Melbourne

  • Late autumn in Melbourne. The nights have well and truly drawn in, and at the moment the sun sets close to 5.30pm. Last week I noticed the camellia tree had a number of new flower buds, after months of bareness, clusters of tightly packed pinkness which overnight blossomed into beautiful large flowers, petals the colour

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  • I joined Ellen van Neerven, Carly Findlay, Clem Bastow, and Andy Jackson on the judging panel for this year’s Lord Mayor’s Creative Writing Awards. The results were announced last night at an online ceremony hosted by Emilie Zoey Baker. Andy revealed the five category winners, and Lord Mayor Sally Capp announced the overall winner. It

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  • MOTEL

    He stopped swimming, and floated in the middle of the pool. I watched him closely, the long thin line of body broken by the blue of his swimming trunks. Then I imagined the trunks gone. It was easy, really, but almost unbearable. He started to swim again, towards me, then tumbled over at the end,

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  • Number 58

    It was a short-term lease, and now their couch is gone from out the front. Some nights they’d sit there in underwear, onesies, crazy hats; talking, but only to each other, and smoking and playing. And by early morning the night’s detritus of notebooks, clothes, packets, bottles, would be strewn in still life over the

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  • Gin and It

    Gin drains her glass, and winces. ‘That was too sweet,’ she says. He’s standing an arm’s length away, polishing the bar. ‘You were smacking your lips earlier,’ he says. ‘Well I’m not smacking them now,’ she says. ‘You mixed it too sweet.’ ‘I always mix it the same,’ he says. He moves further down the

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