After Zora Neale Hurston Tima carried a long-legged ease about her, thundering strides of a leader, full lips and wide eyes and melanin. She would raise her hand like the switch in Adelaide weather, abrupt and sure, delivering answers in Maths like they were meant to...
In the morning, the noise of the trucks from the distant freeway has stopped. There is just the sound of the wind blowing on the gate outside my window and, every now and then, a bird tweeting. I wheel my bike onto the street. There are only five reasons to leave...
Calvin hauled the mattress out of the boot. He had it draped over the bonnet and up the windscreen by the time Ngaire back. ‘The blokes in the first car say about twenty hours,’ she said as she climbed up beside him. She could feel the windscreen wiper poking through...
Then came the Wide Game. It seemed a strange name to the uninitiated like Bronte, but meant only, it seemed, that they weren’t confined to their Scout Halls around the region and could wander far – and wide. Camp Trafalgar, where all the different troops met up, was...
That child’s hand above your head; the hand of a little girl long dead. Kakadu. Djidpi Djidpi. Two blocks of ochre. One grinding hollow. A grinding stone. Five moments of pressure. Thirty reed brushes. Voices echo off the high sandstone ceiling: thirty young lilts and...
“We’ll be live in five.” I feel something on my forehead. It hovers there like a nascent thought awaiting identification, categorisation, validation. “…four…” Maybe it’s a flower. I feel it growing. Blossoming out from a bud. Opening to the...
