Author: mascara

Simeon Kronenberg reviews The Literate Detective by Paul Scully

Written by mascara on July 16, 2026. Posted in Reviews/Essays.

The Literate Detective

by Paul Scully

ISBN: 9780645776881

Reviewed by SIMEON KRONENBERG

Paul Scully may be described, without irony, as an old-fashioned poet: one for whom the act of writing remains grounded in the aspiration to elevate verse through philosophical reflection, emotional depth, and a sustained attentiveness to language and its meanings. His poetry is animated by a clear faith in words—and their capacity to carry thought, feeling, and resonance beyond the merely instrumental. Such commitments might appear self-evident, even foundational to the poetic enterprise, yet they are not universally shared.

Much contemporary poetry has moved in other directions, often favouring a pared-back, often conversational idiom and an aversion to formal or rhetorical display. Against this backdrop, Scully’s work stands out for its willingness to engage openly with cadence, pattern, and the expressive possibilities of language. Rather than treating the “poetic” with suspicion, his poems affirm it as a necessary mode of attention—one that trusts in the shaping power of words and the forms they inhabit. In doing so, Scully reminds us that poetry need not relinquish its musical, philosophical, or even spiritual dimensions in order to remain fully of its time.

It is precisely here that Scully’s work reveals its contemporaneity. His poems are deeply alert to the unease of the present moment and to a pervasive sense of dislocation from the now. That he chooses to explore these conditions within the framework of modified traditional forms, and through a sustained love of language and its philosophical density, speaks to both his literary intelligence and his intellectual inheritance. The poems move fluidly between the textures of everyday experience and reflections that are at once philosophical and almost scientific in their rigour. Indeed, Scully’s fascination with scientific thought is evident throughout his work and finds explicit expression in his recent collection The Fickle Pendulum.

In Paul Scully gathers a sequence of poems that inhabit the life of a police officer, collected under the section that lends the book its title. At a moment when public consciousness seems increasingly unsettled by questions of crime, justice, and institutional authority, this imaginative dwelling within the figure of the detective feels uncannily apposite. The character who emerges is at first tentative, almost naïve, yet as the sequence unfolds, he grows into a hard-won comprehension of the world he serves — and the reader, moving alongside him, is drawn into the same slow accrual of understanding.

The opening poem, “The Detective’s Almanac”, establishes the tonal register for what follows. The fledgling professional dismisses the familiar paraphernalia of fictional detection — ‘trench coat, fedora, deerstalker, priestly vestments, nuns’ habits’ — as so many ‘tropical tropes’, theatrical ‘accoutrements’ inherited from television melodrama. In their place comes a recognition of the dense moral matter of actual detective work, an acceptance that death ‘is labile and numerous’, that ‘harm and hurt a chasm (and) theft a cloying absence — and guilt eternal …’. From the outset, Scully signals that this will be less an exploration of crime than of the moral atmosphere in which crime is encountered.

For the detective, as for all of us, there appears to be safety in the well-worn path of conformity to social expectation. Yet these poems steadily erode any sense that such a path offers clarity or refuge. The detective’s growing comprehension of his world is shadowed by a corresponding emotional calcification; what he gains in knowledge he risks losing in humanity. The sequence asks, with quiet insistence, whether such knowledge is itself a form of diminishment, and whether the cost of professional insight is a gradual estrangement from ordinary feeling.

In ‘Down by Lane Cove River, 1963’, included in the final subsection ‘Scrapbook’, Scully draws this meditation out of abstraction and into the unsettling terrain of lived history. A notorious case is reanimated in all its lurid, baffling horror — an episode that transfixed and titillated 1960s Australia in equal measure. I recall, at seventeen, the sensational headlines surrounding the Chandler–Bogle case, rendered all the more prurient by insinuations of adulterous ‘swing-door’ marriages and the tawdry spectacle of desire played out on the banks of what Scully memorably describes as a ‘spent condom of a river’. The metaphor is as arresting as it is unsettling, condensing into a single image the era’s fascination with sexual transgression and moral decay.

Here too, the “stern detectives” of the poem find themselves confronted not with clarity but with bafflement. The facts resist arrangement; the case offers no satisfying narrative resolution. In this failure of method lies the deeper resonance of the sequence: the recognition that the world the detective seeks to master is finally resistant to comprehension, and that the limits of reason are as much a part of his vocation as its procedures.

The sequence of detective poems in The Literate Detective derives its power from the way each poem inhabits a world thick with mystery, compromise, ambiguity, and the proximity of evil. These are poems that both allure and unsettle; they trouble the reader even as they draw us in. For this reason, they function as potent ciphers for our own unsettled times.

In the more personal sequence, ‘Mind Stunts’, Scully turns from the external world of crime and procedure to the interior theatre of consciousness itself. Here the poems move with a lighter, more musical touch, though they remain alert to the shifting dominance of perception and thought. The titles of the six short poems signal this preoccupation with mental states and altered awareness: Foreboding, Premonition, Déjà vu, Mirage, Hallucination, On Waking from a Dream.

‘Mirage’ in particular stands out:

Distance on the bitumen is rectangles
of shifting sameness, a javelin runway
west, acid-harsh gibber and ochre
to the north, a pocket of remotest blue,
yet lakes somehow lather the vista,
lapping makeshift foothills
and a pool-shimmer on the road
far ahead. I am a thirsty fool.

This single-stanza poem gathers its images with deceptive simplicity. On the surface, we are presented with the ordinary visual phenomena of distance and heat on an Australian road. Familiar enough you might think, even cliché. Yet the final line, sudden and declarative — ‘I am a thirsty fool’ — transforms the descriptions into acts of self-recognition. The mirage is no longer merely optical but psychological, even existential. The speaker’s admission anchors the poem’s imagery while enlarging it, drawing the reader into that acute moment when perception turns inward and we become ‘aware’ of our own awareness. It is precisely here that Scully’s poetry achieves its quiet force. What begins as observation becomes illumination: a moment of heightened cognisance in which the external world and the inner life meet.

And even more obviously personal are a pair of poems within the broader section titled, Clusters. The poems “Hiding in the Daylight” and “Ours is not a through street … “ are paired in a sub section titled, ‘Home Fires’, where the exigencies of suburban beauty are unfolded carefully, like something unwrapped, with care – as if to save the paper.

“Hiding in the Daylight”, is an observation poem, one where the speaker, sitting “on our deck”, records his observations of the neighbourhood of birds, people and cars in a loving portrait of suburban life. Here, the “rinse water grey” is “finally dispelled” and “the sky now gleams”, initiating a peaceful moment of reflection until the dog “erupts” into “a crescendo / of barking”, thus disturbing both the speaker and the “grey crane cresting the fence line”. The poem continues its deep interest in bird life, as do many Australia poems, noting the “king parrot sifting the offerings in Julie’s lorikeet / feeding tray, the cock bird skulking in the magnolia, and a kookaburra / and its rumbustious comedy atop a paling …” And there are more, somewhat darker presences as well, including the “pigeons that have dispelled the fairy wrens”. This, a reminder that this urban peace being observed, within which the speaker luxuriates behind “a newspaper, ipad and coffee hide” has been wrangled from the bush at inevitable cost to native wild life, which hangs on.

The poem ends in the recognition that within this “vigil for the impaling moment” where ultimately, we discover “infinity in a millisecond”, there is an acute awareness of the fleeting moment of consciousness, be it ever so fugitive.

In the wryly titled “Ours is not a through street …” there is another portrait of suburban life and its context, describing two ageing people who must confront, or resist perhaps, the exigencies laid out as the likely future for them, when they can no longer manage their suburban paradise but be forced to shift to “downsizer-appropriate tenements”.

There is a new generation inhabiting the street, including a “scamp” who “bellows from the driveway opposite” then “galoots away on his tricycle, grin wide as an open plain” and who has a father who “mows and coaxes couch and buffalo into ordered growth…” These are recent neighbours, friendly ones, but they replace the old, like Wal, “the previous owner, in a nursing home, “as is Gwen next door…” It seems like that fate might be just up ahead for the speaker and his Julie too – but there is resistance, thankfully, where despite the “shrinking” and the forgetting, there remains a memorial in suburban “fence lines” where heroism is measured in terms of “constancy (and) care”, just keeping on.

In The Literate Detective, Paul Scully demonstrates that poetry can remain intellectually ambitious, formally attentive, and emotionally resonant without retreating into sentimentality (he remains too much the scientist for that) or irrelevance. Across its varied sequences, the collection affirms a sustained belief in language as a medium capable of holding moral complexity, perceptual subtlety, and philosophical weight. Scully’s work does not shy away from difficulty—whether ethical, emotional, or epistemological—but instead dwells patiently within it, allowing meaning to emerge through accumulation and sometimes momentary revelation.

The detective poems, which form the conceptual focus of the collection, The Literate Detective, function less as narratives of crime than as meditations on knowledge, responsibility, and moral exposure. The detective’s growing understanding of the world does not bring mastery or resolution; rather, it produces estrangement, ambiguity, and a heightened awareness of the limits of reason. In this sense, the figure of the detective becomes emblematic of the contemporary subject: professionally competent, ethically burdened, and perpetually confronting the insufficiency of explanatory frameworks. Scully’s refusal of narrative closure is not a failure of method but an ethical stance, acknowledging a world resistant to coherence.

This attentiveness to the fragile nature of understanding carries through to the more personal and domestic poems. In Mind Stunts and Clusters, perception itself becomes the site of inquiry. Moments of mirage, memory, suburban observation, and ageing are rendered with precision and restraint, yet they open onto larger questions of consciousness, temporality, and care. The suburban poems, in particular, resist sentimentality, holding beauty and loss, continuity and erosion, within the same frame. Heroism, here, is not spectacular but grounded in endurance, attention, and relational fidelity.

Taken as a whole, The Literate Detective offers a compelling argument for poetry as a mode of sustained thought—one that neither abandons the musical and philosophical traditions of the lyric nor retreats from the unsettled realities of the present. Scully’s achievement lies in his capacity to make uncertainty productive, transforming ambiguity into a space of ethical and perceptual engagement. These poems do not resolve the world; they teach us how to remain alert within it.

SIMEON KRONENBERG has published poetry, reviews, interviews and essays in Australian poetry journals and anthologies, including Best Australian Poems, 2017. In 2014 he won the Second Bite Poetry Prize and in 2015 was short-listed for the Newcastle Poetry Prize. Distance, his most recent poetry collection still black water is published by Pitt Street Poetry.

Nina Culley reviews Elegy, Southwest by Madeleine Watts

Written by mascara on July 15, 2026. Posted in Reviews/Essays.

Elegy, Southwest

By Madeleine Watts

Ultimo Press

ISBN: 9781761153136

Reviewed by NINA CULLEY

Elegy, Southwest (2025), winner of the 2026 ALS Gold Medal, arrives as further confirmation of Madeleine Watts’s standing as one of Australia’s most compelling and inventive contemporary novelists. Following The Inland Sea (2020), shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award, it extends Watts’ ongoing interest in the entanglement of personal grief and ecological collapse, while pushing more directly into the political and environmental questions that have been preoccupying her work for some time. These are also the questions Eloise, the novel’s protagonist, is wrestling with as she and her husband, Lewis, travel through the American Southwest, where she’s researching a dissertation driven by an obsession with the dwindling flow of the Colorado River.

Watts situates their journey within a narrow window: between California’s Camp and Thomas Fires and Australia’s own Black Summer bushfires, in that uneasy interregnum before the pandemic, when Greta Thunberg’s activism had intensified public climate consciousness. Against that backdrop, the novel unfolds in retrospect, filtered through Eloise’s memories of the journey and of Lewis’s decline and eventual disappearance – a truth Watts circles rather than confronts directly, making its eventual revelation all the more disorienting. From this retrospective distance, Eloise laments the things she never told her husband: her pregnancy, and then her miscarriage.

That mournful, searching quality finds its most striking expression in Watts’s decision to address Lewis in the second person. It’s one of the scarcest and most contested points of view in fiction, one that creative writing workshops tend to tut at and many novels avoid altogether. The handful that’ve pulled it off, like Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City (1984), naturally remain exceptions, since “you” can so easily veer into gimmickry. Watts’s gamble works, however, because her “you” is not just stylistic but the only grammatical space capable of holding this grief: a way of keeping Lewis present in a book defined by his absence. It also makes it easier to accept that the secondary characters – Lewis’s therapist Mariana, his father and brother – remain loosely drawn, because fuller rendering of the people around them would dilute the novel’s central tension: the intimacy (and co-dependence) of the pair set against a paradoxical lack of communication.

Lewis, who works for an art foundation, has his own task: checking in on Kenneth, the surviving partner of the recently deceased artist Lawrence Greco, and assessing the completion of Greco’s desert installation, Negative Capability. The title of Greco’s installation borrows from Keats’s idea of an artist sitting in uncertainties, resisting frameworks, and valuing beauty over the pursuit of objective fact. Keats arrived at this idea after losing most of his family to tuberculosis before dying from the disease himself at twenty-five – grief, after all, is the original unexplainable thing.

It’s a bold gesture on Watts’s part to reach for something so squarely Keatsian and make it feel current rather than archaic. The poet’s own formulation of beauty over fact – “Beauty is truth, truth beauty. That is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know,” – is the negative capability Eloise can, and can’t, manage: she stews in the beauty of the landscape, but also reaches for fact, research, control, certain that if she reads enough, she’ll be prepared. When Lewis’s mother gets sick, for example, she studies what she calls “the canon of death” (Simone de Beauvoir, Roland Barthes, Kate Zambreno, and, of course, WebMD), hoping that knowledge might offer some comfort: “As though by studying the canon of death I would be able to anticipate the future, prepare a plan, and take control of the outcome. I was reading for you, for when you fell apart,” (p. 50). Lewis, by contrast, is more internal and embodied, clinging to the gifts his mother left him – headphones, a Nintendo – and retreating into meditation, bodywork, and an increasing reliance on weed.

Watts leaves little unaccounted for, with each formal and narrative choice carefully calibrated to the novel’s larger concerns. The density of Eloise’s – and Watts’ by extension – theoretical and intellectual framing is not just a feature of her characterisation, but a reflection of the way she processes her experiences. During her own miscarriage, for instance, Eloise recounts a story about Georgia O’Keeffe to her mentor, Camila, revealing her tendency to reach for other people’s stories – like O’Keeffe – as a way of making sense of her own. This habit becomes both a coping mechanism and a structural reflection of the novel’s broader tensions: Watts explores the desire to use knowledge, art, and language as a way of making sense of an increasingly uncertain world, while also acknowledging the limits of those tools when confronted with grief and environmental loss.

The novel returns to this tension as Eloise considers Elizabeth Bishop’s unfinished poem, Aubade and Elegy, which began after her lover Lota de Macedo Soares took her own life. Like Watts’s novel, the poem was written in the second person, with the word “you” struck out. Eloise asks who is erased in that struck-out word: “Was it the beloved? Or was it the poor husk of the person left behind, rendered suddenly second person?” (p. 105). Eloise’s question implies that the novel’s use of the second person does more than address Lewis – it also enacts her estrangement from herself, suggesting that grief can erase the identity left behind as well as the person who has gone.

This sense of doubling – or shadowing – runs throughout the novel; another way Watts highlights the interplay between intimacy and distance in Eloise and Lewis’s relationship. O’Keeffe’s recovery mirrors the pair’s own time in the desert and their twin obsessions with water’s abundance and recession; Eloise’s miscarriage, endured alone at home, rhymes with Lewis dispersing his grief alone in that same landscape. The domesticity of Kenneth and Lawrence echoes that of Eloise and Lewis. The Colorado River itself circles back when Eloise observes that it was “nice until it got so toxic. And now it’s disappearing” (p. 58). It’s a sentence that could be describing almost anything in the novel: a relationship, a person, a world.

Climate fiction (or cli-fi), despite its growing presence in literary spaces, is still often viewed as overly didactic or apocalyptic. Watts resists both expectations and is instead more interested in the quieter, cumulative ways climate change reshapes landscapes, memories, and everyday life. In an interview, she noted that climate change is “global but also manifests locally,” arguing that writers can either see this as a challenge or “use [it] as structural possibilities and innovate [their] form to respond to them.”(1) Elegy, Southwest embraces the latter approach, using form and language to explore not only environmental loss but also the political systems that enable it, from government policy to extractive capitalism. Her prose is both melancholic and probing, tracing the quiet, cumulative effects of climate change: drying earth, dwindling water supplies and the rotting fish of the Salton Sea. For anyone who lived through the Australian drought, myself included, or who has watched the American Southwest’s rivers literally disappear, these passages will feel sadly familiar. Even the idea of a mall fountain spurting water becomes something Eloise can’t remember ever seeing, which is how most of us are now experiencing climate change – a detail likely to turn up in more and more novels as it becomes harder to ignore in real life: cracked earth along the Appalachian trail, shorter gardening seasons, the decline of butterflies, as everyday Americans described in a recent Guardian article. (2)

This sense of solastalgia, alongside a landscape juxtaposed as ruined and beautiful, made me think of the tradition of the Australian writer abroad – Patrick White, Christina Stead – for whom the expatriate condition sharpens both the adopted landscape and the longing for home. Eloise being Australian gives her an outsider’s eye on the Southwest and its mythology: Coachella, weed pens, palm trees, the long Lynchian highways, punctuated by a domestic rhythm of date shakes in diners, checking in and out of Airbnbs, endless tidying and pottering. “It’s the America you are singing about in all the songs. I was interested in exploring this Americana from an outsider perspective.”(3) That vantage allows her to map the landscape’s damage in ways that are never abstract but visceral, intimate and always rooted in place.

Despite moments of warmth – small human flashes, or, in the spirit of the book, glimmers over water – Elegy, Southwest is not a particularly hopeful read. By the end, we’re left searching and haunted alongside Eloise, perhaps because Watts is too wise, or too pragmatic, a writer to offer us any answers. Instead, she treats both loss and climate change critically and attentively, and it’s this patience, this willingness to linger within beauty (or ruin) rather than push towards resolution or revelation, that gives the novel its distinctive force.

Notes

1. Courage, Ariel. “Writer Madeleine Watts on Balancing Growth and Guarding Against Burnout.” The Creative Independent, 6 Mar. 2025, www.thecreativeindependent.com/people/writer-madeleine-watts-on-balancing-growth-and-guarding-against-burnout/

2. Canon, Gabrielle. “How the Climate Crisis Showed Up in Americans’ Lives This Year: ‘The Shift Has Been Swift and Stark’.” The Guardian, 31 Dec. 2025, www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/31/climate-crisis-guardian-readers.

3. Cain, Sian. “Madeleine Watts: ‘Climate Change Should Be in Everyone’s Writing Right Now’.” The Guardian, 3 Mar. 2025, www.theguardian.com/books/2025/mar/03/madeleine-watts-climate-change-should-be-in-everyones-writing-right-now

NINA CULLEY is a Thai-Welsh writer and critic based in Naarm. Her essays and reviews have appeared in Kill Your Darlings, Liminal, Aniko Press, Mascara Review, and more. As a theatre, arts, and literary critic, her work is regularly published in Time Out, Limelight, and ArtsHub. In 2024, she was named one of Mascara’s Emerging Critics, and she is a 2025 Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellow. Nina previously worked as Editorial Assistant at Kill Your Darlings.

Bec Kavanagh reviews The Endling by Keely Jobe

Written by mascara on July 15, 2026. Posted in Reviews/Essays.

The Endling

by Keely Jobe

SCRIBE

ISBN 9781761381782

Reviewed by BEC KAVANAGH

The feminist compound at the heart of Keely Jobe’s debut novel, The Endling, is a flagging utopia that gives the novel a sense of the post-apocalyptic: resources are depleted, shelter is sparse and patience wanes. In reality, the novel takes place from the early to mid ‘90’s and is set on a remote unnamed mountainside somewhere in Australia. ‘It’s like a scene from Oliver Twist but with chickpeas and tits’ (p.33)

By the time the story begins, the compound, started some decades earlier by a group of feminist visionaries, is home to a small remaining cluster of ‘mountain dykes’ (p.55) who barely get along. The shared vision of the founders – to create a community with no men and to free themselves from all patriarchal forces – has proved challenging. Living on the mountain is hard work, and the current cohort has little energy for genuine political activism or work, preferring instead to get high and seduce the few occasional newcomers. Frank, one of the novel’s two protagonists, has turned her back on the petty grievances of the main camp in favour of isolation. She camps away from the other women at the top of the mountain in a tin-roofed shelter with drop sheets as walls. Chicken Midnight, a small rescue dog, is her forbidden companion, and the deep bond between the two is the closest Frank will ever get to true love. Mila, Frank’s adult niece, is the second protagonist and acts as the bridge between Frank and the other women. Although Mila lives in the main compound, she’s also an outsider, more pragmatic than the others and less rigid. Framing this is the endling that gives the book its title, a lone black orchid, deep in the valley, holding onto life for the sake of its kind.

‘The Endling’ is a novel obsessed with life: the emergence of it, its failures and the conditions needed for it to thrive in both the individual and the collective. The choice to set the novel in the early to mid- ‘90s provides an interesting dramatic irony for readers who will bring an awareness of the pending climate emergency to the page. While questions of ecological survival lie at the heart of the narrative – the orchid’s plight to reproduce draws awareness to the fragile ecosystems surrounding it – there’s no urgency behind the way the women protect the environment. Their ideology takes a fairly passive approach coexistence. ‘We’re more like caretakers,’ says one early one, ‘while we’re here, nothing bad can happen. No logging, no grazing, no development’ (p53). But they are never required to actually put their bodies on the line to defend these beliefs. The perceived threats to their collective survival – all framed as masculine in nature – are largely hypothetical. And while there are hints at the world beyond the mountain – a plane flying overhead, the roar of a chainsaw encroaching on the natural noises of the forest and gully – the women live with minimal intrusions.

The boundaries between living things – plant, animal, human – in the novel are diaphanous. Frank and Chicken communicate almost telepathically with one another, and while this could be read as a psychological consequence of Frank’s human isolation, Jobe writes the animal’s voice believably. Chicken is endearing without being overly anthropomorphised. But what makes the novel truly special is its posthuman turn. During a particularly fertile spring, the women find themselves unmercifully aroused. Drawn into the wilderness, the women find pleasure in themselves and a heightened awareness of the life around them. Jobe’s language here is sensual and descriptive:

‘Quietly, privately, and all at once, they begin to hoard details like coins. A fishbone fern will bend towards a moving body as if eavesdropping. The trunk of a blackberry ash is adorned with ancient eyes staring out, staring back, and the fruit it drops is the colour of the small blue vein on a wrist or behind an ear. A budding fern front is bunched like a fist but soft as a day-old chick. Brushing a hand over certain byrophytes feels like static, and brushing past a maidenhair fern is like brushing past a ghost.’ (p63)

By endowing these plant forms with such human qualities, and bringing them into direct, intimate contact with her human characters, Jobe erases the hierarchy between human and non-human bodies. Some months later, the women are all pregnant, seemingly by immaculate conception. Only Frank and Robin are excluded from this synchronised mass conception. Frank remains unaware for some time – her own body is deteriorating rapidly, and shame and stubbornness make her trips to the main camp less and less frequent. Robin, an older woman who had been away from the mountain during that fertile spring, takes on the role of carer and scientific observer of the women. Her theory for the pregnancy is that extreme isolation from men has triggered a biological evolution of sorts, allowing the women to become pregnant without male intervention. When the babies are born, all of the women give birth to girls except Mila. The babies look human but behave strangely, rejecting maternal offerings, and speaking to each other in indiscernible whispers. Here, Jobe challenges not only the physical limits of the human body, but its psycho-social limits too. For all of their idealistic ambitions to leave the patriarchy behind, the women are unhappy when they are unable to step into the role of mother/nurturer. The babies don’t need their protection, and they don’t seem to want their care – they don’t cry when they’re hurt, and they don’t crave any kind of physical contact with their mothers. It’s a fascinating provocation, if a slightly sad one. With the exception of Mila who is positioned as the outsider, none of the women really rise to the challenge of these unconventional circumstances. If anything, becoming mothers seems to make them even pettier, and they reflect quite a toxic version of motherhood.

This foray into the more experimental aspects of the novel takes the reader away from the more grounded reality of Frank’s experience. Her eyes are failing, she is increasingly incontinent and her limbs stop working sporadically. She doesn’t even have the constant companionship of her beloved dog, as Chicken Midnight has become the self-appointed guardian of the children. Though she has no desire to be remotely likeable, Frank is the most interesting of the women. By removing herself so completely from a social context, Frank is a more hopeful posthuman role model. In such isolation, and with few opportunities to see herself through the eyes of other people, Frank experiences herself in contrast to animals, and to the mountain itself. But while the tonal division between the two parts works, the jump between two such complex narratives happens abruptly, and the brevity of the text doesn’t fully allow for its ambition.

If the pacing feels rushed at times, it doesn’t matter, because The Endling is a truly exciting novel to read. Jobe is unafraid to challenge the comfort of the reader by decentring the human body. And while it doesn’t offer much hope for the feminist revolution, what it offers instead – bold, provocative transformation – is thrilling.

BEC KAVANAGH is a writer, literary critic and academic living in Naarm whose work examines the representation of women’s bodies in literature. Bec’s reviews can be found in The Guardian, and Australian Book Review and she has written fiction and non-fiction for a number of publications including Overland, The Big Issue and Mascara’s Resilience anthology. Bec has worked for the Stella Prize, the Wheeler Centre, Faber Academy and Australia Reads. She is currently Senior Tutor in Creative Writing and Publishing at the University of Melbourne. Externally, she runs ‘Body Writing’, a series of 3-hour life drawing classes for writers. www.beckavanagh.com.au

Maya Crombie

Written by mascara on July 9, 2026. Posted in Fiction.

Maya Crombie is a zinester and fiction writer studying Creative Writing and German at The University of Melbourne, and currently a fiction editor for Voiceworks.

CLIFFS

I’m staring into the sanitiser at work. Water’s dripping from the top and I’m imagining it as a water feature in a garden or a grotto or like one of those plexiglass windows at the museum with the cross-section of dirt and moss and water and a frog. I pile in some dishes and then close it.

When I open it, it vents me with hot pungent air and I zone back in.

Somehow another half hour lapses after returning from the toilet where I tapped around on my phone. I stand in the walk-in fridge. I like the sour smell in there: some combination of golden cheese slabs, burger sauce, butter, slaw, pickles, tomato discs, vats of mayonnaise, bagged liquid cheese, etcetera. Everything is dated with a label sticker, and the vegetables are sealed in single-use plastic tubs.

I draw things on the receipt paper. I serve five customers and try to avoid the managers. I imagine them being angry at me. Anyway. On the bus, then, at home.

At home I turn on my laptop. Earlier I’d been itching to get on Google Maps in order to find places I went while on holiday as a kid. I was trying to think of restaurant names through the shadowy outlines of meals and interiors. There’s a restaurant I always picture with a big tree inside it, but I know that can’t be right. That becomes kind of exhausting until I’m flying down these country roads in Google Earth. I’m passing stretched cars and cows suspended in mid-air like smudges, while holding my hand to my laptop and feeling the vibrations of the trip-hop song I’m listening to. The other day I spilled candle wax all over the carpet by trying to light an already-fucked candle by holding it upside down. The wick had disappeared under a valley of wax. There are droplets caked into the carpet across my room. I pick at a little speck. It pleases me how it feels like nothing when hot wax falls onto my finger; it never hurts.

I’m under the blankets reading fanfic for a book series I’ve been reading fanfic of for years. The scratchy russet blanket that smells old and I usually keep under the bed is draped over my sheets. I’m disrupted by an email notification but it’s just from Everyday Rewards. My nose feels blocked and irritated and I can’t soothe it. When my left eye starts stinging from tiredness and I rest my finger over it to hold it closed, the words on the laptop screen look far away.

I switch to reading reviews for work to see if I’m named, even if it’s in a bad review. Lately I’ve also been playing Papa’s Freezeria. It sometimes makes me feel angry and inadequate, but I want to keep playing in case there’s an end I can reach.

I ride the train to see Xavier with all the commuters on their way to work. I sit turned against the window and scroll a bit on my phone and listen to Massive Attack’s album Protection.

X texts me every few days and I procrastinate on responding even when I read the texts as they come in. We go to the movies or get a drink, and I feel like at any moment he might see right through me and walk away. I don’t know. I’m waiting for him to drop me.

X and I would typically start our days at the library near his house. (Rain was coming down in sheets today for instance; characteristic for late November.) We’d listen to music together, synced up by pressing play at the same time and putting our own separate headphones on. We were often alone; sometimes there’d be a reading for parents and toddlers, and their shrieking would mellow underneath the voice of whatever minimal downtempo ambient we’d picked.

Then from the library—since the rain would have probably paused by then—we would walk over to the Rotary op shop and look at $1 doilies and used glassware and worthless DVDs. X was set on finding some scarves to hang on his wall. The ones we found were often tattered or the wrong colour. Then we’d go to the station to head into the city and get coffee, which was never a good idea for me because it tended to make me anxious (which I typically first noticed on the train home), but I kept drinking it because it made me feel like talking. And I liked talking to X.

I was at work thinking about seeing X tomorrow, then somehow, I was back at work again thinking about how fast the time with X had passed. I could time travel—I said to myself—by creating these little blips that I would pile on top of each other and then replay all at once. I still remember walking to school one July morning in Year 9 and the way the houses looked squared and crisp in the frost and thinking, ‘I’ll always remember this when I remember how fast everything happens.

Recently instead of filling a cup of water up for myself, I’ve been getting sneaky and I fill up lemonade instead, or I’ll do half-lemonade and half-water to dilute the bubbles. It still tastes strong enough. Today I fill up what is essentially two-parts lemonade and one-part water. Maybe they’ll notice me doing it on the cameras.

I’ve been getting really good at Papa’s Freezeria. Or maybe I just feel that way because I’ve been playing more. I get a good rhythm going, as I’m listening to the ceiling fan flutter and rain drumming outside. I put on Selected Ambient Works Volume II. I remember the customers, start recognising their orders and notice when they change. Think about what X might be doing.

When his shift at the ice cream store finishes in the early afternoon, X buys some of those 250ml apple and blackcurrant juice boxes that we both like, and we sit out on the curb at the edge of the carpark and drink three each in long gulps.

I chew thoughtfully on the last straw and then I toss it limply onto the steaming bitumen. Fragrant rain appears in spots on the concrete around us. We walk over to the train station.

X and I go to the park with heavy oak trees, where the houses look kind of magical and I see a particular one that reminds me of Mulholland Drive. Pre-Summer in the city always feels like trees rustling, the rattling and dinging sound of the trams, the free Bible course people, everyone walking somewhere, dampened heat beating down and sunburn.

I start feeling guilty for being mad at old friends in my dreams. They have been so horrible lately, but I can’t bring myself to call them nightmares. Yesterday I dreamt that my little sister died, and I felt bad that I was so affected by it because when I woke up, I knew she was asleep down the hallway and not dead like so many other people’s little sisters. ‘In my dream, last night, you died,’ I tell her over dinner, because I didn’t see her for breakfast since she got up and left for school before I could bring myself to get out of bed.

‘What,’ she replies, like me mentioning that made her uncomfortable or it felt weird and, somehow, to say it made it real.

X and I go watch another movie together. He texts me asking if I want to go; it’s a horror movie we’ve spoken about together and they’re showing it at a cinema near his house. He meets me outside the station. The streetlights turn on at some point as we walk past restaurants at half-capacity; metal curves protruding over the bruised clouds. We sneak in.

At work I print the exact right number of labels for the frozen chips I portioned. I fill two boxes. In Papa’s Freezeria there is always a queue of fuming customers, but here at work I shuffle around to look for menial cleaning jobs and whatever might need restocking. I’m always wiping over little crumbs on the stainless steel. I can still kind of taste lozenges on the roof of my mouth.

After work I am listless as ever. The tab I was playing Papa’s Freezeria on crashed and I lost my progress. I think I might have been close to some kind of end, if there was one. I was at rank 45, if I remembered correctly. I go downstairs and make a tea, and it doesn’t taste like anything specific, just herbal. I take Nurofen and watch TV on mute. Some channel they play in the waiting room at the doctor’s office.

Rain crescendos outside into a storm. Pellets of water pound at the iron garden furniture outside. It gushes down so thickly that it becomes impossible to see through the layers of it. The backdoor is open and the flyscreen is shut, and the sweet smell of rain-dampened eucalyptus wafts in.

This week I don’t remember any of my dreams, even though I have to assume that I’m still having them. Maybe I’ll start playing Papa’s Burgeria or else another game we used to scramble to during wet day timetables. How many times did I probably make a new Poptropica account on the school desktops?

Anyway, X says he’ll visit me at work today and afterwards we’ll maybe sneak into another movie. I wait behind the front counter, click around on the POS and point the scanner at things and try to guess when he’ll come out from the screen of rain, cross the road, shake his hair under the awning and enter through the front door.

Natalie Damjanovich-Napoleon reviews A Blink of Time’s Eye by David Adès

Written by mascara on July 2, 2026. Posted in Reviews/Essays.

A Blink of Time’s Eye

David Adès

ISBN 978-1-923248-15-1

5 Islands Press

Reviewed by NATALIE DAMJANOVICH-NAPOLEON

Life’s Unending Casualties

A Blink of Time’s Eye is a gentle book that invites the reader on a journey through Adès’ personal and family history, exploring the notion of time—deep time, the present day, and ancestral time—as it connects with the story of a person’s life. This is Adès’ sixth poetry collection, if we include his chapbooks, and encoded in the lyric poems within is the work of a mature poet viewing their life’s work, their mortality and the mortality of their loved ones. The fixity of time and “our variegated mazes of memory” are continually questioned by the poet in A Blink of Time’s Eye. Yet Adès remains an optimist and like the sunflowers that are scattered throughout the collection he turns towards the sunlight of life rather than its darkness, remaining willing “like this flower” to “bear witness.”

“Going On” opens the collection on a strong note. The poem examines intergenerational trauma, announcing one of the book’s themes with the line, “ —language / fails me here, the chasm between a story lived and a story told.” The Beckett epigraph announcing this poem, “You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on” speaks to the poet’s recognition of the everyday struggles that are part of the human condition which he echoes throughout the collection. In a podcast with Magdalena Ball recently Adès revealed that many of the poems were written during a residency at the Don Banks Studio and inspired by his experiences during the Covid pandemic (00:01:22-00:09:44). The pull towards introspection and the reckoning of life as a result of Covid lockdowns and isolation is evident in the collection, particularly in poems such as the title poem “A Blink of Time’s Eye” with “infection toppling / the dominoes of our vectored lives” and “In This Late and Tenuous Hour” where the subject of the poem is “deprived of the intimacy of close contact”. The collective experience of time that was bent and distorted during Covid coupled with loss is encapsulated in this work.

Few male poets write as empathetically and engagingly about parenting as Adès’ and this insight provide some of most poignant moments of the collection. This is evidenced in poems such as “Washing My Daughters’ Hair” and “Such is the Gifting, Such the Receiving,” although the emotional impact of poems such as these is often undone by the poet’s habit of titling poems with either the first or last line of the poem. Repeating impactful lines robs these lines of the weight of surprise. However, the use of anaphora with the word “observe” in a poem about parenthood such as “The Myriad Lives I Live Inside My Own” is an effective tool that moves the poem along in a satisfying rhythm. In this poem Adès asserts that life is to be lived in the moment:

I replay images and moments from the day,
they are already diminished, even if I hold them
in the arms of my own joy.

“The Archaeology of Living” and “Tidal” are two poems that follow each other in the collection exploring squewiff typography that echoes concrete poetry, accompanied by abundant, experimental language to profound effect. Parenthood is invoked in “The Archaeology of Living” along with the “Rubik’s cube of perpetual departures” that affects parents of late teen children. Circling back to the prescience of survival that the pandemic pressed upon many of us Adès asserts:

Survival is such an effort,
requires so much devotion, such constant attention
it is little wonder so many fall by the wayside,
life’s unending casualties.

“Tidal” is a poem that showcases Adès’ talents as a poet at his best, and it is refreshing to read a poem where a father explores parenthood with its “chop and swell” and “wave after wave after wave” of challenges. This is a father who both “set[s] boundaries” and is also “willing the breaking of them” yet acknowledges the effort of fighting against the tide to remain afloat as a parent. Yet it not only in the present tides that Adès poems shine, but rather in his ability to look back that renders impactful insights.

The third section of this collection “Past Whispering in the Tent of Present” is a standout as it examines the effects of the Holocaust and this “catacomb of memories” on his mother’s and subsequently his own story. “Exodus” calls to mind the style of Adrienne Rich in its breadth and examination of history against the background of his mother’s personal experience:

exodus upon exodus
always leaving, lost markings hidden
though marking generation after generation.

It is an exceptional poem that holds both the past and present taught, tying the threads of his own and his mother’s life together when he returns to Egypt, concluding “it takes so / little time to be obliterated, for all the markings / to disappear.” “My Mother, My Daughter and Anne Frank” continues on a similar vein, calling to task the Nazi legacy and “one man’s demonic vision” along with the “questions asked that cannot be answered.” It is in the quiet moments that this collection excels with poems such as “Disembarking” when Adès returns to view his own life in light of his mother’s exodus. “Disembarking” unfolds the verse in tercets and standout lines such as “the day’s slow map rolls away,” reflecting on another war someone in his family, namely he, has escaped, and wondering at a world that could be “oblivious to all borders.”

The poems “Exit” and “Tomorrow” are apt as poems that bookend Adès’ collection, appearing in the fourth section “Our Lives Floating Light as Windswept Dandelions.” “Exit” explores the metaphor of falling asleep during the movie of one’s life, here the poet writes, “I wonder what living I have missed in that sleep…how the story is so much memory and so much the gaps between.” However, in “Tomorrow” the poet tells us he is not yet finished with this world, for even though it is broken he holds onto gratitude and “what we haven’t yet written / on tomorrow’s page.” Time may disappear in the blink of one’s eye, but this poet is determined to keep their eyes and heart open to life’s mysteries and joys.

Works Cited

“David Ades on A Blink of Time’s Eye.” Compulsive Reader Talks from Spotify, 29 May 2026,
https://open.spotify.com/episode/5K9nIiCLZRFvE04wbHoDyo.

NATALIE DAMJANOVICH-NAPOLEON is a poet, songwriter and educator from Fremantle/Walyalup who was raised on a farm by her Croatian-immigrant parents. She holds a PhD in creative writing on erasure poetry at ECU. She spent a decade in the United States where she performed and recorded music and was a Coordinator at the SBCC Writing Centre. Currently, she teaches EFL, writing and poetry in private and university settings. Natalie has won the Bruce Dawe Poetry Prize, KSP Poetry Prize and has been awarded both the Red Room Poetry and KSP Writers’ Centre fellowships. Her poetry and creative nonfiction has been widely anthologised in the US and Australia, including alongside the US Poet Laureate, Ada Limon in the anthology Dear Human. Natalie‘s second poetry book, If There Is a Butterfly That Drinks Tears, was released last year via Gazebo/Life Before Man Books. Through her academic and creative work she explores autoethnographic and avant garde theories and methodologies with a focus on nonfiction storytelling, history and poetry as craft. Her most recent collection is The Commonwealth of Amnesia

Vek Lewis

Written by mascara on June 24, 2026. Posted in Featured Writer, Creative Non-fiction.

Vek Lewis is a writer of Anglo-Indian heritage who grew up in Goolamrup, Whadjuk Noongar Boodjar, in Armadale-Kelmscott, an outer suburb of Perth, Western Australia. She currently lives on Gadigal Country in Sydney. Lewis has published poems and short stories in Cordite Poetry Review, Meniscus Literary Review, and has work forthcoming in Westerly.

Real Estate

We had no money, and no quick means of getting it.

To make matters worse, no real estate in town would even consider our application. Every receptionist aped the other, smiling moronically behind painted lips and lacquered dead hair. Yes, we’ll telephone you as soon as the owner has reached a decision. No, the matter is yet to be finalised. Yes, you can try phoning on Friday at midday if you like, we should know by then. No, the house hasn’t been leased to anyone yet, please be patient. Wherever we went, the same old tune. We had references, yes. We had the foresight to be creative, to put it another way, with our sources. What else could we have done?

I was beginning to realise we had nowhere to go. And staying at the hotel – famous for its family feel of psychotics in adjacent rooms and drunk wife bashers across the hall – could only last so long. Till tomorrow, that is. Between us, we had not a cent to our names.

Salome was optimistic. I found myself slipping into a vague state of panic. Four months in Melbourne, having torn away from Perth, already I’d landed in this mess. At least there was Salome.

I rang a housing crisis line, only to be given four names, all of which turned us down. No, we don’t have any spaces, sorry or We cannot house friends together anyway was the customary dismissive response. It was like doing the rounds with the real estate again.

I rang the last contact on a list given me by the Salvation Army. It got through.

– Come and see us for an interview tomorrow at 1:45. My name’s Maria, I’m the housing officer, and we’ll see what we can do. Do you know where we are?
– Yes, St Kilda, right?
– Fitzroy St. Good, see you then.

Some consolation. I would do anything to get into this program. Otherwise, I knew, things would surely spin out of control.
I turned up ten minutes early to the appointment.

A woman, wearing a red vinyl jacket and with her black hair in a corkscrew perm, in her thirties, was smoking a cigarette out the front of the Centre. I assumed she was a client. As I approached, she looked at me a little quizzically, then leaned forward.

– I’m Maria.
– Oh, hi, yes. Am I late?
– No, you’re early. I’m just having a fag. Why don’t you come in and sit down. I’ll be with you in a sec, OK?
– Ok, thanks.

I sat there, flicking rapidly through piles of Woman’s Day and New Idea, not really reading, but taking in the headlines and the blurry exclusive photographs. Melanie Griffith and hubby Antonio caught nude on beach. Madonna hits out at anti-fur campaigners, Robert Downey Jnr on drugs – again. I only digested the large print, mulling over my own story, which would have to be equally sizzling, controversial, I thought, to be taken seriously by these social workers. They saw all types. Some of them worse off than me, probably. What was my case? I felt a sharp sense of guilt, akin to when I’d get called a whinger at home, for any and everything, such was my reputation. Weak, spoiled, girl. More often than not, overheard words. My father’s. Maybe it was true. I had nothing to complain about. I broke out in a sweat, my stomach grumbled.

I would have to be as creative as any subeditor of a scandal sheet. The public had to know, didn’t they? I saw myself in one of those articles, framed in red Story of a runaway was one headline. Another brave victim speaks out.

I laughed at the corniness of it.

Hadn’t I lived a normal life? I was alive. I predicted their responses: come on, you’re bright, emphasise the positive (as my mother might say) or more brutally, we only help those who can’t help themselves. I felt like leaving. I was a phoney, a fraud. I had nothing to say. I had never suffered. I had brought all misery upon myself.
Before I could get up, Maria entered the waiting-room.
– You can come through now.

Maria offered me a coffee, which I declined, politely. I did not want to feel more jittery than I was. A valium might have helped. I rooted myself to the metal chair. Maria introduced me to a blonde woman in a seat next to her, by the name of Carol. Carol was extraordinary. She wore several layers of pancake, and over her lips had applied bright-red lip liner which finished in two alpine peaks on the top. She was my “worker” proper (they never said social worker) and I would be seeing her every week. She would look after my needs, and assess my weekly progress. Carol was the source of much gossip among the “kids”. On her left cheek, under the layers of frosted foundation, you could discern evidence of a slight scar, about an inch long, which she did her best to hide. Watching her talk was weird, and I tried to stay serious. That was vital today. I couldn’t show any degree of light heartedness here. That was not on the script.

– Hi there. Just a few questions to begin. Maria tells me you’re from Perth. How long have you been in Melbourne?
– Yeah, I moved from Perth about 4 months ago, so I’ve been living here since February this year.
– Mmm. Since this year. February 1992. Right. Any family?
– They live in Perth.
– Do they know that you live here? Is it possible for you to get any support from them?
– No, I left without saying good-bye. And no, they wouldn’t support me. They can’t. I mean – they’ve never really supported me…
– Financially…?
– No, I mean yes, that, but in all other ways. We don’t have what you’d call “a good relationship” y’know, me and my parents.
– So you don’t get along with them, not even with your mother?
– That’s what I said.

In that moment, I felt as if I had dealt my mother a swift blow. I was like Peter denying her three times. I never knew you. I never knew you. I NEVER LOVED YOU. Not the way someone should treat their mother. Judgement weighed heavily on me. It was irreversible. There was no point holding back. I’d already contravened the Universal Law.

Wasn’t I, myself, an aberration? This is perhaps something this woman could never comprehend. She was part of the normal – the acceptable – world. She had a family, parents who loved her, paid for her education. What separated us? I had come here to find somewhere to live, all other doors had been slammed in my face. But I would have to reduce myself to visual rubble to get anywhere. A cry nearly cracked its way through to the surface, but I scotched it. I bent my head down, talking to the carpet. Here as usual I was giving account.

What did she see, looking at me? Why couldn’t they just get it over and done with? They would probably say no, they couldn’t help me just now. Suddenly I sensed I had no place in this world. It was better I didn’t exist. There, I was helpless. Scrape me up from the floor. Wash that blood up.

– She can’t cope with who I am, I offered. This was sure to elicit some response. It was the 1990s. The talk shows were full of it. Carol looked like the kind of person who would watch talk shows. Tape them if she missed them. She would enjoy all the emotional blood and guts.

– She won’t accept that your sexuality, your gender? That word again.
– No. My mother wouldn’t accept me being anything she hadn’t planned.
– And your father?
– I haven’t told him. But he’d put me away. I’m certain.
I felt I was speaking of someone else’s life. But once I’d said those words, thinking back, they resounded with truth.
The last time I saw my mother, we’d met for lunch in the city.

It was months since I’d seen her. My mother is full of smiles and singsong cheeriness when she waves at me from the front of the station. We lunch at an Indian restaurant.

She asks the usual questions: How are you getting on? How’s the asthma now you’ve moved? Do you see many of your old friends? I answer them, mindlessly. Her conversation is nearly always like this, mindless. To my mother, small talk is pivotal. She is constantly avoiding the topic. But not today. I won’t allow it.

We finish our pumpkin dhal and I go for seconds. I need to fortify my stomach for the afternoon ahead. With characteristic aplomb, she refuses a second helping. Always the self-sacrificing one. Not one to be seen as excessive.
It’s that look of pride that I hate, the way she stares at me like I’m some object and doesn’t listen to what I say. I may as well be a Stepford Child, a good Anglo-Indian “boy”. It’s what she wants. Loyal, self-effacing.
But this afternoon she doesn’t get what she wants.

We make the journey back to the suburb, and I know it will be the last time. I am careful to ascertain if my younger brother is liable to be out or in. My mother assents. He has gone off driving in his V8 with his friends.

On the way there, I thought, this is where the rift starts, this is where I wave goodbye to my mother as a passenger on a cruise liner bound for some distant country, a long trip, possibly for life, signals goodbye to the fast-disappearing friend on the docks. I could see her as a black speck blinking on the horizon until she no longer existed, except as memory.

But no, that rift had started much earlier. It is hard to say precisely when. It was only that now some spell had been broken. I had stopped believing in her. Or so I thought.

I felt sad for this woman, who had never known me. At the same time, I was angry beyond words. Anger felt like privilege. It surged through my veins. My mother hated emotions. I began to see her beauty as the beauty of a mannequin, a wax figure. Someone who rarely breathed, she was so controlled.

I remembered those long days after I left school, half-way through the year, sleeping, holed up in my bedroom, completely lost. Seven months, seven months of walking into a coma of languidness. I would draw flowers. I drew an outline of my body, but I tore it up. My mother pushed food over the threshold, dutifully. And mail under the door. She accepted this without a word. She did not want to know.

– Glandular fever, she told her friends. Struck down, just like I was before the brother went and their father had to hire home help.

Like any commander, she schooled her cadets in the utmost self-discipline. Just a glance was warning enough. Or the threat of No-Speaks. Efficiency is the way. If there was a person down there it was lost beneath all that artifice of poise. And mimicry is the best flattery. She needed that. She, in her own way, was missing too. She rarely spoke of her parents but in the most glowing terms. For every real emotion, she had a part rehearsed. That was her survival.
But survival can be hollow.

Looking at it now, so much is laughable. Tragi-comedy, I guess. That afternoon, in her duplex, I summoned the courage to be as straightforward as possible.

– Agape, I can understand, but Eros? That is not a natural thing. What are you trying to tell me? You like men? Why cannot you just be normal? Plenty of girls like you: Annika Panicker, for example, from a good family. Or Vivian’s daughter, from church.
– Mum, it’s not about that. I just don’t feel “right”. I don’t know how I feel. Nothing in our family is normal! Are you going to tell your friends, at least? If you don’t understand it, me not being a boy, you should at least talk to them.
– I will say nothing, it’s against God. I will tell them you are asexual.

My mother looked down, picked up some knitting, and asked me when my train was due. I never saw her again.

Angela Costi reviews Gold Digger by Lisa Collyer

Written by mascara on June 24, 2026. Posted in Reviews/Essays.

Gold Digger

by Lisa Collyer

Gazebo Books

Life Before Man

ISBN 9781763600935

Reviewed by ANGELA COSTI

Documentaries, literature, memoirs and oral storytelling projects have contributed to our familiarity with the intersectional identities of woman, worker and Italian migrant. However, these identities are further nuanced and enriched in Lisa Collyer’s second poetry collection. Collyer’s dexterity with archival sources, versatility with form, and distillation of memory is pronounced throughout Gold Digger. We are not merely introduced to personalities, rather we are engaged with the challenges these intersections have endured, including the struggle to eke out a living, smarting from the hard-edged rivalry of blue-ribbon competition, or being objectified by patriarchal hierarchy.

The book begins with an outstanding ‘Prologue’ poem, ‘The Grape Picker[s]’, which uses brackets to accentuate inequality, and kinaesthetic words to build an atmosphere of labour under burning sun and for unjust wage:

This heat sum is ripe, titled and tilled
[without consent] and hired hands are rarely paid
to re[turn].

………

This dry heat; beneath her frock, a micro-
climate trickles; her hands once proxied manpower:
that farm she’ll never in[her]it.

This poem’s final stanza ends with a striking image of gendered division:

this crow f[lies], cordoned to yield. The boss
shakes her husband’s hand but without
that salutary crush, we’ll never know the rugose
topography of a lady’s hand.

The dissection of ‘f[lies]’ embeds two associative aspects of disempowering dynamics: the need to fly from dishonesty. The bracket also has a visual impact, as it emphasises women’s imprisonment, which is further displayed with the handshake, only between men, and its fallout on women’s labour. The poem is an exemplar of feminist working-class poetics.

After the ‘Prologue’, the collection is divided into five substantial sections that glean an evocative line from one of the poems in that section. For example, the first section’s title is ‘… A Paradox of Composed Sweat’ and the third section’s title is ‘Ditch the Coquette’s Cloche…’. These phrases herald the intricate word play and research which upholds the collection.

Many poems in Gold Digger bring to mind the empathic perspicacity of collections by Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980). Like Rukeyser (1), Collyer’s poems have an indelible way of blending nonfiction account with lyrical acumen.

In Collyer’s dynamic ‘Volcanic Fed’ we encounter public and media transgressions towards female figures by way of the story of Anna Magnani. Magnani is considered to be ‘the overlooked “goddess” of Italian cinema’(2) in contrast to Sophia Loren, Gina Lollobrigida and Isabella Rossellini. There is a deft use of apophenia by way of folding into the poem’s body the ordeal of the I Carusi (Sicilian dialect) referring to ‘six-year-old boys once indentured to work in the Sulphur mines’. The subjects, whether enslaved to film or cave, oscillate from dare to despair with each build of line:

She comes on too strong. Sacrifice
dear ones to placate the mephitic
breath of the goddess [Anna] Magnani
idols offered-up to an animal pulse
hustling amongst the slave class.
I carusi buckle under and wombs
bag-up hellfire. Bare-bottomed mules
moil for brimstone, too cavernous
to keep in olives and bread. Boom
then bust! She’s in your face
full-bodied, we climb her slopes
over-equipped and photograph
our risk-take. She’s public space;
the slip-side of a rock-fall and women
who smoulder.

On the following page, ‘Pit Canary’, amplifies the doomed existence of the wedded woman within a coal mining world. An astute mix of verbs and intentional alliteration hit home the dire financial struggle and the derogatory servitude to the royalty masters of the coal industry:

… The family kitty rests
on black lung for its bread ‘n’ butter,
her milk spelunking into the quietude
on half his pay. Try erasing slag
from a silk pocket; a winched wench
on your conscience.

Along with ‘wench’, throughout the collection there are deliberate sprinkles of words hoisted onto women, which are reclaimed or repurposed. Some words are:

‘Gold Digger’
‘bonnie lass’
‘a wifebeater’
‘slattern’
‘a bun in the oven’
‘Barmaid’

Attention to language is furthered with the braiding of Italian and/or Sicilian dialect in a number of poems. The bilingual intervocality provides for rounded, authentic studies of women as in ‘Pay Packet’. The working Italian woman tucks the hard-earned pay into her bra pocket, does her shopping for ‘mangia meat / cheap cuts’, has a ‘smoko’ with a cup of ‘Nescafé’, watches her ‘daytime soap’, and guards ‘her still small waist’ by stating, you can look, but you can’t touch ‘guarda, ma non toccarmi’.

The voice of working women are further exemplified within the immersive and polyvocal, ‘Hello Girls!’. In this two-page poem, the rhythmic interplay between the phone operators’ scripted text and their actual working conditions creates a striking theatrical reportage:

…
       I’m afraid he’s not …
the customer’s always
        my fault.
       May I have your name, company and …
five lines lit
transition to next pink post-it
       Thank you, nevertheless …
there’s no time for politesse.
       Thanks for waiting. How can I direct your… ?
memorised extension
       He will return your call when he gets … ?
lines two and four are lit
       Thank you for waiting …
sell sanguine tone
       who can I … ?
before they hang up
and the bear turns bull
…

Another highlight of Collyer’s work is her own interrogation of her lived experience as a child-free woman, an Italian descendent and her working-class upbringing. These insights are vivid and stark in ‘An Appendage’, ‘La Vera Pizza’, and ‘All-In’. In particular, ‘All-In’, mimics the poker game it describes by applying a rhythmic punch to each line, creating a complete portrait of desperate hope within the traditions of manhood and assigned family expectations:

…

A royal flush trumped but nothing
beat a full house. Uncle J. splashed
the pot, but D. bought home
the sliced white
even when the books were cooked
on the dog they bought
in five ways. Friday
was family night at the tracks:
a trifecta arch
of skinny canines—the façade
of our wog mansion
or little men riding high
at the trots, where we dreamt
of tying the knot
in a carriage one day
to boys with workmen shoulders.

Gold Digger is a fulsome collection of triumphant poems. Showcasing a cohesive throughline dedicated to unravelling the social, economic and psychological injustices women have endured and inherited. Biographical and autobiographical poems are interspersed throughout and create a powerful commentary of how the past is on repeat. The diverse array of forms deployed, including prosepoems and strikethrough/erasure poems, create a multi-layered way of highlighting mistreatment and abuse within failing work systems.

And Gazebo Books has delivered yet another enticing artistic cover as the collection is enclosed within the arresting visual art of Phil Day. The art is titled ‘Fix’. It seems like a gold spike is nailed into a pink wood/pole; an image which is in perfect alignment with Collyer’s penetrating portrayals and piercing juxtapositions.

NOTES
1. including The Book of the Dead, West Virginia University Press, 2018 and The Speed of Darkness, Random,
1968
2. BBC article, ‘You can’t grasp her or replicate her’: Why Anna Magnani is the overlooked ‘goddess’ of Italian
cinema, by Anna Bressanin, 1 October 2025

ANGELA COSTI is a poet who has also been commissioned to write plays and to work on polyvocal multi-disciplinary projects. Her recent poetry collection is The Heart of the Advocate (Liquid Amber Press, 2025). She reviews poetry for a number of journals, including Rochford Street Review, Cordite Poetry Review and Compulsive Reader.

Lieu Chi Nguyen

Written by mascara on June 16, 2026. Posted in Poetry.

Lieu Chi Nguyen is a Vietnamese Australian emerging writer and scholar residing on Yirrganydji Country. She has been a member of Sweatshop Literacy Movement since 2017. Her short fiction and non-fiction have been published in SBS Voices, Kill Your Darlings and various anthologies, namely This Little Red Thing (Sweatshop 2019), Sweatshop Women (Sweatshop 2019 and 2020), Heroines: An Anthology of Short Fiction and Poetry: Volume 3 (Neo Perennial Press 2020) and Love (Sweatshop 2025). She was shortlisted for the RUSSH Magazine Literary Showcase 2026 and the 2020 Heroines Women’s Writing Prize.
She is a Media and Communications Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) candidate at the University of New England.

All the Houses I’ve Lived In (National Police Check)

Zero to Eighteen
Out of the incubator box,
I cradled to another (box),
one of many inside
a red-brick slab.
Sometimes the power was out, and
roach eggs smelt like
dried man sweat.

College
Fledgling adult, I Country-linked,
one way ticket,
to a room,
in a hollow cube,
as if constructed
with Minecraft.
Central, a grassy square,
mud-stuck with Passion Pop.
In July there was a mechanical bull.

College 2
The Village smelled like
tiệm thuốc bắc,
Laoganma chilli oil,
burned-out radiator heater,
damp socks.
Bros hung shit on me for everything
but they took me out for fried chicken.

Nursing Quarters
Before I moved out,
I looked inside the microwave and saw
stalactites of Lean Cuisine (et al.)
so old,
they had spiral perms.

Uni Rental
The boys screamed about milk,
left on the kitchen counter.
Us girls waited outside in the sun.
I wasn’t scared though –
I was tough back then.

Granny Flat
My landlord, ex copper,
got post-traumatic stress,
so, she fashioned a menagerie
of 7 dogs and 3 cats.
The chihuahua never learned to sit
and peed on my bathmat.

Metro House
Living with friends was fun,
But my dog couldn’t come inside.
So, I’d pat him on the back deck,
overlooking the neighbours’ garden,
a memorial to old Macedonia.

Real Estate 1
The real estate agent was too lazy
to fight me about
the bathroom mould,
that had always been there.
So, I got my bond back
quick smart.

Tropical Unit
Number 5 tenant told me
Number 3 tenant
smoked too much hydro
and didn’t come out much
anymore.

Real Estate 2
Hardcourts, the slimy cunts,
took us to QCAT
for 4 weeks’ rent and a lawn mow.
They left with half of that;
we left vindicated.

Tropical House (Settling)
On the website, the rental
looked like a Balinese retreat.
But in person,
it was a dodgy home job.
We took it anyway.

Can you see why I hate
security clearances?

Zoleikha Baluch

Written by mascara on June 4, 2026. Posted in Fiction.

Zoleikha Baloch is a Baloch writer based in Iran. She writes fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction centered on women’s lives, memory, and resilience in Balochistan. Her work has appeared in seven international literary journals, including Solarpunk Magazine, Sky Island Journal, Chestnut Review, and belladonna’s garden. Through her writing, she seeks to bring Baloch voices and stories into a wider literary conversation.

Insistence

Autumn arrived without announcement.

In Nikshahr, the Makran wind did not ask permission. It slipped through doorframes, settled beneath fingernails, gathered at the corners of mouths. Touba tasted it before she saw it—metal, clay, something older than both.

In Qasr-e-Qand, the date palms let go all at once.
Leaves dropped straight down, striking the yard flat. Under sandals, they cracked. No one bent to gather them.

One leaf dragged along the packed earth, its edges singed from weeks of sun. The wind lifted it once, twice—not enough to carry it away.

Touba picked it up.

Inside the house:
“Where is she?”
“Outside,” Golpari said, hands deep in indigo cloth.
“What is she doing?”
A pause.
“Nothing.”

Mirrors stitched into the fabric scattered light across the wall.
“Wash your hands,” Golpari said. “Ghafour is irritated.”
“Why?”
A thread snapped between her teeth.
“Men do not need reasons.”

At the basin, water ran warm from the pipes. Dust softened into mud beneath Touba’s fingers. The towel came away brown. She set the leaf beside the sink.

Her notebook lay beneath the mattress—once discovered already.
That afternoon, Ghafour had turned the pages slowly, stopping where her handwriting pressed hardest.

“Who will marry a girl,” he said,
“Who writes about her own house?”

He had not taken the notebook.
He had closed it.

Touba opened to a blank page. The leaf left a faint imprint.

“Mama.”
Golpari’s hands stilled.
“Did you ever want to leave?”
The needle resumed its small, controlled violence.

From the courtyard, a radio slipped in and out of signal. A child shouted, then quiet.

“Every woman leaves,” Golpari said. “Some never cross the gate.”
Touba wrote.
Not about leaves.

She wrote about Zeinab, promised before she understood what promise meant. Henna mixed too thick. Eucalyptus sharp in the throat. Women laughing too loudly. Zeinab holding her hands up for hours, waiting for the dark to settle.

She wrote about the first sign of womanhood—
and what followed:
sit differently
walk differently
lower your voice
do not be seen from the road
shrink.

I am told silence is protection,
she wrote.
Protection for whom.

A shadow filled the doorway.
“What are you doing?”
“Homework.”
“Let me see.”

The wind pressed against the roof. Tin shuddered.
He waited.

The page lay open between them.

From the courtyard, Golpari’s voice:
“She is studying.”

A long moment.
Then footsteps moving away.

Touba did not look up. The leaf shifted slightly on the paper. She pressed it flat and kept writing.

Outside, the call to prayer rose through the wind.
Inside, the mirrors scattered the last of the light.
The page held its mark.

Brenda Saunders

Written by mascara on May 28, 2026. Posted in Poetry, First Nations.

Brenda is a First Nations Wiradjuri writer and performer living in Katoomba. Her poetry and short fiction appear in edited anthologies and journals both on-line and in print, including Westerly, Australian Poetry, Live Encounters, Mascara,the Circular Anthology of Best Australian Prose Poems 2021, Best Australian Poems 2022. She performed her memoir, My Mob, as a Short Film, winning the Best Script Prize, London Short Film Festival in 2021.

Adaptation

1. Invincible
Sydney Harbour Large-footed Bat

Small as a finger, this bat has eagle claws
long enough to hold prey twice his size
Unique to the harbour, this creature hunts
in saltwater bays. At dusk, he hangs
unseen, under bridges, wharves, tunes
into echoes sounding across river
In the darkness he pin-points every ripple
each surface hum. Spreads curling toes
to scoop up minnows, prawns mid- flight
What defence has this tiny flyer against
oil slicks, heavy metals. Blinding light
from pleasure craft, the endless roll
of traffic on the bridge. City night life
closing in to confuse his sonic arc

2. Invisible
Booligal Glass Perchlet

See-through as cellophane she flits
an olive flash through shallows, ephemeral
as her wetland home along the river
Believed extinct, she hides in billabongs
run off from lakes, lost among cumbungi
Clearing the swamp of pests, she waits
for fresh water and a chance to spawn
For a flood to wash her young downstream
This native minnow has turned night-hunter
invisible to giant carp invading her pond
She survives dry times hiding under sand
struggles against locks, weirs changing
the river’s flow. Bright blue-green algae
silently smothering her water world

yellow hunger

high in the bloodwood tree
you lift honey bag
from a native hive
wary of the swarm

between the teeth
sugar cells crumble
against palate and tongue

lips smack
as you squeeze

pools of mottled gold
searing your throat
with heady sweetness

Paris Rosemont reviews The Drama Student by Autumn Royal

Written by mascara on May 27, 2026. Posted in Reviews/Essays.

The Drama Student

by Autumn Royal

Giramondo

ISBN 9781922725394

Reviewed by PARIS ROSEMONT

It is not often one encounters a poetry collection that stays so Desdemona-faithful to the thematic premise of its title. Autumn Royal’s The Drama Student (Giramondo, 2023) delivers. It opens with the poem ‘Causing a scene’, a prologue of sorts to the sections that follow, aptly punctuated into: ‘Scene One’, ‘Interlude’, ‘Scene Two’, and ‘Encore’. Each poem in this collection interacts with the notion of performance in various guises – whether on the stage, or behind the scenes. The narratives shift and morph like a kaleidoscopic hall of mirrors. We see only the selective fragments the poet has chosen to share, glimpsing a fractured world of intrigue and curiosities. The result is intimate and quirky, confusing, humorous, and at times confronting.

Theatrical references abound. From anecdotes about auditions (p1), dramatic method (p10), agents and roles (pp17-18), melodrama and searing acts (p21), casting (pp22-23), theatrical skills and dimly lit tragedies (p41), plotlines (p42), and authentic dialogue (p43), the list can—and does—go on. This sweeping theatrical epic culminates in a five-page opus titled ‘Soliloquy’ (pp59-63). The collection’s central theme is indelibly embedded into each poem. One of the great strengths of Royal’s writing lies in the multi-layered richness of concept and wordplay. Often, this is presented via metaphysical observations:

One must become perverse when adapting
to this genre. I’ve flattened myself to fit through
scripted doorways and babbled away
my dimensions. This leaves no suspense.
We’re dealing with pre-existing material
and I’ve forgotten who speaks next. I need a prompt –
(‘Raising a subject’ p5)

Royal holds the reader captivated by the performative confessional. Yet, it is not long before the reader develops an awareness of certain smokescreens—how we sit on the ‘audience’ side of the dividing line, and that the poet is toying with us with selective truths, unreliable narratives, plot twists, and deliberately planted red herrings: ‘such a buttery trick’ (‘Soliloquy’ p60). We are left questioning what is real and what is part of the act.

Reality, and the assumptions we make, are challenged. There is a visceral nature to this poetry. The body becomes a vehicle for acting, a vessel for emotions, and a vestibule for hurt and harm. Beauty standards are conversely seized and shed; the source of vanity, power and revulsion.

…the only option to show you
what I mean is to expose my midriff. … – stroking
my bloated abdomen and thinking about how you
wore singlets to bed to hide your tummy – we both
knew it existed … I will gorge – bare
my guts in actions you cannot disrupt while my
digestive tract is processing, and I am full of shit.
(‘Elegy / my affliction’ p38)

There is a curious interplay between the body, embodiment, and disembodiment. In ‘Form, like body, should never be assumed’ (p37), Royal writes:

…a nightie is a throat, deeply penetrated
if assuming that there is a throat
for the ground to tenderly stroke over–
as opposed to being lifted from
the ground, up past the feet,
supposing there are feet and a ground.

It is reminiscent of Carmen Maria Machado’s bizarrely disembodied characters in ‘Her Body and Other Parties’, oozing a surreal sensuality and eroticism. Later, the poet/actor asks herself:

After having my make-up prepared for filming – I often peer into the mirror and ask the shining surface if it is my insatiable greed which motivates me towards such youthful casting, or simply my wish to embody anyone but myself.
(‘Timeless Beauty’ pp22-23)

Here, as in many of Royal’s poems, acting becomes a form of masking – both physically and metaphorically – of stepping out of the flawed, damaged, or vulnerable parts of oneself, and choosing the armour of reinvention.

A thematic thread woven to great effect in The Drama Student is the warp and weft of costuming. Indeed, the first poem in the first ‘scene’ of this collection opens with: ‘It’s time to dress your body in this unrevised final draft’ (‘Raising a subject’ p5). There’s a dressing-gown cloaking shoulders and a nylon neck piece in ‘Acting in awe’ (pp12-13), ‘Form, like body, should never be assumed’ (p37) gives us a stained nightie, a shoulder strap, and rumours knotted like fabric, ‘On lucidity’ (p41) offers an entire top-loader full of dresses draped across a foldable clothes horse ‘skirting fragile textures’. ‘Nightgown slips’ (p45) examines: ‘silk submerge(d) in a silver tub of tepid water…agitation shaped by human touch’ and ‘the way language immeasurably clings even when whispered or delicately cut’. ‘Considered in relation to’ (p50) adds to the wardrobe more nighties (a prized nightie, at that) and:

…the fluid fall of the ruddy gown, so slept
in, so worn–with its low-scooped neckline, so low
and so scooped…

whilst introducing ‘the ultimate activewear basic, a must-have accessory in your workout wardrobe’. ‘Soliloquy’ (pp59-63) describes inhabiting a character’s backstory by ‘devot[ing] months to dressing in her clothes and wearing wigs in her exact hair colour and texture’. And ‘Materials list’ (pp26-27) gives us a profusion of fabric, mesh, pockets, a dress, and sleeves. The poet articulates her intent:

I want these words to thicken – to form a cloth case for the bolster
stuffed with denial. No adequate substitute
has ever been found for felt and this end line is fabrication.

The permeability of mesh makes a repeated cameo in this collection. From its initial appearance as ‘mesh patterns and a need to touch’ (‘Materials list’ p26), to ‘a mesh with many situated beginnings’ (‘On lucidity’ p41), right through to the closing image: ‘in full mesh I will gallop’ (‘Soliloquy’ p63), which also, in its layered meaning, gives the faithful stainless steel clothes horse first spotted in ‘On lucidity’ a reprisal.

The ‘Interlude’ is a dreamlike series of vignettes punctuating Scenes One and Two. Titled ‘Approaching a bedside table’ I, II, and III respectively, these palate cleansers are again reminiscent of Machado’s writing—in this instance, her memoir ‘In the Dream House’, where a series of micro-chapters each reframe the central relationship through a different voice and lens. So too does Royal’s bedside table get repositioned, repurposed, and reframed, each micro-scene shifting in cadence.

The final section, ‘Scene Two’, contains a multitude of intertextual pieces. This gathers force, amplifying with the closing soliloquy in ‘Encore’—a text-dense intertextual masterpiece leapfrogging between ideas and segueing from source references to responses then catapulting into rapid-fire word associations that sling one thought into the stream-of-conscious next:

Wistful music plays as a dentist reminds me to floss after he pulls out my prized tooth. I ask him if you can ever really wash away memories from your mouth? My grandfather’s teeth. I have smelt the horrid breath of lost lovers as I kiss them all good night – tasting a mouth giving over to another mouth as shallow pools form. A brick drops from the ceiling landing next to my feet – reminding me to remind myself that I am an idiot. This word means a lot to me. I have been called it many times. Me and my idiocy are very close. We finish each other’s sentences. I express this through screaming–and what is the point of screaming without receiving the appropriate level off attention? asks Panda Wong. I seek attention by cradling my chin with my hands – a form of preciseness of what I, myself am seeking. I told you – I warned you. I am an idiot.
‘Soliloquy’ (pp59-63)

Too often, when intertextual references are invoked, the source material is left to do much of the heavy lifting whilst sitting on the surface without being properly folded into the batter. Not so with Royal’s work. Whilst the cast list of the closing poem reads like a Who’s Who of great poets, writers, and thinkers, what is remarkable is that each quote is purposefully selected and seamlessly integrated into the fresh work, thus earning its place.

The Drama Student is an utter delight of a collection that razzle dazzles in all the right places. It is tactile, performative poetry that is felt, absorbed, and experienced on a multi-sensory level, where emotions enter tangible dimensions and may become something ‘I shawl over my knees’ (‘Catwalk’ p17). Ever the entertainer, Royal raises chuckles with the wry tone and breezy appeal of the bombastic, sardonic, and melodramatic (‘(Regarding) the pain of others’ pp42-43). However, beyond the craft and showmanship, we see softer glimmers – ‘the stains of violence our intimacy provokes’ (‘Leaf-shadow’ p44). It is this breadth and versatility of character and role that is compelling. As the curtains close, are we really any closer to knowing who this enigmatic poet-actress is? She has left us suspended in our suspense. Cue applause.

PARIS ROSEMONT is a multi-award-winning Thai Australian poet, performer, educator, and author of Banana Girl (2023) and Barefoot Poetess (2025). Her books have received awards and accolades in Australia, Greece, UK and USA. Paris’s poetry has been published in a plethora of literary journals and anthologies including Australian Poetry Journal, FemAsia Magazine, Rabbit, Splinter, and Verge. She was the winner of the Matthew Rocca Poetry Prize 2025 (Verandah Literary Journal; an initiative of Deakin University), First Prize in the Hammond House Publishing Origins Poetry Prize 2023 (UK), received a Best of the Net 2025 nomination from Sky Island Journal, and was awarded Honourable Mention in the Fish Poetry Prize 2025 (Top 10 in the world, as selected by judge Billy Collins). She has judged for the Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards 2025 and Sydney Fringe Festival 2024. Paris is a member of the Randwick City Council Arts & Cultural Advisory Committee, Guest Editor for Written Off Literary Journal, and sits on the Hunter Writers’ Centre Board. She may be found at www.parisrosemont.com

Angela Costi

Written by mascara on May 14, 2026. Posted in Poetry.

Angela Costi’s poetry collections include Honey & Salt, An Embroidery of Old Maps and New, and The Heart of the Advocate. Her chapbook, Adversarial Practice, published by Cordite was commended in the Wesley Michel Wright Prize 2024. She won the University of Canberra’s Health Poetry Prize 2024 and the Katherine Sussanah Prichard (KSP) Poetry Prize 2022. She is currently working on a poetry collection titled A Body of Rocks, which unravels genetic medical conditions and their intersections with inherited ancestral trauma.

I Don’t Want to Step on Anyone’s Ancestral Toes But

a genetic impasse
T my nonbinary eighteen-year-old
shows their Ancestry.com report
They welcome my body’s people
48% from Cyprus

I wasn’t even born there
yet 96% of me is engulfed
by a small bisected tired concubine of empires forced to lie
between Turks and Greeks to snap into exotic dance
for the British and American colonels

I am the first generation to be settled
to read in English an official report by the District General
of the state of Cyprus but my body is fired by dialect
by women with full-term wombs running from
military borders they hide in the caves to birth

Somehow I poured Cyprus
into T’s long fingers red hair voice made for singing The Long and Winding Road
Next I’ve given T 2% refugee and military camps
of the Levant states 2% Arabian Peninsula
the greats and grands who survived with olives raining like bullets

The DNA Report splits T further
like a shopping list of food for the freezer
Norway Germanic Europe Scotland England
We count 9 tribes pillaging squandering settling
from their father’s DNA

Not happy with the English in me T says
as we sit on a Queen size bed
live in a street named Queen
in the State of Victoria
study Year 12 Drama ensconced in Elizabethan etiquette

England & Northwestern Europe share a mere 5% of their code
Sweden & Denmark dictate an entire 16%
still they worry about those with smaller numbers
will they go warring for the better
parts in West Side Story

what percent wants the lead role
who is content to be in the ensemble
who doesn’t care whether they dress
as man or woman for any character
I don’t care says T’s father but my 1% Italian might

Margaret Bradstock reviews Thistle by Kate Maxwell

Written by mascara on May 14, 2026. Posted in Reviews/Essays.

Thistle

by Kate Maxwell

ISBN 9781764106870

Recent Works Press

Reviewed by MARGARET BRADSTOCK

Thistle, Kate Maxwell’s third poetry collection, is a book depicting the trajectory of a life, choosing, as its approach, a dipping in and out of time. The collection is dedicated to the poet’s dead mother, whose late-onset dementia is movingly recalled in the elegiac “The Forest and the Trees”:

     When she’s finally gone
                   not like this
                   not this
                   slow scrape of self
     pieces of the past
                                 falling
     like potato peelings
around her slippered feet

…………………………

     ever searching, ever trying
     to recall the question
                     she can’t answer
(pp. 7-8)

This poem is echoed in “Into the Forest” in the final section of the book:

     If you ever want to find my mother
Follow the tissues:
those crumpled,
                   hardly damp, thin cotton clouds
     held to twitching lips,

………………………………….

     Like an ancient Gretel,
she’s still leaving trails,
                   flagging out her one-way journey
                   into deeper woodlands
(p.100)

and has its conclusion in the evocative “Believe”:
     I used to believe in clouds
     until the roar of a Boeing 737
     dissolved my Kinder innocence,
     back when I’d paint stick-figure
     me and stick-figure you
     floating in a bright blue sky.
     Yet, while reason reminds
     there is nothing above
nothing to hold in the heavens,
     I believe – like ice crystals
     suspended in the atmosphere –
     you too, are somewhere
(pp.102-3)

“The Forest and the Trees”, and “Kaleidoscope”, both appearing in the opening section of the collection, serve to trigger childhood memories, beginning with “Beyond” – the poet’s recollections of a small country town and her yearning for the extraterrestrial:

I would lie: palms cradling neck,
listening to chirp and croak,

                        drinking in jewelled black,
brighter than neon, higher than the highest
                        high-rise, more distant than a million strangers.
(p.4)

The book’s title, Thistle, and the back-cover statement “Life doesn’t always bloom the way you expect. Sometimes it prickles,” suggest that a number of the poems will deal with life’s disappointments and irritations. These poems, many of which appear in the second section, are a delight – humorous, perspicacious and cutting-edge, providing social comment. In “Waiting in the Queue” Maxwell presents us with the graceless male ahead of her, who

                   flicks his card
  over the machine
  without a word
to the smiling waitress
               or busy barista

then clutching coffee
almost collides into a pram

as he wades through
humans in his way.
(pp.48-9)

In “Colossus” she takes aim at those unnamed “who could hope to govern the globe”, as:

A set of opposable thumbs does not grant me dominion.

Primates, possums, birds – even some frogs
could hold cutlery, if so inclined.

…………………………………………………..

yet still we wail at the height of the moon.

How dare it be higher or brighter than us!
the billionaires cry, punching holes into space
just to show the damn universe who’s the real boss.
(pp. 57-58)

“Basking” is another such poem, where the unnamed protagonist is immediately and amusingly identifiable:

The mogul’s getting hitched again
at ninety-three. He can’t seem to make one last
past his plans for an afternoon nap
and world domination.

…………………………

         an empire so layered
         in flashy fabrications
that he cannot place
where he left his last wife
                      or whether he had one at all.

…………………………..

Each crevice sprawled across his chin
a final line in the sand
for each bride
who wasn’t what he ordered.
(pp.62-3)

The third and final section of Kate Maxwell’s book, including the already discussed “Into the Forest” and “Believe”, encapsulates a time of looking back and reflection. The beautiful opening poem, “I Cannot Build a Shelter”, engenders a sense of determination to make the best of a flawed and often disappointing world:

from hollow sticks in the grass
snapped with cold fingers broken
with boot crunched by the claws
of brush turkey feet hurled skyward

in storm and too damp to burn
             too fickle too thin to build shield
                           from the wind that might thatch
                                         a tense weave against chill of the night.
(p.77)

But I will build shelter within these small
words a home for my yearning layered
in script sealed in dry ink patched
with hubris and hope wrapping heart

with the wishes of how it could be
(p.78)

However, humour is not lacking in this deeper, more introspective section, and there is still room for irony and wit at the expense of some of the challenges of modern living. Proof of identity, or even of being human, is one of the more annoying of these, as in the poem “Prove Humanity”:

Check a box
to prove you’re not a box
of whirring parts
wired circuits or stuff
you just don’t understand
then when the box

learns to recognise
our patterns, ways

………………….

then they’ll have to
set the sentient
new challenges −
(p.82)

Subject matter of the poems in Thistle ranges through personal, political and environmental to keenly observational, and Maxwell is not afraid to reveal heartfelt emotion, or satirise some of the absurdities of the human condition. Experimentation with poetic form and astute wordplay add to the mix, ensuring a multi-faceted perspective. Readers will find much to enjoy in this collection, the more poignant poems continuing to reverberate long after a first reading.

MARGARET BRADSTOCK is a Sydney poet, critic and editor, lectured at UNSW for 25 years, has been Asialink Writer-in-residence at Beijing University, co-editor of Five Bells for Poets Union, and on the Board of Directors for Australian Poetry. Poetry collections include The Pomelo Tree (winner of the Wesley Michel Wright Prize) and Barnacle Rock (winner of the Woollahra Festival Award, 2014). Editor of Antipodes, the first Australian anthology of Aboriginal and white responses to “settlement” (2011) and Caring for Country (2017), Margaret won the Banjo Paterson Poetry Award in 2014, 2015 and 2017. Alchemy of the Sun (Puncher & Wattmann, 2024) is her ninth collection.

Duc Dau

Written by mascara on May 14, 2026. Posted in Poetry.

Duc Dau is an award-winning author, scholar, and emerging poet from Boorloo (Perth). She is the most recent recipient of the Jan Dean Members Prize of the Newcastle Poetry Prize as well as the Annette Cameron Award for an unpublished poet in Western Australia. “The Sign” was shortlisted/commended in the 2025 Tom Collins Poetry Prize. An Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Humanities at the University of Western Australia, her latest academic book is Sex, Celibacy, and Deviance: The Victorians and the Song of Songs (Ohio State University Press, 2024). She also works in the research and evaluation team of an Aboriginal community-controlled organisation.

The sign

The holiday prematurely ended
sex toys still in our luggage

heading home along a slope of road
and a yellow sign says “soft shoulders”

outside us the rain turning to hail
hitting the gravel with exclamation marks

we stop
—waiting for the thundering to pass

you in the car beside me, shoulders stiff-
ening like weathervanes against the wind

our breathing fogging up the windows
blinding us. I run a hand across the passenger pane

look out at the bush, newly backburned
—blackened, its naked stumps becoming

jumbled limbs miming
precautionary signs on the way home.

Sreepurna Datta reviews Gather Up Your World In One Long Breath by S. Shakthidharan

Written by mascara on May 13, 2026. Posted in Reviews/Essays.

Gather Up Your World in One Long Breath

by S. Shakthidharan

Powerhouse

ISBN: 9780645530964

Reviewed by SREEPURNA DATTA

Gather Up Your World in One Long Breath is a sincere attempt to deliver what its title promises. “Tell me all the stories from your life, from the beginning to the end,” asks the author’s son in the opening section of S. Shakthidharan’s memoir. The following chapters provide a range of moving and unique stories from the author’s life. Shakthi’s play Counting and Cracking – which won the Victorian Prize for Literature, the Nick Enright Prize for Playwriting, and several other awards – was also based on the playwright’s personal history. Gather Up Your World in One Long Breath not only fleshes out this history further but also explores how it shapes the author’s present.

In a radio interview, Shakthi explains his approach towards telling the “stories from [his] life” through this memoir. Surrounded by his family on a busy morning of his life, he found himself wondering “why the hell [he] was feeling such joy in a time of madness and difficulty” (Knight). Here, Shakthi follows up by providing a brief answer: “It was because…this was the first time that I had been inside a family.” The memoir gears up to explore both how the author found his family, as well as what broke his family apart in the first place.

Gather Up Your World in One Long Breath is thus, at one level, quite a personal endeavour. The book is structured as a series of second-person narratives. Each section is addressed to one of the most important people in the author’s life, including his parents and his partner. Quickly and spontaneously, however, the personal expands into a lens to the broader histories that shape the author’s life. This is conveyed to the reader in advance through the eye-catching paratext. The book design and endpaper illustrations are credited to Tamil artists – from both India and Sri Lanka. The sections of the book are divided with pulli kolam – dotted geometrical patterns traditionally painted on the floor, especially doorways, for prosperity. The endpaper artwork includes oceanic motifs, further drawing attention to the author’s diasporic background. The memoir is crucially shaped by this transoceanic history, and the focus on family is refracted into a broader sense of belonging in terms of culture and nation.

The memoir’s central character is, by definition, the author, but Shakthi’s narrative partly subverts this formal requirement by centering a physical object: the author’s uniquely mobile family home. In a chapter addressed to the house itself, we find the chronological beginning of the story: Shakthi’s great grandparents were of Tamil ethnicity, living in Sri Lanka in the mid twentieth century. This was the period over which the teardrop-shaped island gained independence from British colonisation and gradually became the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka. Shakthi’s family was directly part of this political history: his great-grandfather was Chellapah Suntharalingam, who was the Minister of Trade and Commerce in Sri Lanka for a year, and a member of the parliament for more than a decade. Shakthi was born into a large family living in a single house and integrally linked to the heterogenous community around it. However, anti-Tamil riots in the 1980s eventually led to the scattering of this family and community to different lands. Shakthi’s most immediate family moved to Australia, where his grandmother rebuilt her Sri Lankan house – literally having parts of the house shipped across oceans and then put back together. Shakthi writes: “Each day, you still face the rising sun and feel it set behind you. But where you used to absorb a South Asian monsoon, you now sweat out a Sydney summer” (44-5). Every individual addressed in this memoir has been – in one way or another – linked to this house which Shakthi grew up in, returned to as an adult, and still resides in.

Home is a recurrent preoccupation – perhaps the central one – in diasporic narratives. Protagonists in these stories leave their homes and seek to make new ones in foreign soil. The process is never smooth. In Shakthi’s memoir, the image of the house being broken into pieces and put back together acts as a representation of the figurative journey of the author seeking to make a new home. The memoir underlines that while it might seem like the house “evaporated into the Sri Lankan sky and fell back down as a Sydney shower,” in reality it went through a painful fracture (39). The reassembled version of the house only partly resembles the original, and the author’s connection to the house is now far more troubling and even at times oppressive: “You are our only connection to who we once were. And you will not let me go” (53). The author’s connection to family and community undergoes to same process. Poet and playwright Derek Walcott, describing the performance of Indian epics by village actors in the Antilles, wrote: “Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole… Antillean art is this restoration of our shattered histories, our shards of vocabulary, our archipelago becoming a synonym for pieces broken off from the original continent.” In Shakthi’s memoir the house – and in parallel, the family – resembles this vase and the archipelago, representing a love that is stronger because it reassembles the fragmented.

The image of the archipelago has further resonance. Postcolonial and decolonial scholars have championed “archipelagic thought” (in the Western world, proposed by Édouard Glissant), a philosophy of thinking of the world as an archipelago, a rhizomatic concept without centres – or mainlands – and peripheries. Gather Up Your World in One Long Breath presents the world in this rhizomatic sense. For instance, the memoir does not exceptionalise Australia but portrays it as one in a series of islands, including Sri Lanka and Malta, where Shakthi’s partner hails from, that make up the story of Shakthi’s family. Soon after moving to Australia, Shakthi’s parents were divorced, after which he grew up primarily with his mother, Anandavalli, a Bharatnatyam dancer by profession. With retrospective knowledge and understanding, Shakthi imagines his mother’s initial fear of losing his son to Australia: “In Sri Lanka we had a community…Here, I am alone. And I am terrified I am going to lose you, too” (104-5; italics in original). However, gradually developing a more symbiotic relationship with the land, Anandavalli contributed to building a diverse community of artists in 1990s Sydney with the help of “Aboriginal men and European women” (78-9). The point is crystallised in Shakthi’s description of this community-building: “What a way to become Australian! To belong! Not by limiting yourself, but by expanding the collective sense of what we might all become, what our country might one day be” (79). To become Australian is to join its identity to other islands, to make it part of the archipelago. The author’s own career reflects the same: Shakthi is the founder of an arts company, whichais focused on “fostering… relationships between [South Asian] communities and Australia’s major creative institutions” (Kurinji).

A rhizomatic imaginary also pervades the author’s descriptions of family and home. The section addressed to the author’s father describes him as someone who, after leading a strikingly lonely life after his divorce and estrangement from his family, finds “strange and unexpected” community in the final years of his life (232). Here, the concept of family not only expands beyond blood relations but also challenges the established hierarchies in father-son relationships. In the middle section of the book addressed to the author’s partner, the couple have a conversation that extends the idea of expansion to the central image of the home. When his partner asks Shakthi to consider that she does not necessarily want to live in Shakthi’s family home her whole life, it leads the couple to rethink their ideas of home, to include something that “expands” rather than being fixed in a certain physical location (198). This is how the memoir connects nation, family, and home: all three must be reassembled by “expanding the collective sense of what we might all become.” Perhaps the joy that the author finds is born’Here, out of this openness towards expansion at different levels of his world.

While South Asian diasporic narratives are not quite front-and-centre in Australian literature today, Shakthi’s memoir – and his playwriting oeuvre – joins a gradually emerging set of South Asian voices in a variety of genres. When Shankari Chandran (who is also of Sri Lankan Tamil origin) won the 2023 Miles Franklin Literary Award, the novelist commented that her win “reflects the change that is happening in Australian literature, and that has been happening for many years now in terms of what the curators of culture and publishers are allowing through to be published” (Manley). Gather Up Your World in One Long Breath – the first literary publication of Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum – is an exciting reminder of this richly diverse future towards which Australian literary culture can potentially be headed. The memoir is a promising step towards the shaping of Australian literature as a restoration of shattered pieces, of a neighbourhood of houses carried over from other islands across the archipelago-world.

WORKS CITED

“Kurinji.” Kurinji, kurinji.com.au.

Glissant, Édouard. Introduction to a Poetics of Diversity. Translated by Celia Britton, Liverpool University Press, 2020.

Knight, Dom. “Sri Lanka to Sydney Brick by Brick: S Shakthidharan.” ABC Listen, 19 Sept. 2025, www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/sydney-saturdaybreakfast/shakthi/105797384.

Manley, Janet. “Miles Franklin Winner Shankari Chandran on Defining Australianness.” Literary Hub, 28 Aug. 2023, lithub.com/miles-franklin-winner-shankari-chandran-on-defining-australianness.

Walcott, Derek. “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory.” 7 Dec. 1992, www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1992/walcott/lecture.

SREEPURNA DATTA (she/her) is a PhD candidate at the University of Tasmania and currently based in Hobart. Her research examines the emergence of South Asian diasporic romance novels in contemporary book culture, with a focus on the ideological and material transactions that contribute to the transnationality of the popular romance genre.

Isabel Howard reviews Cannon by Lee Lai

Written by mascara on May 12, 2026. Posted in Reviews/Essays.

Cannon

Lee Lai

Giramondo

ISBN 9781923106406

Reviewed by ISABEL HOWARD

The first thing I noticed when I received Lee Lai’s Cannon, slipping it out of its envelope in my quiet living room, was how heavy it was. A large, squarish slab, I imagined it could cause some serious damage if it landed on my toes. Or squish a large cockroach, if I had nothing else at hand.

Sitting on the couch, I was around twenty pages in when I noticed something strange. There was a weight resting in my body, not unlike the book itself: dense, ungainly, with hard edges that feel awkward in a human hand. It made me want to curve my body inward, or hold my breath, like I was preparing myself for some kind of onslaught. So, I closed the book. I got up and did things I’m supposed to do. Empty the dishwasher. Fold the laundry. As I moved around, the feeling shrank. But it didn’t disappear.

The life of the titular character, Cannon (known by her family as Lucy) is the focus of Lai’s graphic novel. In the very first scene, before we even reach the title page, she stands in a restaurant, surrounded by broken furniture, shattered crockery and spilled condiments. She’s struck with panic as she takes in the scene, but before abandoning it, she smashes one last plate.

Rewinding to three months earlier, the novel starts again with a portrait of Cannon’s day-to-day. She’s a Chinese-Canadian, queer young woman who takes care of her ageing gung-gung (grandfather) and works as a chef. She watches horror films with her best friend, Trish, and she runs regularly to a podcast that tells her to ‘release tension’ and ‘breathe’. Her peers refer to her as ‘stoic’ and ‘reliable,’ and her expressions are flat and devoid of emotion, but as the story progresses, we learn that Cannon’s calmness is on a precipice. Magpies gather around her, which no one else can see. Her work goes unappreciated, her hurts go unacknowledged, and she begins having panic attacks as her composure falls away. When her friendship with Trish is about to breakdown and her boss makes a pass at her, she cannot take anymore. Her anger overflows, and she trashes the restaurant in a violent episode where the pages are flooded with red. Afterwards, she slowly begins to rebuild, having learned what pushed her over the edge.

Lai’s graphic novel is preoccupied with responsibility and rage. Until Cannon’s breakdown, her efforts to be dutiful and unflappable are relentless. She cleans for her gung-gung while her mother ignores her texts. She cooks for Trish, who secretly uses Cannon for creative inspiration. She tries to keep the peace at work while avoiding her lecherous boss, and when her co-worker describes Cannon’s care for her gung-gung as ‘wholesome’, Cannon responds with ‘I just have to do it’. Despite the clear frustration in Cannon’s silences and facial expressions, she acts sensibly and responsibly, refusing to acknowledge pain, accept praise, or ask for help, even when her feet begin blistering, and her doctor asks, ‘my goodness, what have you been doing to yourself?’ But acting in accordance with what other people want and stymieing her own feelings are what build her anger to the point of violence. Trish pinpoints this right before Cannon breaks down in the restaurant:

‘It’s not my problem that you’ve sidelined all of your twenties to deal with other people’s shit. There’s no virtue in being so solitary and self-effacing and resentful, you know.’

Cannon asks questions about how we fulfil our obligations to our family and friends, how we address our own wellbeing, and whether we must sacrifice either. These questions are likely to show up in every life, but their significance in Cannon’s echoes what some describe as ‘the eldest daughter’ experience, where daughters, particularly those in Asian families, feel pressure to take on caretaking and emotional responsibilities from a young age (Chau, Vadakumchery).

Upon reaching Trish’s words above, I realised these questions were also, in fact, the source of my own discomfort. Having grown up in an Asian immigrant family, these pressures are disturbingly familiar: should I prioritise my personal needs, or the needs of my loved ones? Should I express my own hurt, even if it risks destroying a relationship? Lai does not delve into an examination of how gender, race or sexuality may factor into these questions, but the uneasiness I felt shows just how effectively she brings them to life.

Riding the wave of her anger, a slightly different Cannon emerges after the trashing of the restaurant. She tells Trish to delete the writing about her, breaks off a confusing relationship with her co-worker, and insists on a response from her mother. After over two-hundred pages of compliance, her confrontations are satisfying to watch, and in response, her friends and loved ones shift toward her rather than away: several coworkers cover up her wrecking of the restaurant, her mother starts engaging with her gung-gung, and Trish takes care of Cannon’s meals. This shift paints anger as a tool for catharsis and communicating one’s needs, rather than one for inflicting damage, or cutting people and responsibilities ‘out’. Even Trish’s response to hearing about the magpies, which have always appeared when Cannon feels overwhelmed, reiterates the idea of rage as helpful: ‘They’re probably just looking out for you.’

In a final scene, Cannon receives the news that her gung-gung has died in hospital. At this point, I wondered if his death would be framed as some kind of ‘freedom’ for Cannon: his care is potentially the most onerous of her responsibilities, which are already in quick decline. However, after hanging up the phone, she sits alone and cries, surrounded again by magpies. At the end of a novel that largely presents Cannon’s efforts as challenging and unappreciated, her grief complicates the idea that care becomes a burden when it is unreciprocated.

I have not read many graphic novels, but Lai’s skill with the form is obvious even to me. The writing is almost exclusively dialogue, and her illustrations are deceptively simple: black and white, with minimal shading on soft, curved faces and bodies. Wordless panels, both close-up and wide, evoke lonely silence and unease, while moments of fury are punctuated with swathes of red. Throughout, Lai skilfully shows how Cannon’s relationships transform, often via conversations that feel innocuous until the characters’ expressions and quiet reactions are revealed. Additionally, Cannon’s racial and queer identity is acknowledged on the page without interrogation, making for a sincere, refreshing representation of realities we often do not see in fiction.

Rather than an escape, Cannon is a painfully and earnestly realistic graphic novel. It explores Cannon’s struggles with her commitments, her restrained anger, her fraying friendships, and ageing family, and her emotions are so vivid that I could feel her anxiety spiralling across each panel. It centres Cannon’s perspective as a queer, second-generation Chinese woman with a level of honesty that feels rare, but every experience and character is so fleshed out that the novel’s strength becomes its ability to show life’s tenderness and cruelty, and the mundane parts in-between. For that reason, I think there is much more that could be said about Cannon besides the things that struck me hardest. But now that I know what Lai’s capable of, I look forward to reading her past work, and anything she releases in the future.

References

Chau, Shannon. ‘The curse of the (eldest) Asian daughter.’ The Oxford Student, 20 January 2024. www.oxfordstudent.com/2024/01/20/the-curse-of-the-eldest-asian-daughter.
Vadakumchery, Tracy. ‘Is It Eldest Daughter Syndrome, Or Is It Something Else?’ The Bad Indian Therapist, 29 October 2025. thebadindiantherapist.com/indian-therapist-blog/south-asian-eldest-daughter-syndrome.

ISABEL HOWARD is a Filipino Australian writer based in Nipaluna / Hobart. Her work has previously been published by Mascara Literary Review, Contemporary Art Tasmania’s Journal, kindling & sage, and more. Having completed her Honours in creative writing at the University of Tasmania, she is currently working towards completing a young adult fiction novel.

Terry Widders reviews Peter of Dhirri-aay-aay by Polly Cutmore and David Paull

Written by mascara on May 6, 2026. Posted in Reviews/Essays, First Nations.

Peter of Dhirri-aay-aay

by Polly Cutmore and David Paull

Mehi Books

Reviewed by Terry Widders

Peter of Dhirri-aay-aay by Polly Cutmore and David Paull, presents a broad history of the (Indigenous) Gamilraay people, pre-colonial to the present, of a region in north-west NSW (cf. general map on p.55). While the account has an often fulsome mix of oral and documentary sources, it’s in order that ‘the words of those who witnessed the events (…) provide the reader with insight into the people who made that history’ (p.5). In my reading, its purpose is to be a history of ‘truth telling (in order to) promote recognition and acceptance of past wrongs (and) not to point blame for the past’ (p.147).

The book’s contents contain a foreword, which presents a forthright “summary” of the book, nine (9) chapters, an epilogue, four appendices and end notes combining source references and a bibliography. In this review, I group the book’s nine chapters into two themes, and provide commentary. Firstly is the theme of Country, Contact and Colonisation (chps. 1-6) for which the general map (p.55) is quite a useful, complementary reference.

In exploring Country, Peter of Dhirri-aay-aay (Chp. 1) describes an ancestral homeland of the Gamilraay nation, its pre-contact geography, economy, social and language structures, as well as material culture (e.g; tools) and archaeological sites. This was home to a large, mature ‘traditional’ society of some 5,000 people, circa 1830.

An ‘historical thread’, Peter (Cutmore 1) is linked to Dhirri-aay-aay, the ‘traditional’ place, and later ‘woven’ into a more complete, historical person through the book’s second theme. A photograph of “old” Peter can be found on p.7.

Notable aspects of the invasion and contact history of Country are the Bigge Report: 1822-’23, War, Gold Rushes and Land Reforms. The Bigge Report, a British parliamentary ‘initiative’, recommended the replacement of the penal colony of NSW by a ‘free’ colony of pastoral landholders and workers. This unleashed a widespread ‘land grab’ after 1823, particularly on the western side of the dividing range, by existing, and potential, landholding interests. The other aspect, that of a ‘free’ colony, was left for later, historical clarification.

Contact history (War) is recorded in chapters. 2-4, and Colonisation in chps. 5,6. This well-documented time span of twenty 20 years (1831 – 1851) begins with early, “benign” (British) contact (a couple of explorers and the odd escaped convict) then a sudden, invasive rush of stockmen (on horses) with guns, sheep and cattle. An armed Gamilraay response ensued, followed by the 1838 massacres (of different, large Gamilraay groups). Intermittent, often sustained, Gamilraay “guerilla warfare” continued up to 1845, then ended.

War: “War” could only officially exist between two, or more, ‘sovereign’ entities. The Crown (colony) considered itself one, and the “natives” (Gamilraay) as subject to the laws of the Crown. ‘Ipso facto’, no war. If the ‘natives’ were ‘sovereign’, a different ‘war’ and ‘post-war’ relationship would exist.

Throughout the so-called ‘armed non-warfare’ period (c 1835 – 1845) official, colonial governance “concerns” were publicly expressed through letter writing and official documentation of “illegal actions”, as were religious/humanitarian protest (e.g; calls for “cease and desist” and/or “protectionist intercession”).

Peter, now a teenager, is presumed to have been among the survivors. He ‘pops up’ as a verifiable, historical adult later in the book. However, two realities became established on this part of the ‘colonial frontier’ by the 1850’s. The ‘pastoral dispossession’ of Gamilraay land became officially authorised: ‘land grabs’ were measured – as acreage – certified and taxed, while the surviving Gamilraay, ‘guess-timated’ at 1,000 or so persons, were officially recognised as being in need of protection!

From 1851 two major goldfields in Victoria, in Ballarat and Bendigo and, by 1867, several ‘secondary’ ones along the eastern side of NSW to Gympie, Queensland had attracted ‘tens of 1,000’s’ of (mainly) men into S-E Australia; an ‘immigration tsunami’! This initially created ‘consumer bases’ on the goldfields then, after the ‘rush(es)’, they merged with town/city populations to create and/or expand their ‘consumer bases’. ‘Urban’ based colonies began developing, though their ‘free’ nature was yet to develop.

‘Mini’, internal migrations of mainly men to these goldfields also happened, drawing labour away from existing pastoral and other workplaces. Consequently, it seems that from the 1850’s a particular trend appeared; Gamilraay labour – female and male – was becoming central to the now established pastoral stations, as paid and/or ‘paid in kind’ workers! Peter, who was now in his late 30’s was a valued general station worker, with particular skills as a ‘boundary rider’.

A second emerging theme which the authors explore in chapters 7 to 9 of Peter of Dhirr-aay-aay concerns ‘re-creation.’
The Gamilraay had barely begun adapting to their “worker niche” in the pastoral industry when three further “winds of change” – Land Reform II, (Aboriginal) Protection Policy and an act of Gamilraay “Self Determination” – propelled them to their current “historical position” of occupying a significant “citizen/worker” niche in the Moree township.

Land Reforms took place from 1861, with further reforms from 1884 – 1901, following the “land grab” phase as the NSW government responded to a rapidly growing need for agricultural produce such as grains, fruit and vegetables, and, an equally growing demand for a piece of the “land pie.” These involved land grants being made, from 40 acres to a maximum of 320 acres, on remaining “crown land” and/or land resumed from existing pastoral “grabs”. These grants had specific ownership conditions, such as fencing.

The three reform phases (1861, 1884 and 1901) were intended to expand the different acreage ‘selections’ proportionately across the east, central and western regions of the NSW colony, particularly so for families. The consequence for the Gamilraay (and other indigenous groupings) was that there became fewer ‘worker niches’ in the pastoral/agricultural industries.
Peter took on the surname of ‘Cutmore’, the same as that of a valued employer.

Aboriginal Protection Policy: 1880 – 1885 (and beyond)
By 1880 remaining Gamilraay “living places” (small, protected Crown land lots), the people and their living conditions became a ‘matter of concern’ for a small group of pastoralists, the ‘Association for the Protection of Aborigines’. The (colonial) state assumed this ‘concern’ in 1883 with the appointment of an official ‘Protector’, then an official, appointed Board in 1885, to create an ‘Aboriginal Protection Board’ (APB). The Gamilraay “living places” came under formal APB control in 1892.
With place (‘reserve’) and people now their official legal responsibility, the APB then ‘re-classified’ Gamilraay ‘native’ as ‘Aborigine/al’, with further ‘visual, sub-categories’; e.g; ‘full blood, half caste’ down to ‘octoroon’. [‘European’ remained a ‘natural’, fixed category].

Then, in 1915, the APB gave itself a key, discretionary, ‘social engineering’ power over ‘Aboriginal’ children: ‘in loco parentis’ [Latin: in place of parent(s)]. The APB could decide ‘why’ an [Aboriginal] child’s/children’s (home) living circumstances were ‘not appropriate’, remove ‘her/him/they’ and place one or more in an APB determined, ‘more appropriate’ setting. And they did. Thus became the ‘Removed Generation’! Now in his late 40’s Peter marries Kate Harrison (from Glen Innes) in 1887.

Gamilraay Self-Determination: 1917 – Present
Due to their rejection of the APB’s ‘in loco parentis’ power, and its increasing use by that body, Peter Cutmore 1 and wife Kate Harrison decided to make the ‘pioneering move’ with their grandchildren from their post-colonisation ‘base’ at Dhirri-aay-aay to what became the Top Camp’ on the fringe of Moree township, and made that their ‘new, independent home’. Their adult family members joined them soon after. The year was 1917.

Other Gamilraay families and individuals followed later (1920’s), some joining Kate and Peter at the ‘Top Camp’ or forming other ‘communities’ at other locations around the fringes of Moree. All were on ‘their’ land – neither APB reserve, pastoral nor crown/local government. ‘Independent’ From such beginnings, described as ‘bases’, there continued the literal re-creation of families, and the ongoing re-creation of ‘new’ social/cultural identities.

Here, a general map would have been useful in illustrating this process, noting physical features such as ‘camp sites’, over time, vis-à-vis Moree township, the Mehi river, other waterways, roads, and a compass. Of historical note to the family, Peter Cutmore 1 died in 1927 (exact age unknown).

The two historical ‘trajectories’ of Gamilraay and Moree merged from 1917. Both ‘pasts’ continuing to live in the same ‘present’, their respective families now seventh generational, and counting. Peter of Dhirri-aay-aay implicitly poses the question: who, and how to make ‘our’ common future?

Polly Cutmore writes that the book celebrates the survival of her great great grandfather and his descendants through decades of colonisation and genocide. It includes previously unpublished accounts of the early massacre period from the Gwydir River region of NSW.

TERRY WIDDERS’ family and cultural network extends from the Macleay river valley (Dhangadi/Kempsey), across the New England tableland (Armidale) to Moree (Gamilraay). After graduate and postgraduate studies Widders had a twenty-year academic teaching career, including research/lived experience in the Asia/Pacific region, his broader sense of ‘home.’

TextaQueen

Written by mascara on April 21, 2026. Posted in Poetry.

TextaQueen is a non-binary, disabled, settler-immigrant Goan writer, curator and artist living on Wurundjeri Country. Wielding tools beyond their namesake felt-tip, they present creative non-fiction, personal essays, satire, and poetry about othered bodies, land, power, trauma, and their relationships. Their writing has appeared in Disability Arts Online, Peril, Bollywouldn’t, and Crip Stories. They have performed their poetry and creative storytelling as a guest for Ilbijerri’s Foley and on tour with Radar Production’s Sister Spit across Turtle Island (USA and Canada). Texta received a 2023 Writers Victoria Writeability Fellowship for mentorship with Natalie Harkin.

Photograph by Pia Johnson.

return

traffic through double glass
thrum of a world beyond
the return to normal
they’re sold on a solid idea
relief is ahead
destinations on offer again
desired things ready to be found

outside is a world
determined to meet its end
inside we sit alone and take note

left behind      out of time
we continue to make time obsolete
voice notes skim oceans in an instant
        first words i’ve spoken out loud today
DM Seen 3:14am
        chain-smoking loneliness since 2020 <3
discord from ableds shared in an app
        omfg i’d have a meltdown too
threads stitch us      together out-of-sync

group chat alert vibrates
somewhere under blankets pets pills
phone as hard to find as spoons
our connection untied to consistency
we send each other ease we wish to feel
our choirs meet on screens
wormholes to let us warble
        there is no path to light
    no A to B to Z
        no numbers will be called
    there is nothing to fail
        productivity is fake
    success is brief illusion

our harmonies fade out the hum
return us to each other
back to the disabled future

Notes
‘spoons’ as units measuring finite disabled capacity coined by Christine
Miserandino in The Spoon Theory.
‘productivity is fake’ from a lutte collective poster and t-shirt design that reads
‘time is not real/productivity is fake/what you produce doesn’t matter’.
‘back to the disabled future’ alludes to Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s
book The Future is Disabled.

this flower has a spine

on my footpath i find a flower
it has a spine
moves like a centipede
thin black petal legs
encased in carbonite shell
blood of liquid copper
invisible to everyone but me

i pick it up
for my white polo buttonhole
fifty of one hundred legs
tickle my neck
we wriggle in my uniform

i carry it on the school bus
kids-a-tumble bubble
the melting pot
ready to liquefy me
my flower’s cool felt feet
patter rhythms on my collarbone
we stay solid together

everyone underwatch in class
butts suction to plastic seats
my companion dares to free itself
scuttles across my desk
jumps around the room
past    teacher
        chalkboard
    wall charts
slithering in the ears of every kid
learning how to be one
my clever friend returns to me
sits up on my shoulder
reports its research
whispering clicks and whistles
slides back inside my shirt

if only i understood its language

POEM: prescribed for the temporary relief of pain

care note: self harm

DIRECTIONS FOR USE

• Ball fist until nails break skin
    ° place palm on margarita rim
    ° salt the red crescents
    ° savour the sting

• Bite inside of cheek hard
    ° taste sweet metal seep
    ° refuse ice if offered
    ° wait for welt to form

• Outside club sit drunk in gutter
    ° hit head against concrete
    ° until someone intervenes
    ° or skull cracks

• Drag kitchen knife against wrist
    ° if too dull to draw blood
    ° get some help
    ° to sharpen the blade

• Run boiling bath to full
    ° sink in without flinching
    ° submerge with open eyes
    ° see if you survive

Lisa Collyer reviews Bathypelagia by Debbie Lim

Written by mascara on April 21, 2026. Posted in Reviews/Essays.

Bathypelagia

by Debbie Lim

Cordite Books

ISBN 978-0-6457616-6-5

A review by LISA COLLYER

Bathypelagia is Debbie Lim’s first poetry collection (a chapbook Beastly Eye appeared in 2012, with Vagabond Press) and is similarly preoccupied with the blurred line between human animals and wild fauna. If Bathypelagia is read in the context of production of the global shit show, the descent into the midnight zone seems a place of respite. There is a domestic feel to these poems, following a lover, a child, or the petrified remains of ordinary people in the wake of a volcanic eruption. The descent into the farthest and furthest depths of the ocean also hint to rising seawaters in the context of the Anthropocene, and the necessity to look towards havens of resilience when the lights go out.

The first section of the collection, ‘Midnight zone’ begins profoundly in the bathyal zone and is a pragmatic exploration of romance in the dark. The poem ‘Love Below 2000 Metres’ (p.3) is sensually survivalist, as sex takes place grappling in the dark, wrought out of desperation to feed, to hide, to spawn, and accidentally consummate.

It is difficult to speak of love at these depths.
Instead we live by other callings: attraction, hunger,

a fatal curiosity. Attempts at transcendence merely
destroy us. The only way to survive: make a bower

out of darkness. Or invent your own light:
worm of deception, burning weed, false ship of safety.

‘Love Below 2000 Metres’
(p.3)

If transcendence is the goal of art, then Lim’s poems are the benchmark to erasing the spatial borders between beings. In ‘My Son the cephalopod’ (pp.8-9) the zoomorphic characterisation of the small child slipstreams between octopus and infant. The camouflage of beast or baby, only a mother could love (fuelled by chemicals) with its oversized head, and mercurial moods: love and hate sidle. The poem tracks the tireless work of a parent dealing with the dependent yet independent-seeking child: their tentacles grasping for choke hazards, or projecting food for wall art. Finally, the parent’s attempts at constraint are tentacles cradled beneath the covers and the embrace of sea swell.

‘Every night
I rattle on about the moon, tuck tentacles down
and attempt to rock in a way that resembles
the movement, the approximate weight
of an ocean.’

‘My son the cephalopod’
(pp.8-9)

In the witching hour, men sleep, in a unique ecosystem on the bottom of the ocean while the speaker (perhaps female) observes and acts: a nod to the lion share caring load women carry. There is talk of coupling for reproduction and a setting free of offspring. Occasionally there is longing when a flash mob of top feeders or a sinking carcass bedazzles. But a resigned lack of romance prevails, except the sensory rhythmic patterns gently lulling the reader into a comforting acceptance of life without light.

Sometimes I miss the old life.
Occasionally, we receive fresh news
from above (a flash migration, the latest slick)
but the buzz rarely lasts. Then it’s back

to the grind as usual.

‘A Bar in Bathypelagia’
(pp.10-11)

Lim’s animal explorations are landed too, in museums or conserved in fossils, indicating the longevity of life beyond the watery depths, in poems, such as ‘A Taxidermied Sunfish’ (p.12) and ‘The Fossil Maker’ (pp.13). This continuous lineage works elegantly with the themes of reproduction, memory, and culture that emanate across this sumptuous collection, with its lullaby rhythms toing-and-froing like the baby being swooned to sleep. We too, are invited to sink and accept the darkness, make our own light, and find ways to cope.

There is tension in the second part ‘Fin, Bone’ where the domestic transforms to a suffocating cage where untamed mythic beasts seek freedom in a series of intertextual explorations. The blistering poem, ‘Love Note from the Medusa’ (p.21) uses the first-person speaker to occupy the gorgon in kinky overtures, one who speaks of agency and unyielding desire.

‘Underestimated,
I trail my tangled
boudoir, chains
lit up with toxins.
I am (in fact) not
vain, simple self-
sufficient, loyal
to the old currents
and my own
slow lacy appetites.’

‘Love Note from the Medusa’
(p. 21)

Transformation also comes in the form of bound feet, in a numbered poem, that reads like an instruction manual with imperatives on how to turn feet into lotus bulbs. The complicit mutilation is instigated by the mother on the daughter and continues (until outlawed), following cultural traditions, in an eerily prosaic tone. Beauty and abjection embrace and repel beneath the sole. There is an intersectional feminist probe: of gender, culture and class here, where the bound feet transform the woman with lotus feet into one, who is waited upon, rather than being the one to serve.

4.
Every second day
turn your ears to stone. Unwrap
the bandage and ignore her crying

as you re-bind them,
each time tighter. Remind yourself,
as your own mother did,
that there is no such thing as a truly
liberated foot.’

‘How to Grow Feet of Golden Lotus’ (pp. 32-34)

Lim’s poems converse with one another, often with the the motif of stone. Whether it be ‘ears to stone’ (‘How to Grow Feet of Golden Lotus’ (pp. 32-34) or passive representations of ‘Women in classical Chinese love poems’ (p.35) to the petrified ‘Bodies of Pompeii’ (p.36). Recall the Medusa? The mise-en-scene of an unexpected domestic death are bodies mid-sentence, crawling away, and halted by the infamous volcanic eruption of Vesuvius in 79 BC. The abrupt endings of each line mimic the truncated lives, yet entombed in legend, ordinary lives now transcended to museum artefacts.

‘Unburied, they weigh more than bone ever could.
They have shaken off the ash and refuse to rest. So many

stopped limbs. Mouth holes, eye holes, a balled fist.’

‘Bodies of Pompeii’ (p.36)

The concluding section ‘Air’ draws breath and brings life to ground, beginning with our museum obsession with exhibiting exotica. The violent romance of ‘Hauling the Sunfish into the Gallery’ (p. 45) speaks to the human desire of scientific classification and public curiosity. We are challenged to see our perverse curios as rebirthed, while the ungainly wrenching from the ocean is cleverly wrought in a one-way bargaining agreement between collector and fish.

‘I have noticed the fused bones of your mouth
set in their small surprised o. How, tentative,

you near my gaping window. I say only this:

think of it as a second birth, your odd calling.’

‘Hauling the Sunfish into the Gallery’ (p. 45)

Lim’s poems often sit side by side in a conversation of opposites, like ‘Captive’ (p. 50) where death (a blue ringed octopus) is caught then humanely released, and ‘Praying Mantis’ (p.51) the only living thing in a brush of dead wood. Or ‘Gift of the Sloth (p.52) another instruction manual on occupying tree habitat, and the way in which the fur of the sloth is habitat to ‘beetles, moths and mites’ (p. 52). This poem is juxtaposed to ‘Etiquette for Trees’ (p. 53) with directives of courtesy for the sake of safety in polite (arboreal) society.

‘Respect the branch tips
of others. Learn to get by
on minimal sleep (which is, in any case,
intended for the weak and mobile).
But travel your roots boldly
through darkness and to great depths’

‘Etiquette for Trees’ (p. 53)

Lim’s Bathypelagia is a collection of multidimensional expansiveness. The auricles of an ear, the habitat of sloth fur, or the plumbs of the ocean are occupied by beings of fur, fin, and flesh interchangeably. The domestic zone (a cage of sorts) is transcended with imagination that migrates beyond atmospheres, beneath and above. The lines between these zones are blurred and the status of beings transcended. A bound foot is a girl mutilated, yet elevated; or the noxious fumes of a volcano elevate everyday life to exhibit status.

LISA COLLYER is the author of two poetry collections, Gold Digger (2025) and How To Order Eggs Sunny Side Up (2023), the latter being short-listed for The Dorothy Hewett Award, and both published with Life Before Man Books. Her personal essay, ‘Prolonged Exposure’ is published in the anthology, Women of a Certain Courage (2025) with Fremantle Press. Her poem, ‘The Grape Pickers’ was short-listed for the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize (2025). She was a recent artist in residence for The National Trust of W.A. and Bundanon Art Museum. She is currently writing a literary novel on grief, booze and jazz.

Rozanna Lilley

Written by mascara on April 19, 2026. Posted in Poetry.

Rozanna Lilley is a widely published researcher and author writing across multiple forms. Her work is included in Best Australian Essays (2013 and 2014) and Best (of) Australian Poems (2015 and 2023). Her short stories are published in anthologies and literary journals. Her memoir Do Oysters Get Bored? (UWA Publishing, 2018) was shortlisted for the National Biography Award. A poetry chapbook, The Lady in the Bottle (London: Black Spring Press), was released in 2023.

By-the-wind sailor

A blustery wimple frames impassive features
tan stockings puddled by saltwater
periwinkles clinging to her rough tunic
the deep space of sea-stars scattered in prayer

At inlet’s edge
a girl digs a hole in damp sand
rearranges svelte limbs
a trio of Barbie beach dolls
reclining by the edge of an infinity pool
sipping signature cocktails

Her mother packs the sunlit afternoon
into an overflowing tote
grasps her little sister’s searching hand
and calls her home

Beyond the inlet
the coffle of low dunes
then the open sea
thousands of by-the-wind sailors
their glittering blue bodies
adrift on riotous waves

Winter solstice

At the glass house on the headland
hours contract

Record the fact another year
such skittering distances

To the south the lub-dub
of surf crashing

Through the long night
mice rustling under the sink

Sampling a showbag
of prescription meds

Inhalers and inhibitors
anti-this-and-that

Lacelike veins entangled
skirting the isthmus

To the north a placid bay
a pair of white-bellied sea eagles

Circling the island
inside-out pockets

Of drip-tipped rainforest
a spit of shell grit

Searching safe anchorage
as dawn gathers

The ashen scent
of rejection nestled

Within frosted curves
a daybreak splash of

Flickering vermillion
lights up these empty rooms