by Melissa Lucashenko

extract from Griffith REVIEW Edition 41: Now We Are Ten

Four years ago I moved with no great enthusiasm and a troubled child to Logan City, one of Australia's ten poorest urban areas. Divorce had cost me my farm in northern New South Wales, and housing in Woodridge was, and remains, some of the very cheapest within striking range of the Brisbane CBD – according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, 96 per cent of Australian postcodes have higher socio-economic status than we Woodridgeans.

In October 2013 WrICE Directors Francesca Rendle-Short and David Carlin participated in the Asia Pacific Writers (AP Writers) ‘Reaching the World 2013: creative writing and translation: teaching and practice’ conference in Bangkok, at the Faculty of Arts of Chulalongkorn University. It was held in conjunction with UNESCO’s Bangkok World Book Capital 2013 and celebrated all things to […]

By Jennifer Down
Published in Overland 213 Summer 2013

The afternoons when Murray got home first, he liked to take the dog for a walk down the foreshore. In winter the fat palms shivered and used fits dotted the cement sand. Murray spent his days with trees. Naming them, measuring them, collecting the soil they stood up in. He’d lived in St Kilda for thirty-odd years, but sometimes the sour smells of rotting seaweed and dim sims and car fumes still surprised him…

By Laurel Fantauzzo

1.
Madasalin, corner Mapagkawanggawa

The rain has been trying to tell me something all night.

The rain takes up residence in my dreams. I hear it arriving and arriving. It replaces all other sounds. It replaces the air itself.

By Harriet McKnight

There she was, heading down the A40 free-way, the radio on full and her whole
life packed into the back seat. The heat was so heavy that she had all the windows down
and the hot air curled around her arms like an eel.

By Bernice Chauly
From Onkalo

And so he says it again through headlines

screaming black, bold Serif on undulating white perimeters

Write – you will have the freedom to write –

he says as he spouts jibber-jabber from pink, watery lips