of the car, overturned, entered her mind.
There was a sound behind her. Growling. Charlotte paused, slowly turning to
see the male fox on the overgrown grass of the closest paddock. Its eyes glowed,
reflecting the moonlight. It was maybe ten feet away. Charlotte froze. A light
breeze ran through the trees and grass, and the fox bristled. Its fur was matted, its
eyes remained focused on her. It looked manic.
The fox stepped towards her, lowering itself to the ground as if it might pounce.
She dashed to the door, leaping through and closing it just as the fox ran at her.
It slammed against the dirty glass and scratched at it, furious. She backed away
and hurried to the bathroom with her odd collection of tools and food, hoping the
other fox would tire and leave them be.
This, she knew, would be different to her past experiences, when they kept
kelpies and the dogs fought or were hit by a car. Those dogs had trusted her. If she
accidentally stepped on a paw, they forgave. They let her hold them, help them,
because they were part of her family. This vixen was more dangerous than any
animal she had dealt with on the farm.
She’d have to keep quiet too—her mother needed all the sleep she could get.
With what had happened, and all the financial stresses, she was close to breaking
down. She’d freak if she knew what her daughter was up to. If Dad had still been
here, he would have shot the animal on sight.
‘Bloody pests,’ he would have said while burying it.
Charlotte’s throat caught. She looked to the fox and it snarled at her again. She
snarled back.
She placed the tin bowls in front of her, one filled with tap water and the
other with mincemeat. At the smell of wet meat, the fox pricked its ears. Those
dark, beady eyes were suddenly focussed on the bowl. Charlotte gulped and
leant forward, opening the shower door a crack. The fox pushed its wet nose
through, pulling itself closer to the bowl. Its eyes, watering with hunger, locked
with Charlotte’s.
As she opened the shower door, and placed the food bowl on the ground, the
vixen backed itself into a corner. Slowly it looked down to the bowl and sniffed,
before plunging its snout into it, gulping the meat down. Blood dribbled onto its
furry white chin and up over its nose. The tin scratched against the tiled floor.
Charlotte prepared the muzzle with the vodka. She wasn’t taking any chances.
Her father used to catch foxes after their chickens were attacked—climbing into
the burrow, pulling the creature out by the scruff of its neck. There might have
VOICEWORKS • 85
• ROADKILL •
Lauren Farquhar
been a few bites on his weathered arms, but the fox he held in them would be
stiff, paralysed.
When foxes attacked their farm, whether it was to hunt chickens or wallabies,
traps wouldn’t stop them. Instead of finding a trapped fox, they would find
a closed trap over a little severed foot. Her dad once spat with disgust at the
creatures, gnawing at their own bones to escape. Not to mention the chicken
massacres—a henhouse full of happy chooks found the next morning, necks torn
open, blood drank but the flesh left to rot.
‘Foxes are nasty, vicious creatures,’ he had said, burying the last of the poor
chooks. When Dad was around, a caught fox never survived the encounter. It had
been hard to reconcile this brutal man with the one who cooed happily to his
chickens, who nursed orphaned wallabies for WIRES.
Charlotte shook her head. Focus. Back of the neck, firm grip.
She had been saving the Stolichnaya for a friend’s party at university. She
wasn’t even sure if she would tell her friends about tonight. It would be another
weird story about her weird country life. She was the only one of the lot who lived
in a rural area, probably the only one who had seen a fox before. The only one who
drove on dangerous country roads. Her friends’ closest experiences of ‘rural life’
would be smoking weed in a field on long weekends.
The vixen licked its chops, cleaning itself.
Charlotte approached with the muzzle. It whimpered and backed up, baring its
teeth again.
She pounced, grabbing the back of the vixen’s neck. Even through the gloves
she could feel the fur was matted, coarse—nothing like a dog’s. She sat back, fox
in arm, panting. She held it firmly in one hand and struggled to pop the muzzle
over the rebellious snout. A few scratches later she had it on. Step one complete.
Putting the fox’s body under her arm, she held its damaged leg with one hand
and used the other to pour vodka over the wound. The sounds were unbearable:
screeching as the vodka burned away any germs and infection. She hoped her mum
would sleep through it at least. She cooed and tried to calm the fox down. Finally
it went limp, and she could grab the bandages to wrap the wound. The fox was
bleeding very little now, and she secured it with some tape.
Still, Dad’s opinion sat at the back of her mind. ‘Bloody hell, girl. Foxes are
pests, they’re feral, and they’re nasty bastards. You love the bush, Charlotte, why
would you waste your time on a fox?’
She let the fox go and watched it hobble back into the shower recess. She got
out another portion of meat, popped it in the bowl and grabbed the vixen once
more. It twitched but understood. She quickly unbuckled the muzzle and threw
it on the ground, slamming the door between her and the fox. It turned and tried
rattling the door again, gentler this time.
Outside the bathroom Charlotte returned the clothes basket to the laundry and
the vodka to its cupboard, where she noticed the scotch was missing.
‘Not again,’ she muttered. She filled a glass with water and climbed the creaky
stairs to the first floor. Her mother’s bedroom door was ajar. She slipped inside,
blinking in the darkness as her eyes adjusted.
She stopped, her foot hovering above a dark mound on the floor—Ivy. The
dark-furred mutt lay at the foot of her mother’s bed, sleeping soundly. She wasn’t
86 • VOICEWORKS
• FICTION •
surprised—her mum had taken to letting the dog inside. Formerly a farm dog, Ivy
had settled into being pampered. She snored slightly; her back leg twitched.
Sprawled across the sheets, with one leg hanging off the mattress in the cool
air, lay her mum. So different to how she used to sleep—in a neat little bundle.
Now she seemed uncomfortable in a bed that was too big for her without Dad. The
bottle of scotch sat on the bedside table. Charlotte switched it out for the glass of
water in her hand and kissed her mum on her forehead. Then she headed back to
her other patient.
She wasn’t sure how she’d deal with her mother, or the mess, in the morning.
Mum wouldn’t be angry, but it would remind her of Dad. Charlotte winced. Though
she doubted Mum would be awake until after midday. Hopefully she could get the
mess cleared away by then. Mum didn’t have to know.
As the weariness set in, Charlotte found it harder to push away that image of her
dad’s car on its roof. His blood staining the weeds and wild grass on the side of the
road. The faded speed sign knocked over in the dirt, the sharp bend in the road.
A scratch at the window startled her. The sun was peeking through the blinds of
the bathroom, and Charlotte wiped her eyes. She checked her wristwatch. Just about
six in the morning, she’d slept for three hours maybe. She should’ve gone to bed.
The scratching continued and a quiet whimper issued from outside the window.
She looked at the vixen in the shower; its eyes had opened at the sound, it was
instantly on its three feet, staring towards the window.
Charlotte walked to the window and pulled the cord, bringing the blinds up. The
male fox sat on the windowsill. Its fur stood on end when it saw the vixen inside.
The female bashed against the glass of the shower door, crying. Charlotte jumped
down to the shower and released the vixen into the hallway.
Charlotte’s vixen found the laundry door in no time. Once the door was opened,
it ran, limping but fast. Charlotte watched the pair meet in the paddock. They
circled each other, the male inspecting the vixen’s missing foot and then turning
back to Charlotte to snarl at her.
The vixen let out a low growl and nipped its mate. The male dropped its gaze.
Charlotte smiled for the first time in months. Not that the fox cared. Its shoulders
slumped and it turned back to the bushland.
The vixen followed. The two animals leapt over her dad’s overgrown tractor and
headed into the mess of scrub and trees. Charlotte watched until they were gone.
Lauren Farquhar (25) is a Sydney-based writer. Having turned twenty-five she is currently
distraught she can no longer submit to Voiceworks.
VOICEWORKS • 87
• POETRY •
Cusp
By Zhi Yi Cham
6:46 am: exhaustionlaced lashes
flung
open. reveal bloodshot
eyes: wakeful
for too long
strain with
delirium: horizon soaked
in spilled freshly
squeezed orange
juice: too quickly warm in
summer. dawn sizzles
’gainst
silhouettes: dyed
edges
rise to meet
88 • VOICEWORKS
• POETRY •
white moon: dollop of
cream—perfect serve upon
warm scone halves for breakfast
close (involuntarily.
unwillingly): blink of
eye away to new day.
she
lingers in her twentieth year,
ambling on the line that would
inevitably
cut her from
youth: knife through cake.
bleeding icing, dismembered
sponge.
clap,
cheer: sky
clears to blue.
she mourns at
breakfast. pour freshly
squeezed orange juice.
scone-sandwiched moon,
a devoured cake
to
adulthood.
away
Zhi Yi Cham (22) occasionally dismantles the disarray in her
mind on instagram.com/dsmntlg. She is an accidental oversharer.
VOICEWORKS • 89
• NONFICTION •
NO WEDDING
CAKE FOR
AN ILLEGAL
ROMANCE
By Kim Lateef
no onE knEW—or rEally cared,
it seems—whether Akbar was from
Afghanistan, the North-West Frontier
Province (now Pakistan), or some other
British-Indian city. It was 1894 and he
found only racism instead of fortune in
Perth, Western Australia. Several years
later, he dodged permanent deportation
under the new Immigration Restriction
Act of 1901. Officials took this ‘White
Australia’ policy seriously, being too
busy selecting only British and white
European immigrants into the new
federation to concern themselves with
recording Akbar’s reason for exemption
or background. He persevered as a
travelling hawker, selling anything
from books to pots throughout regional
WA; his unexpected fortune was
finding solace in another outsider who,
like himself, drifted on the edge of
white society.
Lallie Matbar, a young Aboriginal
Wongai woman, met Akbar when
she would travel and camp with her
‘Linden mob’ in the north-eastern
Goldfields to evade relocation to
the Moore River Native Settlement.
Defined as ‘half-caste’ under the
Aborigines Act of 1905, one of the
‘Apples’ is by Lucy Hunter (20), an illustrator from Melbourne. She is passionate about visual
storytelling and thrives off nature and the change in seasons.
VOICEWORKS • 91
• NO WEDDING CAKE FOR AN ILLEGAL ROMANCE •
Kim Lateef
ways Lallie learned to render herself
invisible was by rubbing her skin with
ashes so she would not attract the
attention of the police. Around 1920,
Akbar, who was popularly known as
Jack, upon striking up a friendship
with Lallie, revealed his Afghan name
to her, and he in turn learned that her
close relations knew her as Nilba. For
them, the exchange of their cultural
names rather than the names assigned
to them by white Australians created
a connection that allowed insight into
each other’s backgrounds. Akbar,
armed with this understanding, began
to notice that important Aboriginal
customs revolving around the role of
elders overlapped with his own Afghan
codes of respect.
Akbar soon generated enough
profit to open a small general store
in Mount Morgans, now a ghost town
that depended on the prosperity of
the nearby gold mine. Situated 916
kilometres east of Perth city, Akbar’s
services would have been in high
demand since he was located between
two bigger regional towns, Leonora and
Laverton, separated from each other
by long, red dirt roads. But Akbar’s
tendency to help Lallie’s elders by
offering free transport in his motor
truck was met with disapproval from
the local white residents—they viewed
the Aboriginal Wongai people who
lived on the fringes as a source of
‘moral and physical pollution’.1 Akbar’s
friendly interactions were drawing
them into the town centre, and one of
the duties of local police was to keep
it ‘clean’ of Indigenous presence. In
reality, it was the local white men who
contributed to the ‘moral pollution’
when they transmitted sexual diseases
to Aboriginal women.
Marriage would offer Lallie a safe
and comfortable life—Akbar was aware
of the sexual exploitation of Aboriginal
women by white men and cameleers
‘Colonial law made it
illegal for an Afghan or
non-Aboriginal man to
marry an Aboriginal
woman..’
in exchange for goods. In 1925, Akbar
received the permission of elders
from the Linden mob to marry Lallie,
based on his reputation as a ‘hardworking man of a kind nature’.2 They
did not view all Muslim cameleers as
honest and kind, but Akbar was the
exception. Akbar learned from his
cultural exchanges with Lallie’s elders
that the camel tracks—later, sealed
highways—were based on the ancient
migratory pathways of Aboriginal
custodians. In any case, Akbar was
able to deepen his relationship with
Lallie. The Linden mob—her people—
trusted him. However, once he began
to interact with the local Aboriginal
people, his own ethnicity drew the
attention of local white police. Akbar’s
skin colour—not his Islamic beliefs—
became the problem.
1. Stephen J. Kunitz, Disease and Social Diversity: The European Impact on the Health of Non-Europeans
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 51.
2. Victoria Reynolds, ‘Chit-Chat for Women’, The Advertiser, 20 November, 1928, sec. The Woman’s
World, 10, National Library of Australia: Trove.
92 • VOICEWORKS
• NONFICTION •
Colonial law made it illegal for an
Afghan or non-Aboriginal man to
marry an Aboriginal woman without
first gaining the permission of Auber
Octavius Neville, the Chief Protector
of Aborigines in Western Australia.
The fact that Lallie’s elders gave their
consent meant nothing. A.O. Neville
was a public servant who believed that
Aboriginal people of full descent were
near extinction, so thought he could
speed up this process by manipulating
Aboriginal identity through the birth
of mixed-race babies. He even planned
the future of these babies as assimilated
domestic workers in white households.
Neville, in other words, wished to breed
out ‘Aboriginal blood’ in a perverse
example of pre-Hitler eugenics. In his
eyes, the only way to achieve his goal
was to prevent marriage between his
female wards and non-white men.
Neville’s interfering regime lasted from
1915 to 1940, in which intricate ties of
family, culture and country were quietly
(only to his ears) and painfully snapped
by the forced removal of children.
Akbar was obligated by his Islamic
beliefs to marry Lallie because she was
expecting his baby. Yet their marriage
wasn’t legal under Australian law.
Akbar’s lawyer in nearby Kalgoorlie
advised him to petition Neville to prove
his good character. Lallie accompanied
Akbar as he collected signatures from
white male residents of towns where
he was respected as the owner of his
Mount Morgans business. Neville
rejected three of Akbar’s petitions based
on his hypothesis that a ‘half-caste’
Aboriginal woman—like Lallie—who
had children with a non-white man—
like Akbar—would have ‘coloured’
babies. Neville, basically, preferred that
Lallie marry a white man so at least
their mixed-race children would have
‘less’ non-white blood. Neville didn’t
care if Akbar promised to care for Lallie
because, as Chief Protector, he could
forcefully remove her to a settlement
if he thought she was neglected—and
apparently he thought so. He devised a
plan in which local police would follow
the trail of Akbar’s motor car to Lallie’s
hiding place in the bush. A few local
white opponents who didn’t like Akbar
and his friendly interactions with the
Wongai people had heard rumours that
Akbar provided Lallie and her family
with food and supplies in the bush.
After nineteen years of careful evasion,
Lallie’s mother, Tjirrgulu, finally
witnessed the police drag her pregnant
daughter into a vehicle primed for the
Mount Margaret Mission.
Neville mobilised marriage as
a strategy for the assimilation of
Aboriginal Australians. In his view,
Akbar, as an Afghan, was not endowed
with the power to ‘rehabilitate
and render productive’3 Lallie. In
addition, Neville made it difficult for
Aboriginal women to stay safely outside
the surveillance of the Aborigines
Department because living with
‘coloured’ men was viewed as sexually
immoral—Neville was all about
‘protecting’ these women, remember.
Lallie was considered ‘protected’ when,
on 13 October 1926, six days after she
gave birth prematurely to a stillborn
son, she was abruptly removed from
Mount Margaret Mission to Moore
River Native Settlement in a locked
3. Katherine Ellinghaus, ‘Absorbing the “Aboriginal Problem”: Controlling Interracial Marriage in
Australia in the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries’, Aboriginal History 27 (2003): 206.
VOICEWORKS • 93
• NO WEDDING CAKE FOR AN ILLEGAL ROMANCE •
Kim Lateef
police wagon. In Lallie’s government
file there is no record on the state
of her physical, mental or emotional
health after her premature delivery,
the burial of her stillborn son, or the
long journey to Moore River away from
Akbar, her mother and her family.
Lallie’s grieving process would have
resulted in a lingering depression as
she felt the full force of the Aborigines
Act and Neville’s obsessive goal to
destroy her efforts to create a future
with Akbar. What is included in her
official government record is Neville’s
contradictory description of Lallie as
‘pleasant looking and well spoken’
and ‘absolutely immoral and the
victim of lustful men’.4 The fact that
the Western Australian Aborigines
Department kept a document on Lallie’s
movements shows the extent to which
the Government surveilled Aboriginal
people, especially those who were
interned at Moore River.
The settlement was like a prison.
Lallie would later write: ‘we had to
work hard at washing and scrubbing’,
with a diet of ‘only bread, dripping and
black tea’.5 Barred from visiting Moore
River, Akbar felt guilty for Lallie’s
removal and, after hearing whispers
about his stillborn son through
the Linden mob, he contemplated
selling his store and leaving Western
Australia if it would allow Neville to
gaze more favourably upon Lallie’s
moral character. In 1927, after 365
days of monotony, Lallie, after several
attempts, finally escaped from the
settlement. Now deemed a fugitive by
the law, she once again moved on the
periphery of white society until she was
reunited with the Linden mob. They
told Lallie that Akbar had left Mount
Morgans to drive towards Adelaide,
since local white police had been
harassing him to find out her location.
Still, Lallie did not see herself as
neglected by her partner. In 1928, she
wrote, ‘being a half-caste outcast—for
which I am not blame—very few would
take interest in me or assist me’6 as
Akbar had done.
Lallie walked the hundreds of miles
from Laverton through Kalgoorlie to
Balladonia, locating Akbar in Eucla
after two months of travelling on foot
through barren desert. They finally
took the law into their own hands
when, in 1928, they crossed into South
Australia to marry in the Adelaide
registry office. Akbar gladly paid thirty
pounds for a copy of their marriage
certificate. His determination to live in
comfort with Lallie succeeded, for a few
months at least, until their movements
were tracked down by a detective from
Perth. Both were to stand trial for
breaching the Aborigines Act—Akbar
was charged with kidnapping Lallie
from Western Australia and Lallie for
cohabiting with a non-white man.
Nothing was noted about Lallie’s
kidnapping from her people by white
authorities or the stress it placed
upon her pregnancy.
Most Australian newspapers
publicised the Akbar–Matbar case
expressing their support—in particular,
the South Australian media, which
4. Pamela Rajkowski, Linden Girl: A Story of Outlawed Lives (Nedlands: University of Western
Australia Press, 1995), 151.
5. ‘Walked 500 Miles to Marry’, The News, 22 November, 1928, 26, National Library of Australia: Trove
6. Reynolds, ‘Chit-Chat for Women’, 10.
94 • VOICEWORKS
• NONFICTION •
interviewed the couple while they
awaited extradition. As proof of their
domestic bliss, Akbar stated, ‘my
word she [Lallie] is a good cook,’7
with Lallie equally complimentary of
Akbar’s culinary skills. She compared
the luxury of a ‘fur trimmed coat, silk
‘Lallie wrote, in 1928,
“being a half-caste
outcast—for which I am
not to blame—very few
would take an interest
in me or assist me” as
Akbar had done.’
stockings and tan shoes,’8 which Akbar
had provided her, with the rough khaki
supplied to her at Moore River.
Lallie later wrote: ‘I lawfully wedded
a man of my choice with whom I am
happy, without doing any harm to
anyone. I am sure I will receive true
justice at last and there I will wait and
have my Akbar forever.’9
‘Little wonder that the white man’s
law is often an enigma’ to ‘those
deemed non-white,’ summarised
Perth’s Mirror.10
Insufficient evidence meant that the
trial did not go ahead and the pair were
released from custody. They were exiled
from Western Australia and sent back to
South Australia (at their own expense)
on the condition that Akbar would care
and provide for his wife. Lallie was
released on a bond of 500 pounds and
permanently banned from living in WA
with her people. Akbar argued against
the exile as he could find work easily
in regional Western Australia, where
he had made connections through
his movements. Neville’s refusal
was motivated by a fear that Lallie’s
presence would trigger rebellious
behaviour among the Aboriginal
Wongai. Akbar stressed to the defence
counsel the importance of the deep
bond between his wife and her people,
claiming that Lallie would inevitably
leave him one day to reunite with
them, not because of Akbar’s failure as
a provider, but due to homesickness.
No-one would have assumed that
Lallie and Akbar went to extreme
measures just to live together with
their children in suburban Adelaide.
And they certainly didn’t mention it
to anyone. Lallie and Akbar had two
older daughters, Mona and Shirley,
and two younger sons, Jimmy and
Johnny, and raised them as ‘little
Muslim children’ rather than ‘little
coloured children’11 since they were
afraid of their forced removal. Whilst
Akbar was already voluntarily separated
from his family overseas, it was hard
for Lallie, who couldn’t visit her family
across the border. Lallie couldn’t even
send presents to them because she
was too scared of attracting Neville’s
attention through local gossip. Because
of her isolation, Lallie wasn’t even
aware when her mother died. Her deep
homesickness was soon exacerbated
7. ‘Not Allowed to Love!’, The Mirror, 13 October, 1928, 3, National Library of Australia: Trove.
8. Ibid.
9. Reynolds, ‘Chit-Chat for Women’, 10.
10. ‘Not Allowed to Love!’, 3.
11. ‘Mona Akbar Interview’, YouTube video, 2:02, 30 November, 2012.
VOICEWORKS • 95
• NO WEDDING CAKE FOR AN ILLEGAL ROMANCE •
Kim Lateef
by Akbar’s increasingly conservative
views on parenting, since it reminded
her of living under the Aborigines Act.
So, after twenty years of marriage,
Lallie parted ways with Akbar, without
bitterness, in order to re-enter
Western Australia and reunite with the
Linden mob.
Western Australians during this time
believed that Indigenous Australian
mothers separated from their children
under the Aborigines Act would forget
them in twenty-four hours. Not even
in death did Lallie’s mother forget
her—Lallie departed South Australia
explaining that Tjirrgulu’s spirit was
calling her to return home. Akbar
made his final departure in 1950, and
was buried in Adelaide, whilst Lallie
worked as a community leader to
improve the lives of her Linden mob;
she was buried with much love, respect
and ceremony by her descendants.
Even so, experiencing imprisonment,
discrimination and exile was the huge
price Lallie paid for happiness that,
for white Australians, was a basic
human right.
Kim Lateef (24) is from WA. She likes to uncover and write about hidden histories.
96 • VOICEWORKS
• FICTION •
THESE HANDS
By Bethany Leak
‘you arE spEcial,’ shE said. ‘You need more than we can give you.’
These are the words that return to my mind on the bus home from school. It’s
raining, and the windows are fogged and wet. I scribble in the misty damp with
my finger, remembering hers on the piano keys, the sound of her voice as she
spoke. I like her voice. It reminds me of my mother’s, although Mum never played
an instrument; by the time I found the old keyboard in the hard rubbish, she’d
already died. She left in a white casket with Elliot at the head, Dad at the foot. I
press my palm up against the glass and remember how these hands cradled an
infant Jessie as we followed our mother out of the church.
The coffin was so small.
Elliot’s ute is in the driveway when I get home, water dripping from the
mudguards. Snail tracks glisten on the wet concrete path to the front door. Inside
the house, it’s very quiet. I find Elliot at the kitchen sink. He’s scrubbing glue
from his hands with a nailbrush and lots of soap.
‘Hey.’
‘Hi, Reed.’ He won’t look at me.
‘Where’s Jessie?’
VOICEWORKS • 97
• THESE HANDS •
Bethany Leak
‘Bed. Picked her up early from school. She had another tantrum—didn’t like the
colour of the paper they gave her or something. Ended up she had a full-on seizure.’
I take this information without feeling much of anything at all. Think of a song,
or a piece of music that you once loved. The first time you listened to it, you got
goosebumps. You cried. It lifted your thoughts to a higher level than the textbooks
and playgrounds and petty squabbles around you. By the fifteenth—or even the
fiftieth—time, those feelings are gone.
‘There’s something else,’ Elliot says.
‘What?’
He doesn’t say anything. The only sound is the wrinkling of water against the
metal sides of the sink. He dries his hand on a tea towel. ‘The keyboard. You know
how she goes nuts about leaving it every morning? The school psych called me up
again. He says that’s bad.’
‘But he said it was good that she was showing an interest,’ I protest. ‘He told us
to encourage it.’
‘Not anymore. Reckons it’s keeping her from focusing on getting along well in
the classroom. Integration, or whatever. You know the jargon better than I do.’
Now he is fiddling with the stove, snapping the flame on and off. The clicks of the
lighter are distracting. ‘He wants us to get rid of it,’ Elliot says.
All at once, I notice the grip of my damp dress on my skin. Cold. My legs give
way and I sit down on the kitchen stool, clenching my hands between my knees.
‘The keyboard?’
‘You don’t mind, do you, Reed?’ He turns to me now. He looks very tired. He
digs into his overalls and the pack of cigarettes rattles as he fishes for it and pulls
one out. His fingers are shaking. They’re long for a builder’s, long and elegant. I
have never noticed before.
‘It’s just a stage, isn’t it?’ I say. ‘Her thing with the keyboard.’
‘A stage. Everything’s a stage with her. She’s seven years old and she can’t
read. Do you know what he said? He said if this doesn’t work, we’ll have to send
her to a special school, and do you know how much that costs? She has to learn to
cope without it.’
His words make me hesitate for a moment. ‘Elliot.’
‘I’m going outside for a smoke.’
I grab him as he steps past me. ‘Elliot, there’s this college in Melbourne—an
arts school. For people who are really good at music and things. My teacher, she—
she said I should audition.’
He waits, resting one hand on the bench. ‘Doing what?’
‘Piano.’
He looks down at the cigarette, puts it between his lips, removes it. I know he’s
deciding how to answer. When he does, his voice is gentle. ‘Reed, that’s so far
away. Even if you did get in, there’s no way you’d be able to go.’
‘Oh, I know,’ I say. But I hadn’t thought that far. Standing up, I tuck my hands
under my arms. ‘It doesn’t matter. Forget about it.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘To the garage.’
He goes out the front door, and I go out the back.
I go into the garage. I go to the keyboard. I go to turn it on, but my fingers
98 • VOICEWORKS
• FICTION •
hesitate over the power button. All I do is look at it—at the cracks on the plastic
frame, the keys like a smoker’s teeth, yellowing and punctuated with black, the
smudge Jessie’s fingers have made on middle C. One, two, three. I press all eightyeight keys, one after the other, counting. They make a clacking sound. When I
reach the end, I go down again. That’s how Jessie plays it.
I think back to the first time, her smile when she saw it. Her fingers crept up
the length of the piano in perfect chromatic order. She walked her hand down
again and lingered on the low A. She still plays it the same way, every day. There
is something at once awkward and eloquent in the way she holds her hand, one
finger pressed to the note while the others stick straight out like she has no
knuckles to bend. A coping mechanism, the psychologist calls it: a way for her to
make sense of the world. But everyone has those. It does not make Jessie the alien
they want her to be.
I hit the power button and the dashboard lights up.
The keys are strong and fluid beneath my fingers. Jessie likes it when I play for
her. She’ll cry when she sees it’s gone. I stop, and just stand listening to the silence.
There’s a dim electric hum from the keyboard. Elliot says it must have gotten dust
in it, but you can’t tell when you’re playing. The roof beams groan above me. We
went to a wedding once, before Dad left, and he showed me how to run a wet finger
around the rim of the wine glass, so it would sing. Whenever I make music I think
of that. I think of being back there with Dad and the clear note of the wine glass.
The flywire screen bangs. Elliot ducks through the doorway, switching on the
light. ‘Reed? Better put it in the ute while she’s asleep.’
Hastily I press the power button. ‘Sure.’
‘Grab one end, will you?’
I’m going to. I see myself lifting it, carrying it out. My eye lights on one of
Elliot’s mallets, hanging from two pegs on the wall. Without thinking I seize it and
hurl it at the piano with all my strength. It bounces off the keys, snapping a half
dozen free. They clink and bounce on the concrete. The mallet strikes the floor so
sharply that my ears ring.
‘Reed, what the—’
I step by him and walk into the house.
The sun fades out while I sit on my bed, staring at the ceiling. At last, I hear
a door shutting, and go out. Elliot isn’t in the kitchen or the garage. I check his
room, but that is empty too. With a chattering heart I jerk back the curtains and
look out into the drive. In the light of a streetlamp I see that his ute is still there.
The relief is so intense that for a moment I’m not sure if I’m standing or falling.
My breath steadies. Elliot isn’t like my father.
It’s then that I notice the door to Jessie’s room is slightly ajar. It’s the first door
in the hall, and I can see it from where I stand. Jessie never leaves it open. She
wakes up so easily; light or noise or anything can disturb her.
I go to close it, and see Elliot.
He’s standing just beside her, one hand gripping the bedframe above her head.
His silhouette is dark against the grey of the room. I can’t see his face, but he lifts
his hand to his eyes, gripping either side of his temples as though he’s trying to
squeeze his brain out. A shudder crosses his spine. He drops to his knees, holding
his head in his hands.
VOICEWORKS • 99
• THESE HANDS •
Bethany Leak
Specks of dust float by me and drift into the darkened room. I want to leave, but
I can’t. Something makes me stay.
‘Elliot?’
It’s Jessie. She’s whimpering, flailing her limbs beneath the sheets. Elliot sits
up and touches her face with his big hand. ‘Hey. It’s alright. Go to sleep.’ His voice
quietens her. Reaching across, he tugs the blankets over her shoulder.
Then he turns and looks directly at me.
I wait while he gets up and comes out into the hall and pulls the door closed
behind him. ‘I’m sorry about the piano,’ he says.
‘It’s a keyboard.’
‘I’m sorry about the keyboard.’
‘Did you get it in the tray?’ I think of him out there, without me. It’s hard to
breathe. I feel as though someone is choking me.
‘I’m used to lifting heavy things,’ he says. Sitting down on the couch, he turns
on the television, flicking through to the footy.
‘I forgot to check the mail.’ It’s a lie.
‘Get it tomorrow.’
‘There might be something important,’ I say. ‘It won’t take long.’
He nods.
Outside the air is heavy with mud and rotting leaves. Clouds mostly hide the
moon. I don’t go to the mailbox. Even out here, I can’t seem to get oxygen. There’s
the ute tray with the hulk of the keyboard. I won’t look at it. My skin is clammy.
In the soft darkness I put my palm against the cool wall of the garage, and my
fingers catch on the rough brick. The mortar is smooth.
I feel each knuckle in my right hand—one, two, three, four, five. There was
this game, Knucklebones I think, everyone played it for a bit in primary school
and it had these knobby pieces that the teacher said were sheep’s knuckles. One
boy got frustrated with the game, and he smashed his five by dropping a brick
onto them. He carried the pieces around as souvenirs for weeks after. Little bits of
shattered bone.
Closing my eyes, I clench my right hand.
‘Reed?’
The screen door clatters behind me. Elliot’s grip catches my wrist and jerks me
back, away from the wall. ‘Reed, what are you doing? What’s going on?’
I’m trembling all over. I don’t know what to say. He holds me, resting his back
against the tray and swearing under his breath. ‘I thought you were getting the
mail.’ He’s never really hugged me before. His overalls smell of concrete dust and
glue and sweat. Dad smelled like that, before he smelled of beer.
‘I thought you were going to leave,’ I say.
He lets out his breath. It blows loudly over my hair. The crickets in the gutter
are chirping. After a moment he says, ‘All good now? The Pies were just about to
have a shot at goal, and the game’s pretty tight.’
‘All good.’ Stepping away, I rub my hands on my dress.
His footsteps are light as he jogs back up the steps and into the house, leaving
a block of yellow flooding across the threshold. Lingering in the night, I watch
through the window as the television’s shifting screen illuminates the corners of
the living room. I envy Elliot. I envy his ability to reduce his problems to the size
100 • VOICEWORKS
• FICTION •
of that screen, at least for a few hours. The sound of a roaring crowd filters out to
me, and Elliot yells in triumph. That’ll wake Jessie up for sure.
I sit down on the bottom step and wait.
My back is to the light, my face in the darkness. Dad could make music on
anything, even wine glasses, and he didn’t pass. He used to say it was one of those
things you just have, or don’t. It’s not something you choose. So she was wrong,
my teacher, when she said I was special. There are many others like me, people
who just have it, who didn’t choose. I have only one family.
‘Reed?’ Elliot appears in the doorway. ‘Sorry. Jessie won’t go back to sleep.
Wants you to come say goodnight first.’
‘Alright.’
She likes me best. I can get her to sleep no matter how upset she is. At the first
touch of my hand on hers, she relaxes. Her fist uncurls. I lay her hand in mine,
fingers turned to the ceiling. Then I trace the lines of her palm, over and over, until
the red marks from her nails fade and her hot skin cools. She watches me with her
face half hidden in the pillow. ‘Don’t worry,’ I tell her. ‘Everything will be okay.’
Even though I have been telling her this since she was small, she still listens, and
soon her eyes close. I count her breaths all the way to sixty just to be sure she is
asleep before I leave. Elliot doesn’t know how I do it. But Jessie trusts me.
Bethany Leak (22) is in her final year of a Bachelor of
Professional and Creative Writing at Deakin University.
‘It Took Me To Where I Needed To Be’ is by Gabby Loo (19), who goes by GLWORKS,
Goob, Gloo. She is a Perth dweller, ultramarine lover and has a multitude of names.
VOICEWORKS • 101
• POETRY •
Sprouts
By Emily Crocker
Someone hacked the yawning heads
off our rose bush last night. I hope
they’re having a happy Valentine’s Day.
I bought you these two potatoes—
got ’em cheap even with the sprouts
just starting to pierce through.
The grocer must’ve missed the best bit
Emily Crocker (20) is a poet/student from Western Sydney. She now
spends most of her time in Wollongong, reading things not relevant to
her degree. @EmMCrocker.
VOICEWORKS • 103
BEHIND THE
CURTAIN
‘What inspired your work?’
104 • VOICEWORKS
• FICTION •
Fiction
Eda Gunaydin
Meat—p. 9
‘Meat’ is about the women I watched
doing backbreaking labour, waged
and unwaged, every day, growing
up. Turkish working-class women
sometimes summon bootstraps out
of nowhere, and pull themselves, and
others, up with them. What better
time to write this than during the
renaissance of the halal snack pack?
Kelly Palmer
Anthrax—p. 29
Whenever there was a blackout, Mum
lit candles around the apartment and
played charades with my brother and
me. Every day her world was ending,
but we didn’t understand what she
was trying to say. ‘Anthrax’ is about a
woman whose children won’t play with
her anymore.
Jonathan O’Brien
—and anyway, we promised
you a story, didn’t we——p. 49
I like telling stories so much that
sometimes I interrupt people. This is a
kinda douchey thing to do, and I know
that, so writing this story was a way
for me to vomit that negative behaviour
onto the page. They say writing can
make you a better person but I still
don’t know if that’s true.
Mikaella Clements
Vertical Wine Tasting—p. 65
A lot of writing about couples with a
large discrepancy in ages explores the
generation gap via an understanding
of difference, but I wanted to write
about two women who were, in many
ways, very similar. It's a love story, or
a couple of love stories, depending on
who you’re barracking for.
Lauren Farquhar
Road Kill—p. 83
‘Road Kill’ is a story about a girl who
hits a fox with her car and, against
her better judgement, nurses it back
to health. I had the idea after nearly
running over two foxes myself, and
afterwards I just kept thinking, ‘What
would I have done if I had?’
Bethany Leak
These Hands—p. 97
In ‘These Hands’, the protagonist,
Reed, is caught between her love for
music and the need to care for her
younger epileptic sister. Drawing on
my own experience as the third-eldest
child in a family of nine, I tried to
explore these conflicting desires and
find a potential resolution.
VOICEWORKS • 105
••
Poetry
Mindy Gill
Orang asing—p. 16
I used to travel to Malaysia with my
parents every year to visit family.
Although I’ve always felt at home in
Johor Bahru, with my dad’s Punjabi
side of the family, I’ve always felt
uncomfortably foreign with my mum’s
Chinese side in Klang. This poem
negotiates my fractured relationship
with the city, and this side of my
cultural heritage.
Louise Jacques
Prix Fixe—p. 26
There’s a sensuality about menus
that I’ve always admired. In a way,
they are as carefully constructed as a
poem. ‘Prix Fixe’ unpacks those dainty
hours spent on all those details that
lead up to the moment you press your
fork into cake, to winkle out that gemlike mouthful.
Holly Friedlander Liddicoat
It’s Almost Time (now, this time,
here, in Leipzig)—p. 36
This piece has been in the works for
a long time—as this poem, as short
stories, as anything. It was birthed
listening to Aphex Twin’s ‘Aisatsana’.
Disintegration, degeneration, decay:
how do we make sense of it?
106 • VOICEWORKS
Hugo Branley
A More Modern Torso—p. 47
I was struck by Rilke’s notion of
beauty. For him, even a broken statue
could be whole, fertile and pregnant
with meaning for life. We now orient
our notion of beauty around the living,
but I wonder whether we can still see in
them what Rilke saw in that statue.
Chloe Mayne
Tectonic—p. 63
This piece was whittled together
from behind a mosquito net in rural
Cambodia—listening to the roar of
insects through a hole in the wall,
watching Twin Peaks reruns on a tiny
screen, dreaming of a distant lover.
It’s infused with monsoonal tempests,
burnished with temple music over
treetops and flooding river-bellies.
Gina Karlikoff
Gigi Hadid—p. 72
This poem is for anyone who’s found
themselves on the page of the person
they’re seeing’s ex-girlfriend’s exboyfriend’s bandmate’s sister who is
a model for a new T-shirt kickstarter.
And you’re wondering if that shirt will
make you any hotter.
Jocelyn Deane
Apples—p. 82
I wrote this while sharing an apartment
with seven other people, the sleeping
area consisting of set-up bunkbeds. It
leant to a sense of claustrophobia, not
simply because of space, but because of
exposure to each other’s language, taking
on—yet trying to reject—each other’s
inner lives. I imagined if all languages
were like this: empathic processes.
• FICTION •
Zhi Yi Cham
Cusp—p. 88
I had taken the 3:50 am bus from
Canberra to Sydney and had caught the
sunrise in the mesh of my haze. Racing
to catch a flight home to Adelaide
after my first grad job interview got
me thinking about transitioning into
adulthood and the ‘ceremonies’ we
perform to mark milestones.
Emily Crocker
Sprouts—p. 103
‘Sprouts’ is sorry it forgot about
Valentine’s Day, but really wants to
celebrate every day, and was hoping
you’d want to just stay in tonight
and make hash browns and snuggle.
‘Sprouts’ doesn’t care much for cake
but can appreciate that it’s the thought
that counts.
Nonfiction
Alex Griffin
A Brief History And Short Future
Of The Imaginary Sharehouse
—p. 19
I’m pretty obsessed with studying the
history of emotions, and I guess as the
housing landscape in our urban areas
seems to be changing pretty rapidly
around us, I wanted to try and unpack
why the feeling and the idea of the
sharehouse has come to be so important
to so many young people.
Nonfiction (cont.)
Bartholomew Pawlik
The Surprising Psychology Of
Food—p. 41
‘The Surprising Psychology of Food’ is
an endeavour to share my passion for
psychology, and an attempt to show
that it can be fun and intriguing, all the
while helping us achieve Socrates’ vision
of the examined life. The synthesis of
psychology and literature is a melding of
my two great love affairs.
Nathan Mifsud
Bajitar Paradise—p. 57
The abundance of prickly pear in
Malta led me to fondly recall my
nannu’s farm. Upon learning about the
remarkable rise and fall of the plant in
Australia, I had to share this fascinating
nexus of botany, colonialism and
migration.
Ellen Wengert
By The Half Dozen—p. 74
Growing up in a big family, I refereed
frequent food-related altercations,
hung out countless loads of washing,
and suffered through one particularly
average birthday party. Mum always
insisted it would at least make for
good writing material, and I guess she
was right.
VOICEWORKS • 107
••
Nonfiction (cont.)
Visual Art (cont.)
Kim Lateef
No Wedding Cake For An Illegal
Romance—p. 91
Lee Lai
Friday—p. 15
‘No Wedding Cake for an Illegal
Romance’ follows Lallie, an Aboriginal
Wongai woman, and Akbar, an Afghan
Muslim man, in their struggle to
legally marry during the mid-twenties
in Western Australia. I feel that their
hidden story is important and needs
to be recognised within mainstream
Australian history.
Visual Art
Emma Hough Hobbs
The Swimming Pool Cake—p. 1
‘The Swimming Pool Cake’ is an honest
celebration of those parents who took
the time to make the holy queen of all
children’s birthday decoration cakes,
and the memories forever cemented in
the hearts of children lucky enough to
indulge in its jelly goodness.
Brigit Lambert
Banana Cake—p. 8
This work shows the ritual of making
a list of ingredients for a cake, seeing
what’s in the pantry and what needs
to be picked up from the shops. Baking
is a passion of mine, which is what
motivated me to make this work.
108 • VOICEWORKS
Eric and Allie are a fictional couple that
keep cropping up throughout my work
in little vignettes of conversation. They
have ended up as a sort of vessel for
my recurring need to express particular
things in my comics: highly domestic
intimacy, subjects revolving around
food, and the gentle ins-and-outs of a
pair of queer people of colour in love.
Danyon Burge
The Cake Ahead—p. 28
This drawing is of an older woman
looking up towards a giant,
hallucinatory cake. This divine dessert
is what she has wanted her entire
life, but still it eludes her. This work
was made to illustrate the dazzling
metaphysical object of desire that can
never be obtained.
Ania Gareeva
Birthday Party Matches—p. 56
I love illustration and cultural symbols.
Living in Japan, I have been exposed
to a myriad of new everyday objects
that I now associate with my life here,
and one of these is the momo (peach)
matchbox. I am fascinated by its
contemporary yet traditional graphics.
• FICTION •
Lucy Hunter
Apples—p. 90
This illustration focuses on the beauty
and maternal embrace of the simple
act of baking, found between mother
and daughter.
Gabby Loo
It Took Me To Where I Needed
To Be—p. 102
This piece ambiguously alludes to the
indulgence of multifarious cakes—
hallucinogenic or just intoxicatingly
delicious. It is influenced by comics
and collage, depicting a singular
moment when the offering a sweet
confection is fulfilled.
Anwyn Hocking
PsychideliCake—p. 112
This artwork was inspired by the
strange—sometimes uncomfortable—
memories associated with cake. The
time in prep you were forced to kiss
your crush because the knife came out
of the cake dirty. The time you stood
on a cake. The single time you baked a
cake. And the one time you created an
artwork with the theme cake.
Comics
Harry McLean
Carretera Austral (Route 7)
—p. 38
This is a story of a bus crash that I
was in when I was travelling in South
America in 2011. I find the story
interesting because, despite it being an
extremely dramatic event, it didn’t have
many obvious repercussions (except for
one unfortunate passenger).
Julia Trybala
Slow Burn—p. 79
The comic ‘Slow Burn’ documents
introspective feelings towards toxic
relationships. It is a work about
process and progression in finding
balance within one’s personal, social
and work life.
VOICEWORKS • 109
About Voiceworks
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110 • VOICEWORKS
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VOICEWORKS • 111
You’ve lost it. Tell me what it looked like. Shaken or stirred? Sashimi-raw or
well-tempered, like steel? Don't worry, we'll find it again.
I can feel it getting on me. Cut it out. Pinch it, hit it, strike it. Now touch
it. The whole system starts to shake and shudder. Steady. Try picturing the
audience in their underwear, it’ll help.
Someone blocks your view. She has it. Probably a Gryffindor. Could she
spare you some? You call her Nellie in a voice that sounds like my grandma.
It’s a test. My eyes lock on yours. Do you feel my synapses firing,
crackling, fizzing like fireworks? Neurotransmitters, receptors tumble from
a textbook. If you’re a bundle, I’m a wreck. We run outside into the freezing
night but find it all shot to pieces. That was our last one.
Signalling. Signalling. Signalling. Do I dare ask you to dance? Your
mouth opens and I yank it wider still, peering inside for the ending we lost
long, long ago.
—Voiceworks #105 ‘Nerve’ (Spring 2016)
‘PsychideliCake’ is by Anwyn Elise (21), a human, artist, photographer
and architecture student based in Melbourne.
Voiceworks • Issue 104 ‘Cake’ • Winter 2016
Hugo Branley • Danyon Burge • Zhi Yi Cham •
Mikaella Clements • Emily Crocker • Jocelyn
Deane • Lauren Farquhar • Holly Friedlander
Liddicoat • Ania Gareeva • Mindy Gill • Alex
Griffin • Eda Gunaydin • Anwyn Hocking • Emma
Hough Hobbs • Lucy Hunter • Louise Jacques •
Gina Karlikoff • Lee Lai • Brigit Lambert • Kim
Lateef • Bethany Leak • Gabby Loo • Chloe Mayne
• Harry McLean • Nathan Mifsud • Jonathan
O’Brien • Kelly Palmer • Bartholomew Pawlik •
Julia Trybala • Ellen Wengert