NORTHERN TERRITORY LITERARY AWARDS 2020
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Kath Manzie Estate Works by Winners & Finalists
Library & Archives NT ntl.nt.gov.au 2020 NORTHERN TERRITORY LITERARY AWARDS
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ISSN 1449-9886
Published by: Library & Archives NT
Printed by: Zip Print, 2/418 Stuart Highway, Winnellie NT 0820 Acknowledgements
Established in the early 1980s by Darwin Community College, as a predecessor of Charles Darwin University, and now administered by the Library & Archives NT, the Northern Territory Literary Awards celebrate the richness of our literary talent across the Northern Territory.
Presented across seven categories: poetry, essay, short story, flash fiction, non-fiction, youth and theatre, the Awards reflect the diversity of our vibrant literary community and form part of the ongoing commitment to nurture and inspire writers of all genres and styles.
Library & Archives NT is proud to administer the Awards with the assistance of annual sponsors and supporters whose contributions help make this event possible.
Each year we are pleased to publish literary works that provide us with insights into the evolving nature of the Territory, its past and its future, and what it means to be a part of this place.
Congratulations to the finalists and winners of this year’s Northern Territory Literary Awards and thank you to everyone who submitted works.
The success of the Awards relies on your ongoing contributions and we thank you for continuing to inform, inspire and entertain us.
Note: The entries printed in this book appear as they were submitted by the writers.
Acknowledgements 1 Contents
Brown’s Mart Theatre Award 4
Winner Sarah Rose Reuben and Jeffrey Jay Fowler When‘ The Clock Strikes Two’
Finalists Eleanor Kay ‘Faltering’
Ciella Williams ‘Ruptured’
Charles Darwin University Creative Non-Fiction Award 5
Winner Susannah Ritchie ‘Mother’s Day’
Finalists James Murray ‘Motion Sickness’
Kylie Stevenson ‘Dear Bill’
Charles Darwin University Essay Award 26
Winner Nuhansi Wijesinghe ‘To what extent does architecture of the paediatric department at RDH promote a child’s mental wellbeing and healing process?’
Finalists Liam Grealy, Kirsty Howey, Tess Lea ‘States of Deferral: A Recent History of Housing at Borroloola’
Dr Tom Lewis ‘The Hero who Wasn’t – the Mythic Deeds of Pilot Robert Oestreicher in Darwin’s First Air Attack’
Flash Fiction Award 69
Winner Kaye Aldenhoven ‘Sardines’
Finalists Lee Frank ‘Letter to Nathan’
2 2020 Northern Territory Literary Awards James Murray ‘Sally Gleeson’
Julie U’Ren ‘Fire on the horizon’
Kath Manzie Youth Award 78
Winner Jethro Pollock ‘The Dripping Tap’
Finalists Angela Keating ‘What happens to the imaginary friend when the child dies?’
Tippipon (Tippi) Morgan ‘Pudding’
Peter Susanto ‘The Visit’
NT Writers’ Centre Poetry Award 96
Winner Johanna Bell ‘If I were a bird’
Finalists Kaye Aldenhoven ‘Civilisation . . is..’
Johanna Bell ‘We all adapt to survive, don’t we?’
Brian Obiri-Asare ‘in search of something beautiful, perhaps?’
Brian Obiri-Asare ‘& maybe’
Leni Shilton ‘brown goshawk’
Zip Print Short Story Award 110
Winner Miranda Tetlow ‘TAKE SHELTER’
Finalists Mhairi Duncan ‘Of Ruts and Roars’
Karen Manton ‘Bull Buster’
Contents 3 Brown’s Mart Theatre Award
Winner
Sarah Rose Reuben and Jeffrey Jay Fowler When The Clock Strikes Two
Finalists
Eleanor Kay Faltering
Ciella Williams Ruptured
Due to printing restrictions, screenplays and scripts cannot be included in this publication.
4 Brown’s Mart Theatre Award Charles Darwin University Creative Non-Fiction Award
Winner
Susannah Ritchie Mother’s Day 6
Finalists
James Murray Motion Sickness 11
Kylie Stevenson Dear Bill 17
Charles Darwin University Creative Non-Fiction Award 5 Mother’s Day by Susannah Ritchie
One to spin the thread.
When I was very little I remember my mother telling me the story of the Three Fates in Greek mythology. The Moirai. The Three Sisters who appear within the first three days after birth. One sister spinning the thread of life, another to measure how long that life would be, and the third sister to cut the thread at the right time. Then the weaving and sewing and messy business of living would begin. My mother was one of three sisters and it made sense to her that three women were responsible for the unenviable job of spinning, measuring and finally cutting the very thread of life itself.
On the night my eldest son emerged into the world that thread interwove itself between us. Emerged is a euphemism. Cut via emergency caesarean under a full general aesthetic. The last words I remember after having to be awake for the excruciating pre surgery preparation, as two teams worked on my haemorrhaging body were, ‘his heartbeat has dropped to 80, we need to get this baby out now’. But on the night he was born, ‘untimely ripped’ almost two months before his due date, my Mama was in Perth. I was on the other side of the country. The thread of life and death, as it turned out for all of us, hanging in a precarious balance.
She later described the ride to the airport as unbearable. She had heard the words that can strike fear into the heart of any mother, any woman, anyone - ‘she’s bleeding and alone’. The devout Muslim taxi driver praying with her as they drove, to get on a compassionate flight organised at the last minute. When we still had the freedom to fly when we wanted. She later told me, ‘I couldn’t bear something to happen to you. And I knew if something were to happen to the baby it would have broken you. So I knew two lives needed to be saved’.
I have since wondered, what deal did she strike with The Fates that night? What bargain did she agree to?
6 2020 Northern Territory Literary Awards One to measure the length; to allot the time
Two lives were indeed saved that night. Through a miracle of good luck and a good public health system, a spectacularly robust little boy moved from residing in our hearts, his tiny fish like lungs now breathing their first breaths in the world.
But on the day we took him home from hospital - four and half weeks later - was the same day my Mum got the news her brain scan was clear. There are some situations when you pray for it to be a tumour. Because as I later said to a friend, ‘there are worse things than cancer’. The words: rapidly progressing, incurable, untreatable and terminal fill the space in your lungs devouring what oxygen is left, leaving you panting and shaken, as if you have been physically hit. Each word a blow. A diagnosis.
Every morning I woke up and had one split second of pure love looking at the perfect face of my tiny son who was alive. Not dead. That was not my fate. That not his fate. Then the reality of another life closing, of her dying, filled the space in my heart. Crashing, consuming and sucking away the literal breath from her body and the imagined futures we never would get together from mine.
Would I ever be happy again?
My Mother was born on January 1st. A true January baby. The etymology of January comes from the Roman God Janus, the two-headed God of doorways. One head looking back to the past. One looking forward to the future. One in this life, one in the next.
‘Doesn’t it make it easier to let me go, when you can see I’m so sick?’
Yes. And no. How do you prepare your heart when it is already so bloody and bruised from one trauma, for the next? They said this could go on for years. It did not. We would never have another Christmas together. My son should have still been safely inside his cosy cocoon, but if he had she would never have had one Christmas as a grandmother.
But dying is boring, and hard and sometimes – more often than not – takes time. Time that suddenly feels in rapidly short supply. Time that you measure in moments, in good days (and bad), time between medical appointments, and
Charles Darwin University Creative Non-Fiction Award 7 palliative care team meetings. You see the lengthening shadows of a day you don’t want to end. Of fleeting precious flashes of laughter, sucked away like waves on a beach. The laughter fills your lungs but leaves you hollow, breathless and empty inside. Because there are lots of things funny about dying. But when you laugh bravely to banish your fears; it doesn’t change that they are still going to a place that you can’t follow.
Mum described dying as being on the outside, looking through the window into a world where people have futures. My grief compounding that she died at the end of April, which meant my first Mother’s Day as a mother, was my first without my own. When I explained this looming deadline, with the acerbic wit of one who could see the finish line, she replied ‘Mother’s Day is bullshit’. She went on to explain that when you are a mother, every day is Mother’s Day.
I wish I could say to my Mum, ‘I finally get it!’ I understand the complex mix of love and fatigue that is being a mother. Recently, I raised with a colleague that no one mentions the relentless grind that is motherhood and endured the somewhat incredulous tone of, ‘what no one told you that being a mum is hard work?’ Her roll up your sleeves, get it done, no nonsense tone shamed me. Because my own Mum did tell me it was hard and boring, being at home with babies. She said women’s work was feminist issue.
I try to imagine what life was like for her, the 24 year old stuck trying to grow a garden in Darwin’s desolate, barren, clay-filled soil where nothing grew. A young wife stuck in the Northern Suburbs in the early 1980s, longing for her inner city Melbourne life. Of washing, washing, washing all those cloth nappies. The children next door who had Coca-Cola in their bottles; a little boy with a hole in his front tooth you could see through.
‘As I watched the jet streams of the planes flying over, I used to fantasise about one crashing in the backyard. Nothing very serious, no one hurt. But I would be there. Ready and able. I was just so bored of being at home with two small babies, in the ‘burbs’.
I find myself looking at photographs of my sons with their small bodies, their rounder faces, their teeth, their hair – their lack of – stares back at me like a stranger. A flicker of recognition in a crowd of faces, a shadow or ghost of
8 2020 Northern Territory Literary Awards someone I desperately loved who is now gone. My eldest son asks ‘who is that’ when he looks at photographs of my Mum holding the tiny fragile him. He struggles to understand that he is in fact the baby, and his Mum once had a Mum of her own too.
One to cut the thread
Because we had the incredible pain and luxury of knowing time was running short, we were able to talk about life afterwards. When the grief consumes your senses and the waves threaten to crash in and drown you.
She reminded me that I would remember the good feelings of being together and strangely the memory itself, and any rituals associated with it, would help. She described the intangible moments that would trigger those feelings, ‘sometimes just the way sunlight falls on the stone or the wind blows or a song plays, will bring it all back and you will get it again. The only trouble is, you can’t really call it up on demand - but it will come. It will also come in dreams. Good ones. Not really lost but just that you’ll find it in a different way’.
Before she died my Mother explained that she would never really leave. She said, “When I am gone and years have passed, and you are achieving all the things I know you will - then believe me - I will be there to see it”. And that is how I feel about my sons. I love them in a fierce, at times, overwhelmed way that makes me embarrassed because of the intensity of my own feelings. I am shyly dazzled by their breathtaking brilliance. I love them in this universe and the next.
In the final day or so, my Mum revealed that she had been keeping a diary of her experiences of dying. She pragmatically warned, ‘don’t look too much for yourself in there – dying is a very selfish business’. She was right – I did go looking months later for her final words from beyond the grave. The final comfort and reassurance of a mother’s love. She was also right, it was not there. It was a matter-of-fact account of the everyday indignities of your body shutting down on you. Yet, she finished with perhaps her best line saved for the final entry, ‘My greatest regret: I didn’t eat enough salty, hot chips!’
So again I turn my mind to thinking, what deal did she strike with those Three Fates that night when the line between dreams and nightmares; between living
Charles Darwin University Creative Non-Fiction Award 9 and dying seemed so blurred? Very early on as we grappled with the dying bit of a terminal disease, she said to me, ‘you understand the fragile balance of life and death, now that you are a mother’. Since she has died, I have learnt that there are harder things to bear, than your mother dying. She always used to say, ‘children should bury their parents – that is the right order’. Yet, still I wonder what she promised those Three Sisters and in the end what they took, as she flew across the country that night to be with me and my newly born son?
One to spin the thread
One to measure the length
One to make the final cut
Two lives saved. One life gone. In the right order.
10 2020 Northern Territory Literary Awards Motion Sickness by James Murray
We called it ‘car sick’. We said it pre-literate, kasik, us four small children hurtling around the 1960s sprawl in the back of Mum’s or Dad’s car. This was before seatbelts, and Mum would drive one hand on the wheel, one hand swinging about hitting us. I’d vomit out the window, careful to keep it out, putting my head out in the gale of the car’s great speed and aiming backwards. Mum gave us kasik tablets, and I remember seeing them in the streams clinging to the sides of the car. It’s like seasickness: same thing. People get used to it, some quicker than others. It’s being thrown about, accelerating and decelerating, going up and down and left and right. Your body can’t handle it, and ‘packs it in’.
I lived in three houses in two states in my childhood, then ten houses over eight years in inner Brisbane whilst travelling wildly. Then I travelled wider and lived in six houses in five states over seven years before ‘settling’ (with much travelling and some living interstate) in Darwin, umpteen houses over twenty-odd years, before coming out here, seventy kilometres from town. I’ve been here almost three years, longer than anywhere I’ve been as an adult. And I’ve been here all day every day, deep in the bush, long enough for my motion sickness to quell, long enough to see how sick I was, how wildly I was thrown about.
I’ve been waiting for rain. It will rain soon, of course. The earth swings out then swings back. I see the signs: the cycads came out weeks ago, and metre-long fronds now radiate from their posts everywhere throughout the bush, and I’ve been here long enough to know they are early this year. And half the other trees (that lose all or most of their leaves in April) are leaving, a refreshing sign of confidence, the bush beefing up, and the cicadas have been out for weeks, and the Wet Season birds have arrived – Magpie Geese honking overhead and the Rainbirds back from Indonesia, calling, one here, one there, more each day, and yesterday the Pheasant Coucal did its first WUWUWUWU – but no rain. There’s a banyan tree here, bare, and this time last year it was a mass of vibrant green, and I worry like a parent waiting for their child to come home. I worry about a couple of ironwoods here too, though last year they didn’t show any life until mid-October.
Charles Darwin University Creative Non-Fiction Award 11 But it’s funny: the other ironwoods nearby have been pouring out greenery for a fortnight. What brings it on? Not rain − last year and this year the Dry seasons have been entirely dry. Day length? Angle of sun? Temperature? Humidity? Barometric pressure? There is a precision in each tree’s genes that sets the criteria for the switch to be flicked, the floodgates to boom open, but rain would help, surely. Rain would help us all. And I’ve been wanting rain particularly and personally because I’m worried about fire, there being far too many fires. Dark clouds have been building up in this week’s afternoons and they are rainclouds, not smoke, and there’s been the occasional shower nearby, and I heard Spencer Road got twelve mill the other day – twelve mill could snap the fire season shut. And these are my concerns: rain, fire, the banyan and ironwood trees.
I got up in the night and went back to bed but didn’t fall back asleep. After five minutes I realised I was awake for the day, so I got up. I lit the lamp and put the kettle on, and then I picked up my phone – 3:46. Too early! Normally I’m up around five o’clock. I stand for a minute, considering going back to bed, then I walk off to the toilet, fifty metres through the bush. The moon is big and bright, no need for a torch. I hear a wallaby thump away from me, a possum growl, then the curlews are crying, setting each other off in every direction, then they stop. It’s quiet. Traffic can be heard for miles but there’s nothing there. I look at the moon, a day or two passed full, high in the west. I look at the light my lamp makes, the little outline of my camp, and I walk back to it. I make coffee. I consider the radio – Big Ideas would be finishing; I could get the four o’clock news. But I’ve given up on the radio. I sit and pick up my phone. I check my emails first, and there’s something from Rose. She’s in her office all day with nothing to do, so she surfs the net, and sometimes she sends me the ‘link’ to something she thinks I’ll be interested in, and this morning there are three links. The first is a story and photos of the actress Julia Roberts on the red carpet, barefoot. The second is a story and photos of the actress Kristen Stewart, barefoot on the red carpet, holding her high heels in her hands. Rose has sent me these because I am always barefoot, and I appreciate her gesture, spending some minutes gazing at these beautiful women in their various poses, occasionally picking up my cup.
There are things that happen to a child in the back seat of a car. The kid is so small he can’t see over the front seat, he cannot see the road the car will go. He
12 2020 Northern Territory Literary Awards may be asleep, with no consciousness of the forces acting upon him, but there he is leaning to the right, his shoulder and head pressing against his brother who is also leaning starboard, his sister and the dog bearing hard his way on his left. And then there is a moment when the force directing him to the right is gone, his mother rounding the long left-hand curve, and his head and shoulders regain their place above his hips, his sister and brother with a little shudder regaining their equilibrium too, perhaps with a few seconds of being pushed back slightly. And I felt it this morning, in the quiet dark, phone in one hand, cup in the other. I closed my eyes and felt it, the long outswing finished, and the hovering, the hanging in the air, before – it’s there, unmistakable – the seeds, the germs, the incremental gather of swing back. Humankind has gone as far as it can go, and now it’s coming back.
The third ‘link’ was an article about ‘grounding’. Rose mightn’t remember, but she sent me an article about ‘grounding’ a few months ago, and I’d heard about it from a few other sources. Grounding – also called ‘earthing’ – involves being barefoot on the earth’s surface (in a park, say, or on a beach) to improve one’s health. Brad Fittler, the coach of the New South Wales Rugby League side, got his players to ground themselves by walking and running on the playing field barefoot − it was just for half an hour, and was labelled ‘bizarre’, ‘wacky’ and ‘eccentric’, but one of the players did spout some earthing theory to the press: there are ions and electrons in the earth that get into the body through the soles of the feet, and they increase antioxidants. And there are Earthing Instructors getting fifteen people to pay twenty dollars each then telling them to take off their shoes and hang about for fifty minutes. And we can see exactly how far we are off the planet, how alienated and ‘gone’ and lost in space we are, that being barefoot on the surface of the earth is bizarre to us, and a novel idea. I don’t know about ions and antioxidants, but I can tell you that being barefoot is better for you than being in shoes, and I see this grounding phenomenon as the burgeoning buds of comeback.
Some things happen once every ten seconds – a wave sweeps up the beach, falls back, and ten seconds later it’s doing it again. If your body was lolling about in the shallows, it’d be pushed up the beach, then sucked back. Some things happen once a year – the Rainbird makes its return trip to Sulawesi and Rob spends
Charles Darwin University Creative Non-Fiction Award 13 Christmas with his folks in Sydney. Some things happen once, ever – Cane Toads came to this island once, for example, a great wave sweeping from east to west over a hundred years. They reached here twelve years ago, and they were in plague proportions for some years, but their numbers decline at the back of the wave, and they are now a trifle of what they were. And this drawing back, this clawing back is a source of much joy for me, as is Julia Roberts barefoot on the red carpet and the coach getting his players to ground – I feel where we are going, and we’re going in the right direction. We’re going back home.
I check the NRL app, but there’s nothing new since last night. I tap at the ABC News app, occasionally picking up my cup. I have a second cup. I check out a chess problem. I consider Life Matters on the radio – I like Hilary Harper and Michael McKenzie, and for years I’d fill this hour with their companionship, but I’m sick of them. And I can see it, my movement away, my movement from. I have a half-cup, cold, I wash the cup and pot, and I’m done by quarter to five and it doesn’t get light ‘til six. I go out under the moon and loiter, then I start to walk through the bush. I can see perfectly well in the moonlight, I can see the green, the yellow, the brown, the occasional red.
I glide like a ghost on the path I walk each day, polishing the grass and leaf-litter, feeling each blade, each pebble, each twig with the soles of my feet, and watching my feet, watching and fending off vegetation, occasionally pausing to peruse the mid-distance. Suddenly it goes dark. Cloud is over the moon. I watch it flooding from west to east, blacking out the stars. In half a minute the sky is gone, and I can’t see my hand in front of my face. I stand. I know I’ll lose the path if I try to feel my way along it. I feel a spot of rain on my shoulder. Then another on my arm. I have my arms out: another, another, and then I can hear it, the lightest rain landing, coming closer, and it’s upon me for fifteen seconds, then it’s gone. It didn’t settle the dust. I run my hands over my skin, and I’m not as wet as I’ll be later in the day, sweating.
Cane Toads evolved while they swept across the continent. At the front are ‘supertoads’, bigger than other toads, and possessing the successful genetic mutation that flicks on an irresistible urge to hop west. Normal toads stay
14 2020 Northern Territory Literary Awards where they are, but supertoads can cover several hundred metres a night, kamikazeing into virgin territory with the goannas, snakes and quolls eating the super-venomous supertoads and dying en masse. A month later there are forty thousand baby toads with no predators. And the supertoads push on, because and only because of the hard-wired urge. It’s like a migratory bird – five seconds before it lifts off and flies south-east for five days, it has no idea it is going to and no idea why it will, and there’s been many with the mutant urge to fly in every other direction under the sun, but they don’t survive to pass on their genes.
Of my eight great-grandparents, five were born in Ireland, one in Scotland and one in Cornwall, and all of them left everything they’d known in the second half of the 1800s and came to Australia. My father’s father was born in the bush near Boggabri in northern New South Wales but left for Sydney, my father was born in Sydney but left for Melbourne, I was born in Melbourne and grew up in Queensland, and my children were born in Hobart and Darwin and flew for new horizons like the previous four generations, saying to the father, ‘no, you don’t have the answers.’ The last time anyone did what their father did was probably my great-great-grandfather doing what my great-great-great-grandfather did, staying all his life in his small farming community, never going more than a day’s walk anywhere, rarely meeting anyone that wasn’t family. And you can see how powerful it must have been, how utterly irresistible, the urge to flee, once the criteria had been met − crop failure, famine, typhoid, dismal weather, English landlords, Roman church. Not everyone left, of course, only the big ones, the brave ones, the foolhardy and reckless, with the hard-wired urge to jump. They spread out once they got here, decimating the locals with smallpox on first contact, mingling with other migrants and breeding supermigrants until they’re bouncing about like pinballs, giving me motion sickness just thinking about them.
As quick as the cloud had come it was pulled apart. I stood facing the full moon, two hours from setting. It would be high in the sky in Africa. A breeze blew my body hair. Energy streamed up through the soles of my feet. I’d come home. Eighty thousand years ago, I left East Africa and started moving north, gradually widening my range, going and going as far as could be gone into north-west Europe, and then, when I couldn’t stand it any longer, crossing the ocean that
Charles Darwin University Creative Non-Fiction Award 15 had me cornered, and after being thrown from one place to another for a hundred-and-fifty years, I settle in the tropics, from where I had come, from where my ancestral species came.
I stood. The dawn chorus began tentatively, gradually filling up: the exquisite piping of the Pied Butcherbird, the bombast of the Blue-winged Kookaburra, and this morning, for the first time at dawn, the eerie insistence of the Rainbird.
16 2020 Northern Territory Literary Awards Dear Bill by Kylie Stevenson
I wish I could say the first time we met was memorable, but I don’t recall it at all. I do know the moment we became friends, though. You were sitting behind me for three weeks on a bus as we drove up the guts of the country, then back down the East Coast. It was 1994 and we were on a trip organised by our school.
We’d been in each other’s orbit since high school’s beginning. I knew who you were, but we’d never spoken. I was pimply and bookish and self-conscious. Every report card I’d ever received described me as “quiet and conscientious”. You were tall, blonde, rosy-cheeked. You were on the mild end of the troublemaker spectrum. You made everyone laugh, even the teachers. Earlier that year we’d been given an assignment — a speech on something you’d change. Yours was basically a stand-up comedy routine about how embarrassing your dog Bessie was. I got up straight after you and gave my speech on the genocide in Rwanda. That’s what we were like.
In the early days of that bus trip, the early stages of knowing one another, we discovered you lived on a street that branched off mine. Your house was less than a 10-minute walk away. Then we found a more permanent component in the glue that would hold us together: music. I had a blue and black Sony Walkman — the kind that had a tape deck with a rewind function that required patience. There was a song I loved that I’d recorded off the radio onto one of my mixed tapes. I didn’t know who sung it, or even the name of the song, but I played it over and over and over, waiting each time for the slow, clicking spool of the rewind to take me back to those opening bars.
Waiting on a Sunday afternoon
For what I read between the lines
“What is this?” I asked you, sticking my earbuds into your ears.
Charles Darwin University Creative Non-Fiction Award 17 You listened and nodded along.
“It’s Stone Temple Pilots.” You smiled. “Interstate Love Song.”
* * *
You were my first boy friend. A boy. A friend. A relationship I never took for granted because I’d not experienced it before, and nor have I since. I could tell you anything.
And from that day, on that red bullet packed with rambunctious school children and regretful teachers, you were there. Like a river meandering through the landscape of my life, you were always flowing beside me, always bringing joy. Sometimes you’d curl away into the distance, exploring new terrain. Sometimes I was the adventurer. But we never lost sight of one another. We’d always come gushing back together and then stick close. Until you didn’t. Until you left.
* * *
Our first concert together was the Chilli Peppers at the Sydney Entertainment Centre, 1996. We went with a group of friends and when we got to our cheap seats in the back stalls you declared them crap; said you were going to try sneak into the mosh pit. We all thought you were crazy, there was security everywhere. Not 10 minutes later, you waved to us from right in front of the stage and disappeared into the fray.
You were like that. You just did things. Took risks. And almost always they worked out for you.
You even caught the drumstick at the end that night.
Back then, you didn’t like to promote it — no one at our school did — but you were smart, and a truly talented writer. I harboured a quiet jealousy of your words on paper. You were so bloody clever and thoughtful.
As we neared the end of high school, I asked you what you wanted to do when we finished. Sports journalism, you told me, at the University of Canberra. I planned
18 2020 Northern Territory Literary Awards on studying creative writing, but the careers advisor told me not to bother with that. That if I wanted to be a writer who earned money, I should be a journalist. When I told you what she’d said, you said I should come with you.
But in that final year, a couple of things happened. You had to have surgery on your leg. You were born with one leg longer than the other. You’d always walked with a limp. I’d never thought to ask why. It was just part of you, like your ever- pink cheeks or your tallness or your terrible dance moves. It put you out of school for weeks.
The other thing that happened was you became quite popular. A wider audience of our peers had realised your humour and kindness and spirit. You were voted school captain. You were invited to parties. And your height meant you could get into clubs, even though we weren’t 18 yet.
In the end, I went to Canberra alone.
* * *
A few years back, our friend Leigh sent me an old picture she found of you and me. The short blue dress I’m wearing was in my wardrobe circulation in the mid- 90s, so we must have been about 17 or 18. You’re singing and I’m laughing. My arm is around your shoulder. The lump in my throat longs to relive it, or even to remember it. What music were we listening to? What were we celebrating?
I wish I could put my arm around your shoulder.
* * *
One night, after I had graduated university and returned to Sydney, you convinced me to come to a barbecue some old school friends were having. I hadn’t seen them in years.
“She’s a bit racist,” I said to you in the car on the way home. A blonde girl who’d married one of our former classmates.
“Yeah, she’s awful. I’ve had arguments with her about it before.”
Charles Darwin University Creative Non-Fiction Award 19 I had agreed to drive us so you could drink.
“I’m a good friend to you,” I said.
You agreed.
* * *
Nineteen years is a long time to know a person. Not many friendships hold on through that fraught, shifting landscape from adolescence into adulthood. Moving from those unthinking teenage years when our eyes were closed to worlds outside our own, into our insouciant 20s and the incoming weight of responsibility in our 30s. But you were always there, even when you were far. Even when we disagreed about politics or football, or when we were wrapped up in other things, in other people. We were like puzzle pieces being shifted around to different spots but always coming back together because we clicked.
How we held so tight, I don’t know. I’d always thought it was our honesty. That’s why it was such a shock in the end when you lied. How did I not see it? I believed you when you said you were OK.
* * *
Music was the beginning, and it also filled out the middle. The Big Day Out when we were both so hungover we couldn’t truly appreciate a little up and coming band called the Foo Fighters. Our joyful reunion after the encore at a Prodigy gig when we were shoved and thrown apart in the mosh pit. Cold Chisel. Frenzal Romb. Blink 182. Grinspoon. Spiderbait. We must have seen Regurgitator 20 times.
Things don’t get no better, better than you and me.
You even let me drag you to a Xavier Rudd gig once. You owed me after I saw all those Rose Byrne films with you. You disappeared on me shortly after we arrived, but it wasn’t until after the last song, I realised you were sick. The insulin pen you brought that night was empty. It was as if you were drunk: you wobbled on your feet, you couldn’t finish a thought. I wanted to take you to hospital, but you made
20 2020 Northern Territory Literary Awards me drive you home. I stayed at your house, fretting, until you made me leave, saying you were alright.
Your diabetes appeared on the scene before I did, just before high school, but in all those years of seeing you inject, of teasing you for your Diet Coke habit and the irony of your job at an ice cream company, I’d never seen you sick from it.
* * *
It’s only on reflection I can see what was happening to you. You came to visit me a few years after I moved to Darwin. You’d gained a lot of weight and seemed a bit flat – it was as if you’d breathed out and forgotten to breathe in again.
I registered maybe a pinch of concern, but then I took you to Litchfield National Park and you brightened. You kept saying you couldn’t believe I lived in such a beautiful place. On the drive back to Darwin, we plugged in your iPod and sang at full volume till our throats hurt. You introduced me to Jurassic Five.
A vast universe when the last is the first
We were so happy. I forgot about your malaise.
* * *
For a brief period in our late 20s, between overseas adventures, before I relocated to Darwin and you to Brisbane, we became almost-neighbours again. You at Waterloo, me at Kensington. You in a large modern apartment building that overlooked a dodgy park; me in a small block next door to a servo. You had flatmate issues, so you’d often come to my place and sit on my couch and we’d talk about nothing important for hours. When I think of us there, in that little flat on the loud street, we’re always laughing. By then school’s end had severed so many relationships, I felt so lucky you kept me.
I remember one afternoon at my place when you kept ignoring your phone.
“Who is it?” I asked you.
Charles Darwin University Creative Non-Fiction Award 21 “Lola,” you said. An older woman you’d been seeing. “I was supposed to be at her place an hour ago.”
I told you off for treating a woman so badly, but was selfishly happy you’d stayed with me. No one would ever occupy the couch beside me in the way you would.
I remember one afternoon playing ‘scenarios’.
You: “If you had the choice of eating a whole bucket of KFC, or never eating KFC again, could you eat the bucket?”
Me: “I’d give it a crack.”
I remember one afternoon when you told me a diabetic friend of yours was having problems with his kidneys and had to go on dialysis. You were afraid that could happen to you. I’d never seen you so shaken. You told me you were going to take better care of yourself.
* * *
The other day, an old travel diary appeared in the middle of my loungeroom. It was one a friend had made for me back in 2004, before I went away on my first big overseas trip. Its cover is a collage of photos of all my friends from that time. You appear on it more than anyone else: three times, two of them in costume. You loved a good dress-up party.
I hadn’t seen the diary in years, but my son likes to open and close cupboard doors, he gets swept up in the swing of hinges, the clunk of closure. He must have pulled it out and left it for me to find. It’s still sitting on the table. Now I dine with you every day.
* * *
When I came to stay with you for a night in Brisbane, you had a new girlfriend.
“What’s she like?” I asked you before we went to meet her for dinner. You’d lost a heap of weight and looked great, which you credited to the ‘Calipo diet’, an odd
22 2020 Northern Territory Literary Awards regime you invented in which you exclusively ate lemon ice blocks. But actually, you’d been exercising really hard.
“She’s great.”
I liked her immediately. She was warm and funny and smart and tall.
Less than a year later, you were engaged. Your wedding was the most joyous I’ve ever been to. The room brimmed with love for you both from every angle. I didn’t stop smiling all night. Your speech was the most beautiful I’d ever heard. Your words, on paper, read aloud. So bloody clever and thoughtful.
You asked me to do a reading at the ceremony.
Six weeks later I was back in the same church, reading your eulogy.
* * *
Your 40th birthday was this year, two months before mine. I could scarcely believe you weren’t here. I needed to talk to you about the new Regurgitator kids album. I needed to run a stupid scenario by you. I needed to have a political argument with you. I really needed to sit next to you on the couch.
* * *
It was my mum who told me. Just two words. “It’s Bill.” That was it. I was sitting on the couch at my parents’ place, having just arrived home for a visit.
I could see by the stricken look on her face that you were dead, but my mind flickered with hope — maybe you were sick? Maybe it was your diabetes. Your kidneys. You’d be OK.
Mum shook her head. I slipped forward off the couch onto the carpet on my knees.
“No! He said he was OK. I talked to him and he said he was OK!”
* * *
Charles Darwin University Creative Non-Fiction Award 23 I’m so sad you didn’t make it to my wedding. In your place was a book you gave me. ‘All the Places You will Go’ by Dr Seuss. A travel gift before that 2004 adventure.
I’m so sad you didn’t get to know my husband well. You’d have argued a lot about politics.
I’m so sad you didn’t meet my son. He’s a cracker.
I’m just so sad you’re not here.
* * *
In one of our last conversations, the one when you told me you’d been diagnosed with depression, years of you snapped into place. Your malaise, your absent- mindedness, your here and there, your up and down. You admitted you were having some dark thoughts. But you said you were OK. I asked again. You insisted you were OK.
Before we hung up, I said, ‘I love you, Bill’. I remember it because those words felt so strange out there in the world. Because that isn’t something we’d ever said to one-another, despite 19 years of what could only be described as love. Because I’d always loved you, and always would. You were my boy friend for 19 years. My best friend. And it’s so fucking stupid that I’d never thought to say it until then. But fuck, I’m glad I did.
“Love you, too,” you’d said.
* * *
And just as our beginning and middle were filled with music, so too is our ongoing epilogue. I can’t listen to the Chilli Peppers without crying. I can’t listen to Regurgitator without smiling. I’m eternally grateful for your introduction to Jurassic Five. I wish you were here to tell me if Triple J is any good any more, or if we’re just old.
24 2020 Northern Territory Literary Awards The river of us is still there. You continue to return and I know you always will. Though you’re not as gentle as you used to be. You appear in floods and tidal waves, triggered by a song or a picture or a dream. Sometimes your arrival is joyous, but a lot of the time it’s just heart-wrenching. It makes me ache. Because it’s not even you that flows beside me. It’s just the memory of you.
Charles Darwin University Creative Non-Fiction Award 25 Charles Darwin University Essay Award
Winner
Nuhansi Wijesinghe To what extent does architecture of the paediatric department at RDH promote a child’s mental wellbeing and healing process? 27
Finalists
Liam Grealy, Kirsty Howey, Tess Lea States of Deferral: A Recent History of Housing at Borroloola 44
Dr Tom Lewis The Hero who Wasn’t – the Mythic Deeds of Pilot Robert Oestreicher in Darwin’s First Air Attack 56
26 2020 Northern Territory Literary Awards To what extent does architecture of the paediatric department at RDH promote a child’s mental wellbeing and healing process? by Nuhansi Wijesinghe
INTRODUCTION For children, hospital admission is a difficult, often traumatic experience. Adding to the confrontations of illness or injury are the stresses of a harsh clinical environment, impairing healing processes.1 It is undeniable that hospital architecture impacts a child’s mental wellbeing, with consensus amongst paediatricians, architects and paediatric staff.2,3,4,5,6,7 Children greatly depend on their surroundings for reassurance, through moods of empathy and warmth.8 Moreover, hospital design impacts staff and parents, whose positivity was consistently a top three factor improving children’s hospital experiences.9
1 Verschoren, L., Annemans, M., Van Steenwinkel, I. & Heylighen, A., 2015. How to design child-friendly hospital architecture?, Belgium: Design4Health. 2 Kerr, W., 2019. Video Conference with National Portfolio Leader of Health at Hames Sharley [Skype video conference with author] (15 05 2019). 3 Senadheera, N., 2019. Paediatrician at Lady Ridgeway Hospital for Children Colombo [emailed questionnaire responses] (03 05 2019). 4 Bonney, D., 2019. Paediatrician at Royal Darwin Hospital [emailed questionnaire responses] (21 05 2019). 5 Tait, R., 2019. Paediatrician at Royal Darwin Hospital [emailed quesitonnaire responses] (13 05 2019). 6 Gleeson, M., 2019. Interview with RDH Ward 5A Clinical Nurse Manager [in-person interview with author] (09 05 2019). 7 Noah, M., 2019. Interview with RDH Ward 5B Clinical Nurse Manager [in-person interview with author] (09 05 2019). 8 Kerr, W., 2019. Video Conference with National Portfolio Leader of Health at Hames Sharley [Skype video conference with author] (15 05 2019). 9 Verschoren, L., Annemans, M., Van Steenwinkel, I. & Heylighen, A., 2015. How to design child-friendly hospital architecture?, Belgium: Design4Health.
Charles Darwin University Essay Award 27 Positive mental wellbeing in children allows easier diagnosis, treatment and is intrinsically linked to children’s physical healing, promoting a speedy recovery.10 Recently, much financial investment has encouraged ‘child friendly’ paediatric environments and was a primary objective of the Royal Darwin Hospital’s (RDH) $22.13 million paediatric ward redevelopment in 2017.11,12 This report discusses over-arching architectural concepts and individual features positively impacting a hospitalised child’s mental wellbeing, allowing its extent at paediatrics ward 5A and 5B in RDH to be determined.
RESEARCH PROCESSES As there is no official list of overarching architectural concepts promoting children’s mental wellbeing as hospital patients, numerous academic sources were analysed to identify key concepts.13,14,15 By collating concepts and features mentioned and cross-referencing between sources, a list of six key concepts affecting a child’s healing process was synthesised. Below are the concepts identified, which have been reviewed by leading architect Warren Kerr AM to ensure the architectural legitimacy of these concepts.16
10 Senadheera, N., 2019. Paediatrician at Lady Ridgeway Hospital for Children Colombo [emailed questionnaire responses] (03 05 2019). 11 Northern Territory Government, 2016. Royal Darwin Hospital paediatric redevelopment. [Online] Available at: https://transport.nt.gov.au/publications/a-growing-territory-december-2016/ royal-darwin-hospital-paediatric-redevelopment [Accessed 13 08 2019]. 12 Bates, V., 2018. ‘Humanizing’ healthcare environments: architecture, art and design in modern hospitals. Design for Health, 2(1), pp. 5-19. 13 Pinhao, C. S. F., 2016. Children’s Hospitals: The role of architecture in children’s recovery and development, Portugal: Tecnico Lisboa. 14 Holst, M., 2015. Optimal Hospital Layout Design, Denmark: Aalborg University. 15 Bishop, K., 2017. Considering Art in a Hospital Environment from Children’s and Young People’s Perspectives, Australia: Asian Journal of Environment-Behaviour Studies. 16 Kerr, W., 2019. Video Conference with National Portfolio Leader of Health at Hames Sharley [Skype video conference with author] (15 05 2019).
28 2020 Northern Territory Literary Awards ARCHITECTURAL CONCEPTS THAT POSITIVELY IMPACT A CHILD’S WELLBEING AND HEALING PROCESS (1) Promoting Sterility
Catering for those with stressed immune systems, design features promoting sterility is emphasised, with >120 studies strongly linking positive hospital design to decreased infection rate.17,18 Single-bed rooms consistently showed greater patient recovery through lowered risk of infection.19 Reduced infection risks and operational costs through shorter than average recovery times outweighed the increase in construction cost of single rooms, making single rooms the long-term cost effective option. At Fiona Stanley Hospital in WA, 82% of beds are in single rooms, opposed to the typical 23% in single rooms seen in Australia, expecting to save $600 million in long-term operational cost 5 years after opening.20
Poor hand hygiene, especially of medical staff, plays a large role in increased hospital infection rates. Six independent studies identified strong correlation between increased number and better accessibility of sinks/dispensers and increased handwashing, performing better than reminder posters and health workshops. In particular, sinks directly outside rooms and bedside dispensers vastly improved hand washing adherence, limiting possible contamination.21
17 Senadheera, N., 2019. Paediatrician at Lady Ridgeway Hospital for Children Colombo [emailed questionnaire responses] (03 05 2019). 18 Ulrich, R. & Quan, X., 2004. The Role of the Physical Environment in the Hospital of the 21st Century: A Once-in-a-Lifetime Opportunity, Texas: Texas A&M University and Georgia Tech. 19 Ibid 20 Kerr, W., 2019. Video Conference with National Portfolio Leader of Heath at Hames Sharley [Skype video conference with author] (15 05 2019). 21 Ulrich, R. & Quan, X., 2004. The Role of the Physical Environment in the Hospital of the 21st Century: A Once-in-a-Lifetime Opportunity, Texas: Texas A&M University and Georgia Tech.
Charles Darwin University Essay Award 29 Low ceilings in wards limit airborne infections as air is more easily filtered, removing many dangerous airborne particles.22 Negative pressure rooms or ‘isolation’ rooms should be used to keep highly infectious patients separated.23
(2) Creating Safe and Familiar Environments
Safety is prioritised in ‘child-friendly’ environments, and dangerous objects should not be within a child’s reach. Ensuring furniture has rounded edges and not crowding rooms with clinical machinery can limit accidents, especially trip hazards.24 Same-handed room layouts (Diagram 2), as opposed to mirrored layouts (Diagram 1) between rooms have proven to increase staff familiarity of rooms, leading to greater staff confidence.25
Diagram 1- An example of a traditional Diagram 2- An example of a mirror-image patient room26 same-handed patient room27
22 Senadheera, N., 2019. Paediatrician at Lady Ridgeway Hospital for Children Colombo [emailed questionnaire responses] (03 05 2019). 23 Tait, R., 2019. Paediatrician at Royal Darwin Hospital [emailed quesitonnaire responses] (13 05 2019). 24 Gleeson, M., 2019. Interview with RDH Ward 5A Clinical Nurse Manager [in-person interview with author] (09 05 2019). 25 Kerr, W., 2019. Video Conference with National Portfolio Leader of Health at Hames Sharley [Skype video conference with author] (15 05 2019). 26 Cason, C., 2009. Patient Room Handedness: An Empirical Examination, Texas: AIA Academy of Architecture for Health Foundation. 27 Ibid
30 2020 Northern Territory Literary Awards Familiarity between hospital and home reassures children, making hospital environments less threatening. Cartoon characters are often used in wall art to create security and reduce hospital anxiety, linking known positive characters to hospital experiences.28,29 Wayfinding designs promote better spatial orientation in wards by using memorable features. As not all children can understand clinical signage, abstract features, such as colours, mosaics, floor markers and large artworks become landmarks in a child’s mental map.30 Recognising their location provides children a great sense of reassurance and safety.31
(3) Providing a Sense of Control, Personalisation and Privacy
Accounting for a child’s individuality and personal needs is central to achieving ‘child-friendly’ healthcare.32 Children experiencing helplessness through lack of control are likely to have increased hospital anxiety, making medical management more difficult.33,34 Increasing patient choice elevates a sense of control, which can be achieved through remotes enabling basic room changes (such as bed position, lights, TV), increasing patient autonomy.35 Designing bedside and wardrobe spaces for personal belongings helps individualise spaces,
28 Senadheera, N., 2019. Paediatrician at Lady Ridgeway Hospital for Children Colombo [emailed questionnaire responses] (03 05 2019). 29 Bishop, K., 2017. Considering Art in a Hospital Environment from Children’s and Young People’s Perspectives, Australia: Asian Journal of Environment-Behaviour Studies. 30 Pinhao, C. S. F., 2016. Children’s Hospitals: The role of architecture in children’s recovery and development, Portugal: Tecnico Lisboa. 31 Chenoweth, H., 2017. 7 Steps for Effective Wayfinding in Healthcare. [Online] Available at: https://info.healthspacesevent.com/blog/7-steps-for-effective-wayfinding-in- healthcare [Accessed 14 08 2019]. 32 Council of Europe , 2011. Guidelines on child-friendly health care, Strasbourg: Council of Europe. 33 Ulrich, R., 1991. Effect of health facility interior design on wellness.Journal of Healthcare Design, Volume 3, pp. 97-109. 34 Senadheera, N., 2019. Paediatrician at Lady Ridgeway Hospital for Children Colombo [emailed questionnaire responses] (03 05 2019). 35 Kerr, W., 2019. Video Conference with National Portfolio Leader of Health at Hames Sharley [Skype video conference with author] (15 05 2019).
Charles Darwin University Essay Award 31 especially impacting the mental wellbeing of teenage patients.36 Increased storage spaces also helps staff and parents, who can easily store children’s belongings to avoid trip hazards.37
Many patient studies have considered privacy most important to a patient after medical services.38 However, a patient’s privacy is often infringed on, through sharing rooms with strangers and routine nurse-care protocols. Children, more strongly than adults, identified single rooms with high privacy.39 In shared rooms, privacy can be increased through thicker curtains or sliding doors between beds. Dedicated rooms for private discussions between doctors and patients/parents is especially important, preventing confidential discussions from occurring in hospital corridors.40
(4) Encouraging Parental Support and Socialisation
Children often depend on parents to help face the difficulties of hospital life.41 Overnight parental stay reduces homesickness in children and worry in parents.42 For staff, parental presence increases safety and individual attention for each child, furthering the importance of designing to encourage parent stay.43
36 Pinhao, C. S. F., 2016. Children’s Hospitals: The role of architecture in children’s recovery and development, Portugal: Tecnico Lisboa. 37 Noah, M., 2019. Interview with RDH Ward 5B Clinical Nurse Manager [in-person interview with author] (09 05 2019). 38 Shepley, M., 2005. Meeting children’s psychosocial needs across the health-care continuum, Texas: The Healthcare Environment. 39 Pinhao, C. S. F., 2016. Children’s Hospitals: The role of architecture in children’s recovery and development, Portugal: Tecnico Lisboa. 40 Ibid 41 Ibid 42 Tait, R., 2019. Paediatrician at Royal Darwin Hospital [emailed quesitonnaire responses] (13 05 2019). 43 Gleeson, M., 2019. Interview with RDH Ward 5A Clinical Nurse Manager [in-person interview with author] (09 05 2019).
32 2020 Northern Territory Literary Awards A parent’s bed or foldable chair should be allocated beside each patient bed with access to amenities, such as laundry services, fridges and other basic appliances. Separate areas for parents, such as a lounge or dining room is recommended for social interaction between parents and to allow parents to care for themselves whilst staying at hospital.44
Encouraging social interaction avoids children feeling isolated and promotes social skills development, having fun and building relationships with someone of similar age to share hospital experiences.45 Age appropriate playrooms and games rooms enable opportunities for socialisation at every age.46 As cross-contamination can be a concern in patient interaction, building small communal spaces, such as library corners between 2-3 patients may be safer than constructing larger play spaces in some situations.47
(5) Creating Positive Distraction
Play and education positively distracts sick children by providing normality.48 Fundamental to children’s lives, these activities provide enjoyment, physical activity, increased socialisation, and continued intellectual and emotional growth. Especially for long-term patients, play reduces frustration arising through boredom while continued education allows easier transition into school after a hospital stay. Both playrooms and educational spaces should have wheelchair access and necessary materials to ensure medication is taken whilst learning.
44 Pinhao, C. S. F., 2016. Children’s Hospitals: The role of architecture in children’s recovery and development, Portugal: Tecnico Lisboa. 45 Ulrich, R., 1991. Effect of health facility interior design on wellness.Journal of Healthcare Design, Volume 3, pp. 97-109. 46 Coyne , I. & Kirwan, L., 2012. Ascertaining children’s wishes and feelings about hospital life. Journal of Child Health Care, 16(3), pp. 293-3014. 47 Senadheera, N., 2019. Paediatrician at Lady Ridgeway Hospital for Children Colombo [emailled quesitonnaire responses] (03 05 2019). 48 The Paediatric Society of New Zealand, 2018. The importance of play for your child in hospital. [Online] Available at: https://www.kidshealth.org.nz/importance-play-your-child- hospital [Accessed 15 08 2019].
Charles Darwin University Essay Award 33 For children too sick to reach these spaces, tables and comfortable sitting areas should be provided in bedrooms for continued play, through means such as craftwork, reading and small toys.49
Artwork provides aesthetic variation, allowing healing entrainments to ‘not look too much like a hospital’.50 In a study at Westmead Children’s Hospital in NSW, children enjoyed diversity in artworks presented, including paintings, sculptures, children’s work and photographs. However, children consistently chose nature- based images and pictures drawn by fellow children as favourites.51 Connection to nature, through art, gardens and outdoor play areas creates calming environments for children. In a number of studies, access to natural landscapes rather than brick walls reduced hospitalisation periods and pain medication dosages.52 When designing outdoor spaces, accessibility should be taken into consideration, allowing bedbound patients to also experience nature.53
(6) Adding Positive Sensorial Dimensions
Sunlight has great implications, generating positivity and regulating melatonin levels to maintain normal sleeping patterns while in hospital.54 Using sunlight over artificial light is also cost effective.55 From an architectural standpoint, considering building orientations and window placements is essential to
49 Pinhao, C. S. F., 2016. Children’s Hospitals: The role of architecture in children’s recovery and development, Portugal: Tecnico Lisboa. 50 Eisen, S. et al., 2008. The stress-reducing effects of art in paediatric health care: art preferences of healthy and hospitalised children. Journal of Child Health Care. 51 Bishop, K., 2017. Considering Art in a Hospital Environment from Children’s and Young People’s Perspectives, Australia: Asian Journal of Environmen-Behaviour Studies. 52 Pinhao, C. S. F., 2016. Children’s Hospitals: The role of architecture in children’s recovery and development, Portugal: Tecnico Lisboa. 53 Kerr, W., 2019. Video Conference with National Portfolio Leader of Health at Hames Sharley [Skype video conference with author] (15 05 2019). 54 Pinhao, C. S. F., 2016. Children’s Hospitals: The role of architecture in children’s recovery and development, Portugal: Tecnico Lisboa. 55 Burns, M., 2012. Art. Light. Color.. [Online] Available at: http://www.themondaylife.org/ art-light-color [Accessed 15 08 2019].
34 2020 Northern Territory Literary Awards maximise sunlight entering the building.56 Windows in rooms should have blinds, controlling the amount of entering light. Dimmable lights may be a compromise, allowing both high intensity lights needed for medical examination and low-level lights to mimic sunlight.57
Across most studies, children consistently ranked white as their least preferred colour.58 The largest and most referenced study of child colour preferences in medical environments suggests that purple, blue and green based colours were most preferred.59
Unwanted noises, such as noisy machinery and other patients have consistently been reported to increase stress, frustration and loss of sleep. Although the World Health Organisation guidelines suggest a <35dB continuous background noise during the day and <30dB during the night, readings in hospitals are often higher, with an average of 45dB-68dB.60 Single rooms, carpet floors and sound absorbing ceiling and wall materials are some effective ways of reducing noise in hospitals.61
56 Ulrich, R. & Quan, X., 2004. The Role of the Physical Environment in the Hospital of the 21st Century: A Once-in-a-Lifetime Opportunity, Texas: Texas A&M University and Georgia Tech. 57 Kerr, W., 2019. Video Conference with National Portfolio Leader of Health at Hames Sharley [Skype video conference with author] (15 05 2019). 58 Burns, M., 2012. Art. Light. Color.. [Online] Available at: http://www.themondaylife.org/ art-light-color [Accessed 15 08 2019]. 59 Park, J., 2007. Environmental color for pediatric patient room design, Texas: A&M University. 60 Ulrich, R. & Quan, X., 2004. The Role of the Physical Environment in the Hospital of the 21st Century: A Once-in-a-Lifetime Opportunity, Texas: Texas A&M University and Georgia Tech. 61 Kerr, W., 2019. Video Conference with National Portfolio Leader of Health at Hames Sharley [Skype video conference with author] (15 05 2019).
Charles Darwin University Essay Award 35 THE EXTENT OF POSITIVE ARCHITECTURAL FEATURES AT RDH (1) RDH has a higher number of single rooms compared to shared rooms, all of which have relatively low ceilings. There are sanitation units outside each room with easy access to a sink and gloves for sterility (Figure 1).62 Ward 5B has two negative pressure rooms with attached wet areas for highly infectious patients. According to Dr. Tait, a paediatrician at RDH, the negative pressure rooms are regularly used, and increased hand- washing locations have allowed him to see personal hand-washing compliancy improvements.63
Figure 1- Sanitation unit
(2) The mirrored ward room layout present may decrease efficiency. RDH nurses stated rooms can often be crowded with machinery around the bed and criticised some materials, such as splintered wooden handrails, which pose potential dangers to children.64,65 Although much artwork was used, few had cartoon/movie characters. Wayfinding principle s were present with large artworks and coloured footprints on the floor.66
62 Wijesinghe, N., 2019. Action research: Photo Analysis of RDH Paediatrics Ward. 63 Tait, R., 2019. Paediatrician at Royal Darwin Hospital [emailed quesitonnaire responses] (13 05 2019). 64 Noah, M., 2019. Interview with RDH Ward 5B Clinical Nurse Manager [in-person interview with author] (09 05 2019). 65 Gleeson, M., 2019. Interview with RDH Ward 5A Clinical Nurse Manager [in-person interview with author] (09 05 2019). 66 Wijesinghe, N., 2019. Action research: Photo Analysis of RDH Paediatrics Ward.
36 2020 Northern Territory Literary Awards (3) Increased patient autonomy is evident through remote controlled lights, TV, blinds, bed hydraulics and help button. One nurse mentioned seeing children having fun and increased positive moods when using the remotes to do tasks themselves.67 Personalisation was increased through available shelf and cupboard space for personal belongings. Each ward room had an assigned native animal, increasing individuality in each room. Doors and blinds (Figure 2) in single rooms and dark curtains between beds in shared room increased privacy.68 An interview room was present although fully white, small and quite uninviting.69
Figure 2 - Single room layout with shelf/ cupboard space for personalisation and blinds for privacy.
(4) Sufficient area for parents and visitors in both single and shared rooms. A foldable bed/chair with pillows provided beside each patient bed for parents (Figure 3).70 Seating for visitors available in single rooms. Parents lounge had a fridge, coffee/tea bar and access to laundry services (Figure 4).71 Nurses revealed that a 2017 paediatrics department survey saw much higher parent satisfaction in services, with >75% of parents reporting that the lounge was ‘very helpful’. Communal areas, such as adolescent games room and Starlight Express Room encourage socialisation.72
67 Gleeson, M., 2019. Interview with RDH Ward 5A Clinical Nurse Manager [in-person interview with author] (09 05 2019). 68 Wijesinghe, N., 2019. Action research: Photo Analysis of RDH Paediatrics Ward. 69 Ibid. 70 Ibid 71 Ibid 72 Noah, M., 2019. Interview with RDH Ward 5B Clinical Nurse Manager [in-person interview with author] (09 05 2019).
Charles Darwin University Essay Award 37 Figure 3 - Foldable bed/chair for Figure 4 - Parent’s lounge parents in shared room
(5) Several play and education areas present, including Starlight Express indoor playroom (Figure 5),73 adolescent games room (Figure 6),74 small library corners between rooms and a hospital school with wheelchair access. One nurse fondly recounted kids waiting eagerly outside the Starlight Express indoor playroom each day and stated that all play areas and games rooms were often used.75 Many artworks were nature-based and specific to NT landscapes (Figure 7).76 Animals, such as fish and turtle tank used to incorporate nature (Figure 8).77 As the ward is on the 5th floor, there was little access to outdoor spaces.78
Figure 5 - Starlight express room Figure 6 - Social area in games TV with Starlight Captain adolescent room
73 Wijesinghe, N., 2019. Action research: Photo Analysis of RDH Paediatrics Ward. 74 Ibid 75 Noah, M., 2019. Interview with RDH Ward 5B Clinical Nurse Manager [in-person interview with author] (09 05 2019). 76 Ibid 77 Ibid 78 Bonney, D., 2019. Paediatrician at Royal Darwin Hospital [emailed questionnaire responses] (21 05 2019).
38 2020 Northern Territory Literary Awards Figure 7 - NT landscapes as Figure 8- Turtle tank to simulate artwork nature
(6) Large windows were present with calming natural views in all rooms (Figure 9).79 Nurses suggested good balance between natural and artificial lights, although it may be improved by having dimmable lights to help children with light sensitivity.80,81 Solid bright green and dark purple walls were present in hallways (Figure 10). Single rooms and sound absorbing ceiling allowed for reduction in unwanted noise, although unwanted sound notably increased in shared rooms.82
Figure 9 - View from window Figure 10- Solid purple walling leading to Starlight Express Room
79 Wijesinghe, N., 2019. Action research: Photo Analysis of RDH Paediatrics Ward. 80 Gleeson, M., 2019. Interview with RDH Ward 5A Clinical Nurse Manager [in-person interview with author] (09 05 2019). 81 Noah, M., 2019. Interview with RDH Ward 5B Clinical Nurse Manager [in-person interview with author] (09 05 2019). 82 Wijesinghe, N., 2019. Action research: Photo Analysis of RDH Paediatrics Ward.
Charles Darwin University Essay Award 39 CONCLUSION Evaluating the architecture of wards to promote the mental wellbeing of hospitalised children is essential to improving hospital experiences and healing processes. Using a range of sources, the key architectural concepts and their effect on a child’s mental wellbeing were identified. By reducing possibilities of infection, stress levels, boredom and feelings of isolation, a child’s recovery speed increases, creating better outcomes for the child, their family and long-term economic benefits for the hospital.83,84,85 In regard to RDH, the 2017 redevelopment to create a ‘child-friendly’ environment was perceived as beneficial by the staff and increased the extent of positive features, especially through increased opportunities to play. Although some short comings exist, especially in the area of ‘creating safe and familiar environments’, many of the positive design concepts discussed are present at RDH. Considering RDH is a relatively small hospital with only two children’s wards, its attention to architecture through financial investment suggests growing appreciation for architecture in a paediatric environment.
83 Pinhao, C. S. F., 2016. Children’s Hospitals: The role of architecture in children’s recovery and development, Portugal: Tecnico Lisboa. 84 Senadheera, N., 2019. Paediatrician at Lady Ridgeway Hospital for Children Colombo [emailed questionnaire responses] (03 05 2019). 85 Kerr, W., 2019. Video Conference with National Portfolio Leader of Health at Hames Sharley [Skype video conference with author] (15 05 2019).
40 2020 Northern Territory Literary Awards References Interviews Gleeson, M., 2019. Interview with RDH Ward 5A Clinical Nurse Manager [in-person interview with author] (09 05 2019).
Kerr, W., 2019. Video Conference with National Portfolio Leader of Health at Hames Sharley [Skype video conference with author] (15 05 2019).
Noah, M., 2019. Interview with RDH Ward 5B Clinical Nurse Manager [in-person interview with author] (09 05 2019).
Questionnaire with Paediatricians Bonney, D., 2019. Paediatrician at Royal Darwin Hospital [emailed questionnaire responses] (21 05 2019).
Senadheera, N., 2019. Paediatrician at Lady Ridgeway Hospital for Children Colombo [emailed questionnaire responses] (03 05 2019).
Tait, R., 2019. Paediatrician at Royal Darwin Hospital [emailed questionnaire responses] (13 05 2019).
Photos and Tour of RDH Paediatric Ward 5A and 5B Wijesinghe, N., 2019. Action research: Photo Analysis of RDH Paediatrics Ward.
Secondary Sources Bates, V., 2018. ‘Humanizing’ healthcare environments: architecture, art and design in modern hospitals. Design for Health, 2(1), pp. 5-19.
Bishop, K., 2017. Considering Art in a Hospital Environment from Children’s and Young People’s Perspectives, Australia: Asian Journal of Environmen-Behaviour Studies.
Burns, M., 2012. Art. Light. Color.. [Online] Available at: http://www.themondaylife.org/art-light-color [Accessed 15 08 2019].
Cason, C., 2009. Patient Room Handedness: An Empirical Examination, Texas: AIA Academy of Architecture for Health Foundation.
Charles Darwin University Essay Award 41 Chenoweth, H., 2017. 7 Steps for Effective Wayfinding in Healthcare. [Online] Available at: https://info.healthspacesevent.com/blog/7-steps-for-effective- wayfinding-in-healthcare [Accessed 14 08 2019].
Council of Europe , 2011. Guidelines on child-friendly health care, Strasbourg: Council of Europe.
Coyne , I. & Kirwan, L., 2012. Ascertaining children’s wishes and feelings about hospital life. Journal of Child Health Care, 16(3), pp. 293-3014.
Eisen, S. et al., 2008. The stress-reducing effects of art in paediatric health care: art preferences of healthy and hospitalised children. Journal of Child Health Care, accessed via Ebscohost.
Hames Sharley, 2019. About Us. [Online] Available at: https://www.hamessharley.com.au/staff/adam-prentice [Accessed 01 03 2019].
Holst, M., 2015. Optimal Hospital Layout Design, Denmark: Aalborg University.
Instituto Superior Técnico, 2018. About Técnico. [Online] Available at: https://tecnico.ulisboa.pt/en/about-tecnico/ [Accessed 02 05 2019].
Murphy, M., 2016. Architecture That’s Meant to Heal. Vancouver: TED Talks.
Northern Territory Government, 2016. Royal Darwin Hospital paediatric redevelopment. [Online] Available at: https://transport.nt.gov.au/publications/a-growing-territory- december-2016/royal-darwin-hospital-paediatric-redevelopment [Accessed 13 08 2019].
Oxford University Press, 2019. [Online] Available at: https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/well-being [Accessed 21 02 2019].
42 2020 Northern Territory Literary Awards Park, J., 2007. Environmental color for pediatric patient room design, Texas: A&M University.
Pinhao, C. S. F., 2016. Children’s Hospitals: The role of architecture in children’s recovery and development, Portugal: Tecnico Lisboa, accessed via Ebscohost.
Shepley, M., 2005. Meeting children’s psychosocial needs across the health-care continuum, Texas: The Healthcare Environment, accessed via Ebscohost.
The Paediatric Society of New Zealand, 2018. The importance of play for your child in hospital. [Online] Available at: https://www.kidshealth.org.nz/importance-play-your-child-hospital [Accessed 15 08 2019].
Ulrich, R., 1991. Effect of health facility interior design on wellness. Journal of Healthcare Design, Volume 3, pp. 97-109. accessed via Ebscohost.
Ulrich, R. & Quan, X., 2004. The Role of the Physical Environment in the Hospital of the 21st Century: A Once-in-a-Lifetime Opportunity, Texas: Texas A&M University and Georgia Tech.
Verschoren, L., Annemans, M., Van Steenwinkel, I. & Heylighen, A., 2015. How to design child-friendly hospital architecture?, Belgium: Design4Health, accessed via Ebscohost.
Charles Darwin University Essay Award 43 States of Deferral: A Recent History of Housing at Borroloola by Liam Grealy, Kirsty Howey, Tess Lea
The Army Will Fix It Borroloola is a very remote town located approximately 970 kilometres drive southeast from the nearest city, Darwin, in the sparsely populated Northern Territory (NT) of Australia. Of the approximately 900 residents, 76 per cent are Indigenous, and crowding within housing is acute.
Ten new houses were supplied in 2006 by the Australian Defence Force under the Army Aboriginal Community Assistance Program (AACAP) in Borroloola’s “town camps”. From 2006 until March of 2019, and despite $14.6 million in funding being available from 2009 under the National Partnership Agreement on Remote Indigenous Housing (NPARIH), new town camp housing did not appear.
In 2018, the Commonwealth Government’s special envoy on Indigenous affairs (demoted former Prime Minister Tony Abbott), publicly stated that “The housing in Borroloola is appalling, the worst I’ve seen anywhere in remote Australia.” Abbott promised action and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation soon reported on a Commonwealth plan to transfer 12 ex-Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) houses from Darwin to Borroloola (Gibson 2018). Prime Minister Scott Morrison stated the project was a priority and would be expedited by the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, at an estimated cost of $10-15 million.
Less than one week after the priority plan to revitalise decommissioned RAAF houses was publicised, it was abandoned. First, when told the ex-RAAF houses were materially inadequate as permanent housing, the Commonwealth claimed they’d be trucked down the highway as “intermittent” accommodation. Then, a 15th of November letter from the Minister for Finance and the Public Service, Mathias Cormann, stated that “The Government is not pursuing the purchase of any former Royal Australian Air Force houses for use in Borroloola.”
44 2020 Northern Territory Literary Awards Hopes were raised and just as swiftly dashed. The NT has long been a frontier for testing novel, unproven, and under-developed Commonwealth Government policy (Lea 2014). In her photographic series, “My Country, No Home”, Yanyuwa Garrwa artist Miriam Charlie juxtaposes portraits of community members and their homes against government inaction: “the government comes, has a look and goes back to their air-conditioned office”. For residents in Borroloola, the non-appearance of RAAF housing was yet another promise not delivered.
Borroloola Housing When we visited Borroloola’s Savannah Way Motel restaurant in October 2018, the tables were filled with various professionals passing through town: Northern Land Council anthropologists and lawyers, NT Rangers, and university researchers, each with their own instructions and meetings to attend. A Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet office is staffed nearby, and we learned that surveying by the NT Department of Infrastructure and Planning, and community consultations by the then NT Department of Housing and Community Development, were scheduled for the following fortnight. Even with no construction, Borroloola housing generates work.
Figure 1. “Borroloola sheeting team on single room huts” 1980, Coburg Collection, Library & Archives NT
Charles Darwin University Essay Award 45 Since those houses were built in Borroloola town camps in 2006, the situation has become increasingly urgent. Residents in Mara, Yanyula, Garawa 1, and Garawa 2 camps face overcrowding, insecure tenancy, water contamination, and failing “health hardware” – housing amenities (taps, showers, pipes, wiring, power points, waste water disposal) required for residents to enact healthy living practices. Many houses were constructed up to four decades ago and some are little more than single room sheds, lacking reticulated water or ablutions (Figures 1 and 2). The 2017 Living on the Edge: Northern Territory Town Camps Review (DHCD 2017) classified 34 per cent of Borroloola houses in “very poor” condition, and another 25 per cent in “poor” condition, with an estimated $14.4 million required to upgrade stock to satisfy the standards of the Residential Tenancies Act 1999.
Addressing such material failures confronts the legacy of Borroloola’s settler colonial history. Borroloola was legally created as a township by government notice in 1885. It was to be a rest stop for drovers on the Gulf stock route between Queensland and northern Australia and a service hub for surrounding pastoral stations (Baker 1992; Avery 1988). In the 1950s, discovery of the optimistically- named “Here’s your chance” mineral deposit determined the area’s significance to extractive industries, including McArthur River Mine, an open-cut lead, zinc, and silver mine located 65 kilometres southwest of town. Settler colonial endeavours etched on maps as demarcated territories add complexity to the contemporary legal status of land and infrastructure in Borroloola. These colonial abstractions continue to haunt efforts to build houses, having assumed new significance under recent government policy.
46 2020 Northern Territory Literary Awards Figure 2. “Borroloola Community Housing” 1980, Coburg Collection, Library & Archives NT
Tenure, Tenure, Everywhere but not a House in Sight Official explanations for why available funding has not been expended on housing in Borroloola emphasise “tenure”, or the Commonwealth Government’s requirement to secure leases before it will fund housing and infrastructure. The tenure process is undeniably complex, though not of residents’ making. Under the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976, NT traditional owners could make a land claim on unalienated Crown land, or land that no private interest had wanted to that point. A successful claim resulted in “Aboriginal land” being granted as inalienable freehold title to a land trust “for the benefit of Aboriginals entitled by Aboriginal tradition to the use or occupation of the land concerned” (ALRA s4.1). Mara camp is located on Aboriginal land to the north of the town boundary.
As a township, Borroloola itself was excluded from claim under the ALRA. Being surrounded by otherwise claimable Crown land, it is now an island surrounded by officially repossessed Aboriginal property. A separate piece of legislation, the Native Title Act 1993, enabled traditional owners to additionally claim that
Charles Darwin University Essay Award 47 native title existed within the Borroloola town boundary where it had not been extinguished by earlier government actions – where public works exist or where freehold title is possessed by private interests, for example. Yanyula, Garawa 1, and Garawa 2 camps (which sit inside the township boundary, Figure 3) are located on Crown Leases in Perpetuity, and in 2016 were recognised as native title land. The complexity of land tenure has contributed, and been used as a tactic, to delay attention to the sites of governmental neglect. Knowing this complexity helps explain the paradox: where money exists for housing, housing still does not appear.
Until the early 2000s, public assets and infrastructure were frequently constructed by Commonwealth and NT governments on Aboriginal land and within town camps on native title land without formal property arrangements. The new “secure tenure” policy changed this. In 2006, the Commonwealth Government amended the ALRA to allow for “township leasing”, under which the land on which a community sits is leased for 99 years to a government body, which can then sublease sections of that land. In 2007, under the Northern Territory National Emergency Response – the “Intervention” – the Commonwealth Government compulsorily acquired five-year leases for 64 remote communities on Aboriginal land and community living areas. In 2008, under the National Partnership Agreement on Remote Indigenous Housing, parties agreed that Commonwealth funding for remote housing was conditional on secure land tenure being settled by states and territories; in other words, governments sought to clarify their own muddled histories of ownership of and access to assets on Indigenous land. In practice, this has proliferated 40-year leases over housing precincts in remote communities to the now NT Department of Local Government, Housing and Community Development, which functions as landlord.
This is a major transfer of control over land use to governments, and a shift from community housing models, under which remote housing was usually managed by an Indigenous Community Housing Organisation, to a conventional public housing model.
Secure tenure ostensibly sought to “normalise” the provision of housing and infrastructure in Indigenous remote communities and town camps (Howey
48 2020 Northern Territory Literary Awards 2014). In former Minister for Indigenous Affairs, Mal Brough’s, justification for the Intervention, “there are three phases to what we are doing: (1) stabilisation, (2) normalisation, and (3) exit”. In theory, the NT Department of Housing obtains a lease and assumes legal responsibility for housing assets, including the formalisation of tenancies, rent collection, and repairs and maintenance. The tying of housing and infrastructure funding to longer-term leases forced the hand of many communities into such contractual arrangements. The effects are not consistent for Indigenous residents across the NT, and even within Borroloola, including: new classifications for housing, which inform the sorts of attention they receive; new tenancy and property management systems; and new occupancy and tenancy agreements. All of these factors have had multiple iterations over the past decade. If neglect is the outcome, this is not for a lack of effort invested in policy reform and invention and significant administrative labour required to enact changing regimes.
Such effort acknowledged, in November 2011, major works and refurbishment were scheduled for Borroloola town camps, but negotiations for leases remained “in process” (ANAO 2011 Appendix 8, 164). Money was made available, but still no houses were built.
Charles Darwin University Essay Award 49 Figure 3. Township boundary and town camps
50 2020 Northern Territory Literary Awards States of Deferral So what was the hold up? In Borroloola, Yanyula, Garawa 1, and Garawa 2 town camps are located on Crown leases held by local entities established in the late 1970s and early 1980s. An initial delay was partly attributable to the need to re- establish the formal capacities of those dormant entities so that housing lease negotiations could be held.
However, this is not the full story. The Northern Land Council (NLC), acting for the town camp entities, wrote to the NT Government in February 2012 to convey that Borroloola residents were ready to negotiate town camp leases. It had not received a reply by December 2015 (Poulsen 2015).
Around the same time, the NT Government advised residents of its preference to build new houses outside the existing town camps, since three town camps would be subject to complete or partial inundation in a 1-in-100 year flood event. Residents rejected this proposal, as it would split up existing culturally- aligned neighbourhoods. And while the Northern Territory Planning Scheme requires separate development consent to construct houses in areas of possible inundation, such consent was obtained in early 2018. Across the same period, the native title application for Borroloola town was being actively pursued. The then-government spuriously blamed the claim for delaying public housing construction. But even when this case was determined and native title was recognised in August 2016, housing issues remained unaddressed.
With development consent obtained, and native title issues resolved, the focus in 2018 shifted back to tenure. In February 2018, Senator Nigel Scullion wrote to the NT Government to request it enter 40-year housing leases in Borroloola town camps, which the NLC first requested six years prior (Senate Estimates 2018). The legal hurdles causing the housing impasse seemed to have been cleared.
In the meantime, however, residents’ houses slowly deteriorated while other community members slept rough. Brough’s three-stage model for the intervention – stabilisation, normalisation, exit – describes a situation of dispossession and temporary intrusion under which enforced leasing arrangements are instituted in exchange for housing and infrastructural improvements. This three-phase
Charles Darwin University Essay Award 51 model resembles anthropologist Ann Stoler’s description of imperial formations as “states of deferral”, establishing “gradated forms of sovereignty” and offering promissory notes for future autonomy (2013, 8). In Borroloola’s case, this would include Indigenous people’s right to manage their own housing on Aboriginal and native title land. However, the conditions of leases by which housing might be managed consolidate the long-term entrenchment of government presence and control. In Borroloola, following this series of delays, residents have complied with the latest demands, but are yet to reap the supposed gains of the secure tenure era.
The Promise of Housing When we last visited Borroloola in May 2019, the long-awaited housing was apparently materialising before our eyes. For the first time since the 2006 AACAP program, three new pre-fabricated houses had been erected at Mara camp, with nine more planned across the other three camps in the immediate future. New temporary demountable accommodation was also in place to accommodate residents affected by the new builds.
A closer inspection revealed familiar bureaucratic and intergovernmental entanglements, along with new contradictions.
The twelve new houses are Commonwealth-funded “emergency” houses, constructed urgently, and without leases, to alleviate the housing crisis to which Tony Abbott had most recently drawn public attention. The conservative Commonwealth Government had muscled in as the saviour amid claims of NT Labor Government delay (Ryan 2019).
The NT Government, for its part, had new promises and new funding, this time to construct 38 new or replacement houses in Borroloola as part of its “Our Community. Our Future. Our Homes.” program (Gibson 2018). Launched in 2018, this program is worth $1.1 billion over a decade, half of which is funded by the Commonwealth. This plan reiterates the generic promise of housing to NT Indigenous communities: to “close the gap” on Indigenous disadvantage. Housing is centrally important to improve health, education, and other social outcomes, and adequate housing is a fundamental right on lands which might
52 2020 Northern Territory Literary Awards now be leased but were never ceded.
The roll-out of this program has itself been hampered by partisan intergovernmental wrangling, with the Commonwealth until recently refusing to deliver their funding share unless the NT Government accepted its proposed governance arrangements (Garrick and Abram 2019). At May 2020, residents advise us that across the past twelve months a number of houses have been constructed and refurbished at Garawa 1, Garawa 2, and Yanyula camps. However the planned roll-out is far from delivered and its non-completion has impacted residents’ ability to effectively enact physical distancing requirements under COVID-19 restrictions. The reasons for these delays are again complex. They include the need for town camps to be surveyed and subdivided under revised planning legislation and ensuring that parcels of land for housing are appropriately “serviced” (that is, connected to power, sewerage, and water infrastructures). These steps are necessary for the state (or another entity) to assume not only legal control, but also ongoing responsibility and care for houses and essential services infrastructure in Borroloola.
In this moment, it is tempting for us to write optimistically on Borroloola housing. Certainly, many people we have spoken to in Borroloola are relieved that there is finally some action. We hesitate, wanting to resist the seduction of a governmental discourse of “fantasy futurism and enforced presentism”, under which contemporary neglect is eschewed for tomorrow’s promises (Guyer 2007, 410).
Instead of unfettered optimism, we note two old promises, artfully transmogrified into new policy assurances with their own rationales. First, the $14.6 million allocated under NPARIH a decade ago has not been converted to housing in Borroloola. That particular promise has submerged under the more spectacular promises of the past 24 months. Second, neither the Commonwealth nor the NT Government appeared to secure leases prior to the construction of new houses in Borroloola (although these too are promised, eventually). Thus, the primary rationale for bureaucratic delay over the past decade (that is, secure tenure) has been selectively waived due to the newly-perceived urgency of the housing situation in Borroloola, as well as understandable community reluctance to sign over long-term leases to a government that has to date been unable to deliver.
Charles Darwin University Essay Award 53 The rhetoric of emergency – ironically caused by state failure – was necessary to finally convert promises into houses. However, without leases to assign legal responsibility a void of government responsibility may return, leading again to disrepair and neglect. From this, we observe that the promise of remote housing generates significant work for bureaucracies, lawyers, and surveyors. But a promise doesn’t keep the rain out; it doesn’t provide safe shelter during a pandemic; and it doesn’t secure your possessions or the wellbeing of your family. A promise is not a house.
Works cited Avery, J. 1988. The law people: History, society and initiation in the Borroloola area of the Northern Territory. PhD dissertation. Department of Anthropology, the University of Sydney.
Baker, R. 1992. “Gough Whitlam time”: Land rights in the Borroloola area of Australia’s Northern Territory. Applied Geography. 12(2): 162-175.
Australian National Audit Office. 2011.Implementation of the National Partnership Agreement on Remote Indigenous Housing in the Northern Territory. Canberra.
Charlie, Miriam. 2016. Miriam Charlie: No country, no home. Artlink Magazine. 1 June.
Department of Housing and Community Development. 2017. Living on the Edge: Northern Territory Town Camps Review. May. Deloitte, Northern Territory Government.
Garrick, Matt and Abram, Mitchell. 2019. Northern Territory land councils breathe sigh of relief as housing squabble settled. ABC. 31 March.
Gibson, Jano. 2018. Former Defence dwellings to be used for Aboriginal housing despite warnings. ABC. 9 November.
Guyer, Jane. 2007. Prophecy and the near future: Thoughts on macroeconomic, evangelical, and punctuated time. American Ethnologist. 34(3): 409-421.
54 2020 Northern Territory Literary Awards Howey, Kirsty. 2014. ‘Normalising’ what? A qualitative analysis of Aboriginal land tenure reform in the Northern Territory. Australian Indigenous Law Review. 18(1): 4-23.
Lea, Tess. 2014. Darwin. Sydney: NewSouth Books
Poulsen, Jill. 2015. Northern Land Council told to work faster on native title applications. NT News. 17 December.
Ryan, Hannah. 2019. This tiny remote town asked Tony Abbott for better housing – and were surprised when it actually arrived. BuzzFeed News. 16 May.
Senate Estimates. 2018. Finance and Public Administration Legislation Committee. 25 May. Canberra: Parliament of Australia.
Stoler, Ann. 2013. Introduction. “The rot remains” From ruins to ruination. In A. L. Stoler (ed.) Imperial debris: On ruins and ruination, 1-35. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Charles Darwin University Essay Award 55 The Hero who Wasn’t – the Mythic Deeds of Pilot Robert Oestreicher in Darwin’s First Air Attack by Dr Tom Lewis
One of the enduring Darwin “first raid” stories is of American fighter pilot Lieutenant Robert Oestreicher. Of ten American fighters defending in the Japanese air raid of 19 February 1942, only his P-40E survived. Uninjured, he landed his machine, heavily damaged, almost two hours later. He said he downed two divebombers.
On a day of overwhelming Japanese superiority, here was a positive David versus Goliath story, one historians acknowledge.
The truth is different. Oestreicher was a novice fighter pilot with just 14 hours on P-40s before leaving the USA. When he saw Japanese aircraft he dived away to save himself and hid in clouds. His aerial claims were invented. In 1982 he returned to Darwin where he lied further about his fight. He has become, in books, magazines, museum exhibits and articles, a hero of the biggest aerial attack on Australia. But none of it is true.
The record needs to be set straight: it overshadows the true heroism and sacrifice of the other nine fighter pilots who flew in Darwin’s defence that day.
Background Darwin was a substantial base which the Japanese, victorious in what is now Indonesia and Timor, wanted to see shut down. It possessed a deep water harbour, facilities for ships and aircraft, and an infrastructure support network.
In January 1942, the Japanese Navy tried to close Darwin with a submarine campaign. Using minefields and torpedoes, they aimed to paralyse shipping and block Darwin’s fuel supply. The plan failed, and one of the 80-man submarines,
56 2020 Northern Territory Literary Awards the I-124, was sunk by HMAS Deloraine.1 The Japanese withdrew to plan again. On 19 February , off four aircraft carriers, 188 aircraft were flown for a surprise raid. Kate high-level bombers would strike first, and Val divebombers next. The Zeroes would protect them all. In their way were 10 P-40 fighters of the United States Army Air Force’s 33rd Pursuit Squadron; five aloft and five on the ground after having landed to refuel.
From his own report it seems that after seeing Zeroes shortly before 1000, Oestreicher dived away from formation yelling “Zeroes” into his radio. Discharging his drop tank, he flew south away from Darwin. Meanwhile the other pilots were set upon by Zeroes, in no position for an even fight.2 They were rapidly shot down.3
The raid ended with 30 aircraft destroyed, 235 people dead, and 11 ships sunk. By 1030 all of the attackers had gone.
1 See Darwin’s Submarine I-124. 2 The ten P-40s of the United States Army Air Force had taken off earlier that day, attempting to reach Java. Stymied by weather, they had returned to Darwin to refuel and try again. The account given above of all of the actions is distilled from Bob Alford’s Darwin’s Air War (2nd edition), and Carrier Attack. A full list of several hundred sources can be found in that book. (Dr Tom Lewis and Peter Ingman; Avonmore Books; 2013.) The authors relied on a translation of the Japanese Senshi Sosho war record in Tokyo archives arranged by the Darwin Military Museum. They also completed their own translation of the Kaga fighter Kodo chosho by Haruki Yoshida. 3 Haslett, Gary. P-40 Over Darwin. Interview with Lieutenant Robert McMahon. “Kittyhawk Down.” DVD. 2013. McMahon says in this interview he turned “his flight” over to Robert Walker after his radio went out, and joined Pell’s flight and landed. So was Oestreicher a flight leader? Bob Alford advises: “In his earlier manuscript and later in the one for Bill Bartsch he states that while Pell was the CO both he and Peres were the flight leaders – Peres led A Flt and McMahon led B Flt. These were assigned at Amberley. Oestreicher was definitely not a flight leader but there is conjecture (unsubstantiated) that Peres handed over the flight to him when he went down to clarify the garbled message. But, as McMahon stated you don’t lead a flight by weaving over the top. I believe Oestreicher was weaving over the flight and when they were attacked, yelled a warning, then pitched out and fled the scene.” [Pers. Comm with the author, Oct 2018]
Charles Darwin University Essay Award 57 Oestreicher’s Account At 1145, by his later reports, Oestreicher landed at the RAAF Base, now a smoking ruin. His aircraft was undamaged except for a burst tyre. His commanding officer and three of his fellow pilots were dead.
The story of Oestreicher shooting down two aircraft appeared in no official USAAF accounts, and is not in the Lowe Report, the comprehensive examination of the raid carried out within weeks. It was on 21 July, four months later, that Oestreicher composed a report:
After flying among the clouds for about half an hour I spotted two Series 97 dive bombers with fixed landing gear on a course heading for Batchelor Field. Intercepting them at about fifteen hundred feet I fired and saw one definitely burst into flame and go down. The other was smoking slightly as he headed for the clouds. I lost him in the clouds.4
Later that same afternoon a report came through that a coast artillery battery had located both planes within a mile of each other. These were the first confirmed aerial victories on Australian soil.
This is complete invention. No such divebombers were shot down – none have been found and neither are such losses mentioned in the Japanese records. No reports from a “coast artillery battery” – presumably he meant one of the gun sites ringing Darwin – have been located.
4 Extract of ‘Activities of 33rd Pursuit Squadron Provisional -- February, 15, 1942 to February 19, 1942. Dated 21 July 1942. ROBERT G. OESTREICHER, 2nd Lieut., Air Corps, Pilot. Extracted from History of Fifth Air Force, Part I, App II, Volume IV, Document 932. “CERTIFIED TRUE COPY” Robert Porter Major, Air Corps. (Courtesy Bob Alford) Note this report, written in July 1942, is a separate document to his flight log/diary, which was destroyed in a crash in October 1942.
58 2020 Northern Territory Literary Awards If any US pilot had shot down two Japanese aircraft it would have been cited; indeed lauded, and the pilot’s name celebrated by his own force. The raid was extremely widely reported in hundreds of newspapers – there is nothing in any newspapers or official reporting of the time.5 The Lowe report said “one Japanese dive bomber and one Zero fighter” had been brought down in the action: the wrecks of these had both been found. The investigation had no way of knowing of two more aircraft which crash-landed in the sea on the way back to the carrier group.6
Oestreicher’s statement makes little sense and is littered with contradictions. He claimed he saw two divebombers “on a course heading for Batchelor Field”. Why would any aircraft fly south? The aircraft carriers were to the north, and even a novice pilot – and these were veterans of Pearl Harbor – could navigate visually with the distinctive land features of Darwin harbour and the two Tiwi Islands to the north, in perfect flying weather of blue skies and scattered clouds. Why would any bomber pilot leave the protective cover of the Zero fighters? The Vals only carried one 250kg bomb, and once it was delivered, left the vicinity immediately, their usefulness negated. Every second over the target area was dangerous, with thousands of troops firing rifles at the aircraft; in addition to the heavier fire of many anti-aircraft weapons.
5 The newspapers of the day can be easily found in Trove, the online database of Australian print media. The reports of the day were given a lot of information, which given there was no access to Japanese reports, was quite accurate: 235 dead; 30 aircraft destroyed, and 11 ships sunk – Carrier Attack cites precise sources, numbers, and details. 6 Bombing of Darwin. Report by Mr Justice Lowe. National Archives of Australia: A431, 1949/687. (pp: 9-10). The Commission of Inquiry sat from 5-10 March in Darwin. It was a comprehensive and reasonably accurate examination of what happened on the 19th, but did not have access of course to any Japanese records to ascertain exactly how many aircraft attacked; where they were from, and so on. Much of the Report was concerned with what lessons could be learnt and applied to future raids. It should be emphasised in relation to this article it was concerned primarily with Australian matters. The USA’s part in the battle is understated; for example there was no attention paid to the USS Peary and its high loss of life beyond merely giving an inaccurate total number of deaths. The reason for all of the P-40s being given as destroyed may well have been that none were flying in Darwin from 20 February; nine having been destroyed and Oestreicher flying his out. Oestreicher is not mentioned in the Report; nor is there any story of two Japanese bombers having been shot down and RAAF personnel locating the wrecks as the US pilot asserted. There are no documents in the National Archives that mention Oestreicher.
Charles Darwin University Essay Award 59 Oestreicher says this was “half an hour” after the initial contact. This is ridiculous: the Vals carried one bomb, and if a pilot was lost, he would have ditched the bomb, and headed north. The raid lasted likely only 20 minutes at a maximum, with the Kates bombing first and leaving, and the Vals expending their bomb and also departing. What Oestreicher was actually doing for the next hour after the raid had ended is unknown. What he should have been doing was refueling and re-arming, hopefully to be in a position to attack any future raid.
Oestreicher was indeed witness to the second Darwin raid that struck around 1145. He then claimed to have met with USA Brigadier General Patrick Hurley:
I went to the Twelve Squadron Hangar and there reported to Captain wheel as (sic) and General Patrick Hurley what had happened and that I thought I had shot down one plane and that the other might be classed as a “probable”. The following morning I took off at dawn and flew to Daly Waters where a Squadron Leader Connely took charge of repairing my plane. Later that same afternoon a report came through that a coast artillery battery had located both planes within a mile of each other.7
None of this was recorded by Hurley’s aide Lieutenant Bobb Glenn, in his later account. If Oestreicher had shot down two aircraft it would have made him the hero of the hour, but there is no such description. Glenn’s party took shelter from the second raid and obtained a car to take the General south immediately.8
7 Copy sourced from Bob Alford, who noted: “The report of Oestreicher’s was part of a wider series, and the copy I have of the original is annotated: ‘Note: Extracted from History of Fifth Air Force, Part I, App II, Volume IV, Document 932.’ Emails between Alford and the author, 2012. 8 Glenn, Lt. Bobb B. The Java Mission and the Bombing of Darwin. Historical Society of the Northern Territory. Occasional paper Series. Number 7/2008. (See pages 16-17) Edmonds says that Hurley “received Oestreicher’s report at 1145” (p. 359) but this was when the second raid was beginning.
60 2020 Northern Territory Literary Awards The next morning, by his own account, Oestreicher flew his P-40 to Daly Waters airstrip, 620 kilometres south, where he remained for several days, carrying out flights he later dubiously labelled Combat Missions. On 27 February he received orders to join a new unit in NSW. But the next day he heavily damaged his P-40 during a landing accident in Queensland. He continued to Amberley, onboard a Dutch Lodestar that had been accompanying him.
At this time Oestreicher met one of the other pilots, McMahon, in hospital in Brisbane. McMahon recalled that Oestreicher was using the unusual circumstances for his own advantage. Possibly this was the only time the only pilot who had escaped unscathed in the raid met any of the surviving pilots from the 19 February action.9 Oestreicher (along with all of the other P-40 pilots) was soon awarded the Distinguished Service Cross by General MacArthur.10 Notably he was not given a higher decoration, which would have been the norm if he had shot down two of the enemy.
How did the “two bombers downed” story arise? As there was no squadron structure to confirm and record the air-kill claims, as would normally be the case, how did they arise? Two official American histories, of 1944 and 1948, do not mention Oestreicher’s claims.11
The first time his story was mentioned in print was in a popular book. The Army Air Forces in World War II describes the Darwin fight, with the names of pilots, and concludes: “Only Lt. Robert G. Oestreicher managed to bring in his bullet- punctured P-40 to a normal landing.” The second, The AAF in Australia to the
9 The group appear to have maintained strong views on Oestreicher, although they largely kept these to themselves. In 1999 historian Bob Alford was able to meet the widow of another of the pilots, John Glover. She simply said she had “no time” for Oestreicher. None of the surviving other five pilots have ever backed up Oestreicher’s story. 10 “Beats 114-10 Odds.” “Lieut. Robert G. Oestreicher Awarded DFC by MacArthur.” The Miami Student, Vol. 068, No. 28. (Jan. 12, 1943) 11 See: (1) Craven, W.F. & Cate, J.L. The Army Air Forces in World War II, Volume I Plans & Early Operations January 1939 to August 1942, Chapter 10: Loss of the Netherlands East Indies. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1948. https://archive.org/details/ Vol1PlansAndEarlyOperations/page/n449 (p. 393) (2) Army Air Force Historical Study No.9, The AAF in Australia to the Summer of 1942. Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama: Assistant Air Chief of Staff Intelligence Historical Division, July 1944. (p. 23)
Charles Darwin University Essay Award 61 Summer of 1942, has less detail, and says of the USAAF fighters: “Aircraft losses for the Allies totaled 9 P-40s shot down….” None of the pilots are mentioned by name.
Oestreicher had been telling his two bomber story from 1943. A letter to his father said: “I have two Nip notches on my belt….My ship was pretty well shot up having some sixty odd holes in it….The two ships were confirmed by a coastal artillery unit...12 A local paper reported: “he had finished off one Jap bomber and crippled another. He landed with 60 bullet holes in his plane.“13 14 Other papers reported similarly, and Oestreicher was widely feted.
The two-bomber story first arises in book form in 1951 in Walter Edmonds’ They Fought with What They Had. This covers US air operations in the Western Pacific from December 1941 until March 1942. Edmonds drew on interviews from 169 airmen of the Pacific War. As so few official records exist regarding this period, this book is well regarded, and perhaps has the status of a quasi-official history. Edmonds tells us:
Only Oestreicher fought his way clear and then, finding himself alone among the Japs, flew south into the clouds, from which a little while later he ambushed two dive bombers, shooting one down…. Oestreicher came in at 1145 to refuel and rearm his plane and change a damaged wheel…15
Edmonds wished to portray brave and heroic Americans battling against insurmountable odds; he admits much material was received verbally and relied on recollections, which, he said, “may not make for definitive history in the eyes of military scholars”. The 19th of February accounting is thinly sourced, with none of the P-40 pilots interviewed.
12 Undated letter in the possession of Bob Alford. 13 Miami Student. “Beats 114-10 Odds.” 12 January 1943. 14 Miami Student. “Beats 114-10 Odds.” 12 January 1943. The Columbus Citizen Feature Magazine. “Nip Notches.” 30 August 1942. All items supplied by Bob Alford. 15 Edmonds, Walter. They Fought with What They Had. Boston: Little, Brown, 1951. (p. 354, p. 357)
62 2020 Northern Territory Literary Awards In 1957 the Official History of the Royal Australian Navy was published. On the subject of the air battle over Darwin, without sources, Oestreicher shoots down “one fighter, and two dive bombers”.16 The Army History, two years later, reported: “Oestreicher got into cloud cover, from which he later shot down two bombers, and brought his bullet-marked machine home.”17 In 1962, the RAAF Official History cited Edmonds as their source, strangely crediting Oestreicher with a Zero fighter rather than a Val divebomber.18
Popular books appeared telling the story, but it took three decades for Oestreicher to receive an official USA credit. In 1978 theUSAF Credits for the Destruction of Enemy Aircraft, World War II cites Second Lieutenant Robert G Oestreicher, 33 Pursuit Squadron (Provisional), for a single air victory on 19 February 1942.19
In 2010 William Bartsch’s Every Day a Nightmare noted that in several cases Oestreicher’s story was contradictory, and in particular his account “does not jibe with those of two surviving pilots” – Wiecks and McMahon.20 This was followed in 2011 by Bob Alford’s authoritative Darwin’s Air War, and in 2013 Tom Lewis and Peter Ingman’s Carrier Attack. Both works, having access to Japanese records, suggested the claim was impossible. Alford, Lewis and Ingman stated definitively the losses of the 19th:
Type Carrier Crew Fate A6M2 Zero Hiryu Flyer 3c Hajime Crash-landed Melville Island; BII-124; Toyoshima pilot captured and made POW #5349
16 Gill, G. Hermon. Royal Australian Navy 1939-1942. Melbourne: Collins, 1957. (p. 591) 17 Wigmore, Lionel Gage. Australia in the War of 1939–1945. Series 1 – Army. Volume V – South–West Pacific Area – First Year: Kokoda to Wau. Chapter 2 – The Island Barrier. https:// www.awm.gov.au/collection/C1417309 1959. (p 70) 18 Gillison, Douglas Napier. Royal Australian Air Force, 1939–1942. https://www.awm.gov.au/ collection/C1417315 1962. (p. 426) 19 USAF Credits for the Destruction of Enemy Aircraft, World War II http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/ fulltext/u2/a542272.pdf (p. 143) 20 Bartsch, William H. Every Day a Nightmare. American Pursuit Pilots in the Defense of Java, 1941-1942. Texas A&M University Press. 2010. (pp: 234-235)
Charles Darwin University Essay Award 63 A6M2 Zero Kaga Flyer 1c Yoshio Wing damaged after hitting Egawa a tree; ditched near carriers; pilot rescued D3A1 Val Kaga Flyer 1c Takezo Shot down near Darwin with AIl-254; Uchikado a number of credits as to #3304 FCPO Katsuyoshi how – see footnote21; crew Tsuru KIA; buried at the site; later disinterred and buried at the local Japanese war cemetery; later disinterred and reburied at the Cowra War Cemetery, New South Wales, Australia.22 D3A1 Val Soryu Flyer 1c Takeshi Ditched near carriers; crew Yamada rescued Flyer 1c Kinji Funazaki
The rest of Oestreicher’s flying service was undistinguished; indeed upon analysis it appears he had many problems flying and was eventually transferred. In 1982 the pilot returned to Darwin for the 40th anniversary of the raid. There he was interviewed by media and historians. His account of the downing of the Vals includes:
21 The downing of this Val has been debated over a number of years by several military historians. The general consensus seems to be it was targeted by everyone who could bring a weapon to bear on it. Much credit was given to “Darko” Hudson, a Gunner of the 2nd Heavy Anti-Aircraft Battery, who fired at it while clad only in towel, boots and helmet after exiting from a shower. But sighting a Val at height and speed, and targeting it effectively with a Lewis gun rested on the shoulder of a comrade is virtually impossible, and given the amount of bullet and flak damage discerned in the wreck it would be more than generous to credit Hudson alone. 22 Courtesy Bob Alford, who also advises that Both Uchikado and Tsuru were buried in a rough sapling fenced grave adjacent to the aircraft wreckage and re-buried at Berrimah on 18 September 1942. They were later transferred to Cowra in NSW by 13 May 1964 along with another 30 Japanese airmen. Detail of the tin plaque nailed to the original grave post is shown in his Darwin’s Air War.
64 2020 Northern Territory Literary Awards Got them both and we verified it the next day when some of the RAAF ack ack boys and myself [author emphasis] went out there. They took a piston off one of the engines and cut it in half and made the ashtray that I have brought back now and gave to the Lord Mayor because I believe it belongs in Darwin.23
The piston ashtray has survived and is held in the Lord Mayor’s office in Darwin. But it could have been made from one of the many thousands of the type of engine it came from. It is notable Oestreicher’s story had changed by his 1980s visit to have him visiting the crash site; previously he had just said his “two kills” had been confirmed by others. The “RAAF ack ack boys” claim is impossible: the Army operated the anti-aircraft sites. Notably, there are no accounts of any visit to Oestreicher’s supposed wreck in any of the several accounts of the 19th raid written by AA gunners, nor in their unit war diaries.24
The presentation of the piston smacks of plotting, and an attempt to take advantage of the stories of heroism Oestreicher knew were false. His visit to Darwin was surrounded by well-wishers; presentations, and journalists’ interviews. He was presented with a plaque by the residents of Cox Peninsula. The social gatherings must have been quite lively, and he would have been the hero of the hour.
The story with its sources and dates summarised show up another significant fact: that the pilot constantly got his own story wrong in the details of the supposed enemy aircraft:
23 “A6M/D3A Piston Research.” By James I. “Jim” Long. Copy in possession of the author – courtesy Bob Alford. 24 For example see Jack Mulholland’s Darwin Bombed. (NSW: Bookbound Publishing, 2009.) Mulholland’s account was published as Use the 1916 Ammo First, in 1995, and in 1999 as Darwin Bombed by Australian Military History Publications. The third version of the work was “greatly expanded”, according to the verso. Mulholland remained in Darwin for months after the raid. He described the attack and surrounding events in great detail. The recovery of the piston would have been widely circulated amongst the Army AA crews – there is no mention of it.
Charles Darwin University Essay Award 65 Date Aircraft said to Originator Notes have been shot down July 1942 2 “Type 97, Oestreicher in his • Oestreicher’s logbook credited rewritten logbook rewritten by himself after this day” ¬– of July original lost Kates, also • Oestreicher claimed “divebombers” Australian forces visited the wreck sites
• The Kate is not a divebomber
Jan 1943 One bomber; The Miami Student • Oestreicher’s father in “crippled newspaper interview to paper another” • Miami’s first WWII ace 1951 2 divebombers Popular historian • Edmonds, Walter. They Edmonds Fought with What They Had. Boston: Little, Brown, 1951.
• The two official USAAF histories of 1944 and 1948 do not credit Oestreicher with any kills. 1957 One fighter Royal Australian • No source given and two Navy Official divebombers History 1959 2 bombers Australian Army • Type of aircraft not given Official History • No source given
66 2020 Northern Territory Literary Awards 1962 Zero fighter RAAF Official • Credits Edmonds as History source 1966 2 divebombers Douglas • In Darwin’s Pearl Harbour Lockwood 1978 1.0 enemy OfficialUSAF • Scores calculated for .25 aircraft Credits for the or .50 etc of an aircraft Destruction of to give credit for group Enemy Aircraft attacks 1980 2 divebombers Timothy Hall • In Darwin 1942 1982 2 single-seat Oestreicher • In interview with divebombers historian Alan Powell
• There were no such divebombers in Japanese usage 1982 • Kate Oestreicher? • As per the two piston labels with “T.97 SSF” • Single seat and “Japanese Zero” fighter given in the wording • Zero Story repeated later usually as two divebombers in other accounts
Oestreicher, in a fashion characteristic of witnesses not telling the truth, gets his facts consistently wrong. This is why suspects in police investigations are interviewed several times, and they are asked to tell their story again, often to their indignant “I’ve told you this already” protest. The technique is to see if the person is looking into their memory and recounting what is indeed there, or whether they are telling something they have made up – and which is therefore much more difficult to remember. Oestreicher consistently gets the facts of the aircraft he “shot down” wrong: they are Kates; then divebombers, then single-seat divebombers, then a Kate/single seat fighter, and then a Zero. The truth is there were no aircraft at all.
Charles Darwin University Essay Award 67 Robert Oestreicher died at Wichita, Kansas on 10 January 1991 aged 73. He has achieved some fame for his supposed action. A poster of Oestreicher in action has since been created, and a postcard of the same print.25 Modern books continue to repeat the story. He is a featured character in the electronic Defence of Darwin Experience displays at the Darwin Military Museum.
But Oestreicher should not be commemorated for anything more than flying in the defence of Darwin. He was not a hero of the 19th of February raid, and this should be established so it does not obscure the actions of those in the sky, on the ground, and in ships, who shot back at the Japanese air armada.
25 Unframed print “Zeros, Zeros, Zeros” by Mark Donoghue.
68 2020 Northern Territory Literary Awards Flash Fiction Award
Winner
Kaye Aldenhoven Sardines 70
Finalists
Lee Frank Letter to Nathan 72
James Murray Sally Gleeson 74
Julie U’Ren Fire on the horizon 76
Flash Fiction Award 69 Sardines by Kaye Aldenhoven
Sardines. Like bloody sardines, grumbled Grandpa. The cheek of him. He had most room and he still complained. Nana always said he was never happy.
The rest of them were pressed in the back like a can of sardines. Dad had to sit in the driver’s place. Grandpa sat in the front best seat. Mum and Nana were in the back, with Carole squashed between them. Mum nursed baby David and Nana nursed my little brother Robert, the squirmer, I’d dumped him onto her lap.
Dad looked at me. I looked at Dad. In the front Tuppeny Bit. He opened the driver’s door and I squeezed past the steering wheel and settled next to Grandfather, trying not to ruffle his feathers. Dad had given me a warning look about that, so I settled carefully without bumping Grandpa. Dad sat on his end of the bench seat and turned the ignition key. Our car started up, straight away.
Our new car. Our first car. Dad had bought it today from his boss Mr. Whitmarsh because the boss had a new car. They were both Vauxhalls, ours was shiny grey, battleship grey, and Dad’s boss’ brand new car was cream. Dad had ridden his bike over to Cheltenham to collect the car, abandoning his old bike and driving home to pick us up, and then to Cheltenham again to pick up his mother and father and his bike. He never rode that bike again.
From Burleigh Avenue we sardines were driven down the Parade, over the railway lines, past Holden Factory to the Port Road. When we crossed the railway lines, I thought of Grandpa driving trains, because that’s what he did when he went to work, though he did not go to work often because he could not breathe. From the mustard gas.
Can you drive a car like Dad? I asked him.
No, cars work differently.
70 2020 Northern Territory Literary Awards Dad waited for a break in the line of cars whizzing past on the way to Adelaide. He needed a long gap because he was worried he’d kangaroo hop, worried that his polio foot would slip off the clutch. We kangaroo hopped and we counted the hops out loud until he turned right, onto the lane heading to Port Adelaide.
We might end up at the beach, he said. We’ll just see which way the girl wants to go.
I want to go to Semaphore, I said.
Not you girl. I mean the car will choose. Dad laughed. I don’t want to do anymore kangaroo hops like that one.
Mum closed her eyes and pressed her lips tight together. I knew I was supposed to keep my mouth shut too.
For God’s sake, stop wriggling. The back seat is none of your business, warned Grandpa.
Now I am a real sardine, squashed flat, not allowed to move, not allowed to talk. It’s like my head has been pulled off and I’ve been soaked in thick olive oil.
Flash Fiction Award 71 Letter to Nathan by Lee Frank
Nathan,
I don’t know how to tell you this.
I can’t even see the page coz my eyes are dripping bad and my hands are trembling like I’ve got the horrors.
Some words look half-melted like messages people finger write on cold windscreens, or like those weird ink blot tests head peepers give you; but I reckon you’re about the only person I know who could read the stains and know what I’m trying to say.
It was a crazy time. I did some bad shit and some of it smashed on you. That’s why I’m writing.
To say sorry.
We were like babies when we started. Us, the cheeky, smart arse gutter rats. That first night I snuck out of my room and I saw you and you saw me; you just stayed sitting there. ‘Hey, ninja girl.” you whispered on your veranda. And it was dark and I said nothing and you did too and if anyone had murmured the tiniest ‘‘Boo’ it would have been as loud as a shout from a fire truck
But we were quiet and your face was big and bright and it was like a beam of light and the light broke through all the dark shit piled on top of me, me and my bones and the light broke through and I kissed you and that was our first night.
Remember my ex? The one from Tennant? The one I got myself into the lock up for just so I could be there with him inside for his birthday? He was in Darwin on some program I couldn’t get in coz it was only for boys but I did a bunch of shit and they sent me up here to the Reboot program. In Palmerston. Twenty minutes away.
72 2020 Northern Territory Literary Awards I was going stir crazy in Reboot and my sister came and I was dying for some news about Devon. No Facebook for six weeks. None. But when she told me the news I just blew up. Gay?! What happened to him? He was mine and I was his and someone did something to change that and I was gonna smash them.
That’s why I was outside that night… hunting for someone to smash… and that’s when you were on your porch and you laughed at me.
But the rest of it.
Like I said; I don’t know why I did what I did.
There is no baby and there never was.
I’ve got cuts and bruises from bashing my head against the door of my room. I tell people I was in a fight and that’s been the truth so many times before no one thinks twice about it now.
I know I’m not a bad person but I know I’ve done bad things.
My address is on the back of the envelope. If you still hate me, I understand. But if you don’t, it’d make a big difference to me, if you’d send something back.
I miss you.
Lorna
Flash Fiction Award 73 Sally Gleeson by James Murray
Brendan got to the church at three-thirty. He knelt at the back-corner pew, putting his face into his hands. He knew anyone seeing him would think he was praying, but he wasn’t praying, he was just resting. He liked it there, in the quiet dark, the red candle always burning. If it’s burning, God is present, they said, but Brendan didn’t go for that. Eyes shut, he saw the flame inside himself. If it’s burning, he breathed, I am here.
He sat up after ten minutes. People were arriving for the 4pm service. Brendan rose and walked the side aisle towards the sacristy behind the altar, turning to see the eight- and nine-year-olds enter two-by-two and make their way to the front pews, girls in white dresses and boys in white shirts, a nun leading and two in tow. From St Mary’s Orphanage, making their First Communion, Brendan knew. He recognised faces.
Just before four o’clock, Father O’Reilly opened his door and looked at Brendan standing ready in his altar-boy uniform, and he gave him a thumbs-up. Then he pointed leftwards, asking about the altar preparation, and got a thumbs-up from Brendan. Sister Bernadette came in. They hadn’t seen a girl? They’d done a head count, a roll call, Sally Gleeson was missing. Eight-year-old, red hair, white dress, black shoes. She was on the bus, but no one remembered her since. They searched the church, the alcoves, the bus, quizzed the driver, and people were calling ‘Sally!’ in all directions, search parties sent five ways.
At four-twenty, Brendan saw movement in the thick black ceiling-to-floor curtain against the back wall. He went over and peered along the wall, seeing Sally Gleeson in her white dress. She looked at him a few seconds, terrified, then put her finger to her lips. Ssshh!
For a minute he thought he’d do as she asked. Then he saw Sister Bernadette talking to a policeman on the front steps, and he walked over and tapped her
74 2020 Northern Territory Literary Awards shoulder and pointed inside. ‘What, dear?’ she said, and to the policeman, ‘excuse me,’ and they followed Brendan in. A few metres short of the curtain, he pointed to the little black shoes showing in the gap above the floor.
He knew he’d get into trouble, getting home after five o’clock. They’d told him no excuses. Mr McGregor yelled at him, and pressed him hard into the refrigerator, and sent him to his room. The told him he was leaving at the end of the month. They said sorry. They said they couldn’t afford him.
He didn’t care where he went. That is what he told himself. It would be his sixth placement in three years. It made no difference. Things hadn’t been the same since he’d overheard one foster parent say to the other, ‘I can’t stand the sight of him.’
He pulled the covers over his head. He liked it there, in the quiet dark, the red candle burning. Please, he breathed. Please, find me.
Flash Fiction Award 75 Fire on the horizon by Julie U’Ren
The smell of smoke in the room wakes her. It’s early morning still dark, no moonlight. He’s already upright and out of bed, reaching for clothes. His shoes clatter on the wooden floor as he flicks the hall light on. She rolls over and pulls the sheet over her head, as if to hide from the smoke and the possibility of what it means. Hears his soft singsong talk to the dog, then the car driving off. She drifts back to sleep. Dreams of rain, the dam filling with water, the sound of frogs, and tucking her children into bed, their small bodies curled into themselves.
When steps into the room later, she startles. There’s no rain, or frogs, she holds the softness of the memory of her children who are no longer small. The heat clings. She reaches out for him, feels his long curls and murmurs through dry lips.
What’d you find? Should we panic?
No, I drove up the road, past the neighbours’ nothing. Went east all the way out past the golf course. There’s a fire a few kays farther at the edge of the forest. I could see flames, just a few meters away, red tongues leaping high in the air.
Really? You call the CFA?
Trucks are already there. I spoke to a guy who told me they had it under control, said I should go home.
Sure, they don’t want people hanging about.
She’s wide awake now. The dog barks outside. He’s already drifting off, breathing slow and rhythmic.
So, are we going to put our plan into action?
No, he mumbled. Just get some sleep.
76 2020 Northern Territory Literary Awards Pulling on a cotton shirt she walks to the kitchen. The floor is cool under her feet. Smoke fills her nostrils and she sneezes, runs the tap and drinks. The dog rushes in the open door, whimpering. The red light on the stove flashes 4:38.
In the yard, the dog follows closely behind her. The early morning bird calls, then a soft hooting. She strains to see beyond the line of trees, and blinks into the dark forest. There’s a soft thud on the hard ground and the faint outline of a roo as it passes. Inside the back door, she checks the fire gear. Gloves, masks, long- sleeved shirts hanging on hooks. A plastic bag drops to the floor, flat rubber plugs with small ropes trailing spill out. She imagines blocking the downpipes with these and filling the gutters with the little rainwater that is left and wonders aloud whether the plugs will hold the water. Would it save the house anyway?
A thin ribbon of grey light spreads in the east. The dog follows her back to the bedroom and settles at the door. Lying on the bed she stares up wide-eyed at the ceiling. She watches the whirls in the timber become ghoulish, twist and laugh at her. In the yellow dawn light she can see the smoke in the room.
Flash Fiction Award 77 Kath Manzie Youth Award
Winner
Jethro Pollock The Dripping Tap 79
Finalists
Angela Keating What happens to the imaginary friend when the child dies? 85
Tippipon (Tippi) Morgan Pudding 88
Peter Susanto The Visit 92
78 2020 Northern Territory Literary Awards The Dripping Tap by Jethro Pollock
Drip, drip, drip.
Dad always says he needs to fix our kitchen tap. He never does.
My brother wakes up every morning and asks if dad has fixed the kitchen tap.
Drip, drip, drip.
Thud, thud, thud; the water drops against the steel basin below in a constant rhythm, like a diminishing heartbeat.
Drip, drip, drip.
The pink, early morning sunlight beams into our little house, weaving its way through floating dust. Every drop of water from the broken tap glints eerily.
Glinting, just like that sharp, jagged, knife-like point of glass.
Glinting just like the snake’s fangs. The snake.
Drip, drip, drip.
Droplets of blood drip off his hand onto the grass.
Drip, drip, drip.
The hot afternoon sun beats down on our corrugated iron roof. My new K-mart shoes that Uncle Ricky bought me yesterday slow to a halt on the prickly nature strip of our house.
Old Tony’s there, staring at dad’s car. New sprouts of grass that look like explosions in slow motion have grown up through the car tyres. The back doors are jammed with rust, and the roof’s caved in, where dead leaves have piled up over the last five years it’s been sitting there.
Kath Manzie Youth Award 79 Tony swats a fly from his brow and takes a step closer to the car. He extends his head forward, his nose inches from the smashed glass that borders the car window. He cringes.
‘Smells like shit in there,’ he says, pulling his head backwards, staring at the dead vehicle.
I shuffle closer to the car, peering through the window without touching it, like a meerkat inspecting a sleeping lion’s mouth.
I see damp, mouldy ripped up foam, a few coins, a homemade bong and an empty can of Coke.
Tony wants to see more. He takes a step closer to the car. He reaches out and pulls the door handle, his old thin arm trembling with the strength suddenly needed from him.
The door handle drops into the palm of his hand with an abrupt squeak of rusty metal. He laughs and tosses it onto the grass, where it joins the soft drink cans and icy-pole wrappers strewn around.
Tony places his hands carefully between the shards of glass on the car windowsill.
He sticks his head cautiously through the window, his short white hair scraping against a point of glass. I watch the glass warily. And it watches me. It glints in the afternoon sunlight.
Tony wrinkles up his nose and leans over the front driver’s seat, towards the enticing coins in the centre console.
His forefinger makes contact with the edge of a dollar coin. He tries to reach out further with his fingers, tries to get a grip on the money while also avoiding the blossom of mould on the car seat that has started to get dangerously close to his elbow.
80 2020 Northern Territory Literary Awards He touches the plastic of the center console, the dried, hardened ends of his fingers nudge the coke can, it falls into the abyss under the driver’s seat. He reaches further, trying to get those coins…
And suddenly there’s a flash of movement. Fangs stab into his hand.
Stab, stab, stab.
He lurches back out the window again. Fresh drops of blood on the grass. On the glass. On Tony’s skin.
Drip, drip, drip.
There’s a small, plastic racing car lying in the dirt at the edge of the unkempt garden bed. Green leaves drape over it and brown leaves lie under it. It’s red and orange and it used to zoom across our lounge room floor all day under my enthusiastic little hands.
Uncle Ricky and his mate Fitzie are sitting on two tiny plastic chairs at a little kids’ table, struggling to keep their knees under it. A quarter full bottle of whisky sits on the table, glinting in the early noonday sun. Fitzie whips up expensive alcohol like a magician.
Fitzie has a mug of warm coffee in his hands. He swallows it down and cringes, before pouring some whisky into the cup, and gulping down a mouthful bravely.
Ricky takes a swig from the coffee mug and slaps it back on the table, which shakes with the impact. Ricky looks so dizzy he might fall off his chair at any moment.
Music wafts from the small, black radio inside the house, where it sits on the bench next to the dishwashing liquid.
Max is throwing a hoola hoop up in the air, trying to get it as high as he can. I watch it fly upwards. It looks like it might just keep going up forever into the air and never come down.
Kath Manzie Youth Award 81 The hoola hoop does come down in the end. And Max watches it proudly because he’s thrown the hoop higher than he ever has before.
I’m holding our green garden hose, spraying water into the air. The water shoots through the sky, breaking into droplets that come hurtling back down into the soil. My eight-year-old sister Freya, and her inseparable friend, Emily, who lives next door, are enjoying the mud that I’m making.
Mum’s inside, watching us through the dusty louvres, smiling at us all.
Staring at us. The family where the division between land and sky is blurred, where we travel up and down, sometimes up into the clouds and sometimes down into the lava at the center of the earth. We go up and down, our family.
There’re other people here with us. There’s Max with his hoola hoop, and there’s Eddie and Austin, trying to steal the hose off me without getting wet. There’s Eddie’s little brother, Henry, who keeps tapping me on the shoulder and telling me a knock-knock joke about shit that doesn’t even make sense, but he starts giggling in such a cute way that even Fitzie smiles.
The sun glares down on us, and I can feel my shoulders burning.
There’re only giggles and laughter in my backyard. There’s happiness here. Yes, we understand happiness in this place. But we understand sadness, too, because this is the place of land and sky, of sadness and happiness, of pain and bliss.
This is the place of ups and downs.
The clinic’s walls are white. The floor is white. The chairs are white. The water fountain is white. Not a spot of dust infects the clean interior of the town clinic. The clinic smells of special hand sanitiser, and I will always think of clinics when I see that pink hand wash in the plastic bottles. Tony says he wants me to visit him.
Austin sits next to me in the waiting room, discomforted by the number of people around him. He stares at a kid playing dominoes.
82 2020 Northern Territory Literary Awards A nurse comes and tells us that we can come in. She shows us through a door to the left of the waiting room, and we walk down a corridor.
The nurse eyes us with obvious suspicion, as if she expects us to suddenly smash windows or steal something. I look away innocently. She ushers us into a room. A baby cries; a man moans in pain. She pulls back a blue curtain, oddly out of place in the white surroundings.
Tony is lying on a small hospital bed. He lies motionless on the white, spotless sheets.
Austin whispers to me: ‘He looks like a penguin in the desert.’
A smile spreads across my face. I move to the side of the bed, and Tony’s eyes open and see me. I begin to cry, looking at him.
Austin stands back respectfully. I touch Tony’s hand.
His eyes are bright. They twinkle in the fluorescent light, as if he’s just stolen something from my pocket. His body is crumpled, but his soul is so alive. He’s weak though. Very weak. And it hits me that he can’t always stay strong.
A doctor comes and whispers into the nurse’s ear.
‘Righto boys,’ she says. ‘We’re gonna fly him up to Darwin. Sorry.’
I squeeze Tony’s hand and he manages a smile.
‘Reckon they’ll let me fly the chopper?,’ he rasps.
The sun sinks behind the houses, as if someone is pulling it down with a leash, tugging it out of view.
Every street I walk down is slightly darker than the last. The streetlights blink on, standing protectively on the edge of the road, guarding everyone on it like angels guard the way to heaven.
If heaven even exists.
Kath Manzie Youth Award 83 There’s a tall tree down the street. I dunno what species it is. It ain’t native.
I remember it when it was small, before it grew upwards as if it thought it might get to Mars. Not quite.
The tree’s branches tickle the edges of the power pole, its leaves slide in and out of the pole’s long wires in the wind like a mass of spiders crawling across a web.
I don’t know why no one cut it down. No one gives a shit, I guess.
I walk through our flywire door. The house feels dark. For once I can’t hear our dripping kitchen tap. All I can hear is Tony’s helicopter taking off. The whole world can hear Tony’s helicopter.
84 2020 Northern Territory Literary Awards What happens to the imaginary friend when the child dies? by Angela Keating
There’s a man at my local museum whose been watching the same painting since before I was born, he doesn’t speak to anyone and I don’t think he’s real. He doesn’t know a name, but I call him Time, because I think that’s how long he’s been starring at this painting, since the beginning of time. Time doesn’t always look the same because Time’s weird like that. Often when I see him, Time is a nineteen-year-old boy, dressed in a fancy three-piece suit looking ready to take on the world. More commonly Time is weather worn as a fisherman, white beard unkempt and static. Time is both these people at once, he could quite possibly be everyone who will ever exist, I don’t think it’s any of my business though.
This is what Time has taught me; not everybody you meet is going to be a real person, there is no way for someone to love you other than in their own way, you can restart your life at any time but 3:42pm on a Tuesday afternoon is best, something strange has happened everywhere, every single building is groaning under the weight of what has happened in it.
This is what Time has not taught me; what the hell is so interesting about that damn painting.
We’re in my car by the side of the lake, we’re both pretending it’s because we liked the view and not because the car broke down. The boy in the passenger seat is exhaling smoke so thick I can barely see him anymore, it’s hot and gross and I can’t breathe very well. I contemplate opening a door but neither of us has made any kind of decisive movement in over 20 minutes and it would feel too drastic, so I just let the second-hand smoke contort my lungs, I think that it probably doesn’t actually matter. Then I think that thought is probably just the consequence of the weed. Then once again I think it probably doesn’t matter. I’m trying to remember his name, the boy in the passenger seat. I think about telling him I love him; I
Kath Manzie Youth Award 85 don’t, I just want to see what happens. He doesn’t love me either, but neither does anyone else so it doesn’t really matter. Love’s weird. Have I ever loved someone? I think about telling my mother I love her, but I can’t remember if I have one or if so that I love her.
I don’t remember when it happened, like I scene changing in a dream, but the boy in the passenger seat is no longer in the passenger seat, we’re lying face down in the lake. My eyes sting and I can’t see anything.
“No one sees what you see, even if they look right at it.” The water warps around my words, there is no way to comprehend what I say.
“We do not belong here.” A reply I shouldn’t understand but do.
I don’t know where he means but I think he’s probably right. “Words will always be inadequate.” I tell him, this time there is no response and I know he has understood me perfectly.
I’ve been staring at the murky grey lake bottom for a while now, my eyes hurt, and I can’t imagine why I’ve kept them open so long for such a bland view, but I don’t look away. In this moment I feel connected to Time in a way I hadn’t yet experienced. It occurs to me that this is an awfully long time to be face down in a lake and I wonder if I’m dead, I remember I’m not alone and turn to the boy beside me. He is dead. Okay so I am alone.
This is the first time I’ve been in a police car, I’m not particularly fond of it but at the same time it isn’t totally unpleasant. There’s a song playing faintly on the radio, something old and soothing. I wouldn’t even know what station to put on to find a song like that. The little blue clock on the dashboard aggressively tells me its 3:36, I’m not sure I’m inclined to believe it. Time doesn’t really apply to situations like this. The music is frequently interpreted by static updates hissing away over the police scanner. “A body has been found.” Who is that information helping? “A boy has drowned in Crookbark River” How do you know that? He could have been anywhere, maybe in his head he was at Disneyland, or in his childhood bedroom. “Cause of death Respiratory Impairment.” Just say he
86 2020 Northern Territory Literary Awards drowned. There are voices in the background, lights are starting to flash, and more people start to appear. I’ve changed my mind, I don’t like it here at all. I decide to leave. The car door’s locked but I open it anyway. I’m going to stop being real now, it’s possible I was only ever pretending to be before.
In my new illusionary state, I decide to go back to my childhood bedroom, or at least the bedroom I remember, something tells me it’s not mine. There are still plastic stars stuck to the roof, but they don’t glow anymore, I’m too short to reach up and rip them off so I just bring the roof closer to me. The shelves are lined with toys and the toys are lined with dust and you think that stuffed animals represent your innocence and but in reality, they grow up with you, and not everyone grows up innocent. Not everyone grows up at all.
I am decidedly unreal now, I thought it would feel more peaceful, like everything had settled and I could be still now. Instead it feels like I’ve been buried in someone else’s grave.
Kath Manzie Youth Award 87 Pudding by Tippipon (Tippi) Morgan
Up on the South block, there’s durries, Great Northerns and some aging carcases strewn around me. An air of buffalo muck settles on my skin, and I hear something scuffle along the banks of the billabong – just sploshes, splashes and hard thumps that give me the yips.
Here, I sit past dark and then a couple more hours, hiding like a girl.
After an age, I hit the dirt road in my single cab ute - second only to my Mrs, my late Mrs – and get that midnight rumble going under me. Even with the engine howling and wind flogging in my window, there’s a loud ‘Pick!’ each time a stone hits the steel tray, and it makes my limbs shudder. Pick, pick – like a rake to raw flesh.
Our place – my place - is dark mostly, but I can see light spilling out from the open doors of the shed and hear the screech of steel wool inside. So, I stand on the drive for a sec, where the light doesn’t reach, and try steel myself for it. Couple deep breaths and we’ll be laughing, right?
When I get inside, Bess is sipping on ice water – dripping heavy beads of condensation onto the bare, newly-polished wooden table. The left corner of her mouth is unmoving and she strains to make the right tilt up. Her eyes though, they go like wild dingoes, preying on me, waiting for a flinch or flicker.
But I’m rooted to the spot. Beyond the throbbing pulse of my big toe I can feel my feet squirm against the dirtied, cushioned caps of my boots.
Christ. She’s gone to hell with the bookshelf, scoured the floor ‘til it gleamed like a dentist’s cold, white smile. The fridge door’s been stripped to its bones, the potted orchids replaced with dull plastic ones and the old pendants have been refitted.
“They’re LED. Easier to manage” she says reassuringly as I stare into their high- beam flare; eyeballs bloodshot and an untamed grey fuzz inching itself into the corner of my vision.
88 2020 Northern Territory Literary Awards The sideboard looks just as hazy. A fake piece of mistletoe has been duct-taped to the back - like a cockie wedged in the grill of a ute – and laid at its centre is my hand-tooled wedding album. Bess has the page turned to a shot of my Mrs and I – sat compiled together, with close-lipped smiles and unnatural gazes. Staged for the scrutiny of everyone else.
I shut the book hard and drop it into the bottom cabinet. It hits something with a clang as I move to sit opposite her at the table. A long pause.
“Look Dad, I’ll be out of here tomorrow.” She sighs, surveying the pool of ice- water bleakly, and then outstretching her hand. The water soaks up through the heel of her palm.
My vision swims in the grey fuzz. I can feel what’s coming – like when the doctor said my Mrs condition was fine but her cough had a rattling undercurrent that told me ‘time’s up.’ She’s overwhelmed, I know. She needs comfort. She can’t help it. But, still… I clench and unclench my jaw hard.
“I’m fine,” I tell her, as my thumb moves slowly against the table, searching hard for an etch to dig into. No etch, in the end. Just a stray splinter that pierces its way into the junction between my skin and nail. I watch as a dot of hot, red blood wells its way to the surface.
“Fine?” Bess muffles in exasperation. Slowly, every feeling she’s hidden since my Mrs died, ripples across her face. Every etched brow line and guilty twist of the mouth contorts in pain. Her glazed blue eyes take on a stupid pitiful weight.
“Just stop spewing questions!” I yell. A cyclone of heat starts to pool in my lower back and swell its way up my spine. It’s Category 5, and my entire body turns red and pulsing.
“At least I’m talking!” Bess hurls back in a quavering voice. I study her as she retreats back in her chair, pink-faced, eyes closed, reflexively sucking oxygen in and panting it out. Her arms flail about for something to hold onto.
Kath Manzie Youth Award 89 A hot drift of air blows over me, carrying the stench of bleach and Ajax and that toxic citric detergent my Mrs used to hate. I pause to stop myself from yacking all over the table.
Bloody Bess, who skipped my Mrs birthday dinner this year, bagged her out every time she slipped and fed the grandkids something sweet. Bess, whose phone calls became as scarce as hen’s teeth when the first diagnosis came, who didn’t watch her grey-blue mottled skin turn rubbery and cold, or her body heave under the weight of death. From 5 breaths a minute, to 3, to 1, to nothing but glazed eyes, stale air and an unmoving chest. Bess, who’ll never feel this wretched, raking stone pain.
But I swallow my words and bury them in a box deep within my bulging, bloated belly.
Christ, if my Mrs were here, she would have known what to do. Pull a bottle of Bundy out the fridge, probably, and then sit us all by the TV, drinking ‘til I was ready to talk. The thought of the hard stuff slipping across my tongue is tempting - even draws me towards the kitchen. I’ve got a bad chest ache and something’s got to numb it.
Bess shifts her chair to watch me, but its legs screech against the tiles and leave them scuffed. I feel the glare of her eyes as I lean into the fridge, dig around a bit and reappear with nothing but a ceramic mixing bowl in hand. A long pause.
“Would you like to help me finish it?” she says as she gives a brief, weary grin. “Or are you gonna be difficult?”
Made no later than December 1st – thank you very much – and with absolutely no straying from her own mum’s recipe (including all 4 cups of brandy), the Christmas pudding was my Mrs’ religion. I think back to last December, when she brought it out after lunch. Christ, how quickly I tucked into it! Eyes shut, jaw moving slowly, mind fixed on the rich, moist sponge, the silky-smooth custard and the chewy sultanas. Slish. Slosh. Slish. Something warm trickles out the corner of my lips, down my chin and along the stubble of my neck. I can feel a layer of sugar coat my smile.
90 2020 Northern Territory Literary Awards “Dad, you’re up!” Bess chuckles tearfully, her hands holding the soaked pudding cloth in place. She lends me her finger as I knot the rim with string and place it at the back of the fridge. We purge our lungs with long deep breaths and close the door.
Right now, the pudding is raw, heavy and wet. It smells of hard liquor, is soft to touch and sure doesn’t look the part. So be happy that it’s in the fridge. And, for God’s sake, just give it some time.
Kath Manzie Youth Award 91 The Visit by Peter Susanto
As you walked into the airport, you noticed the funeral service ad, seemingly lying in front of you just to get your attention. ‘Cheapest Funeral Prices!’, it screamed at you. You were so astounded at how people were profiting off death, and for the first time in what felt like forever, you felt it wrap around your neck and you had to rush into the bathroom, taking long strides, staring down the floor, as if challenging it to a duel. You cried and cried, the tears flowing down your cheek and landing on the sides of your mouth, their salinity numbing the pain, cooling like the wets season mmiri falling from the heavens. After the crying had stopped and you had washed your face, you attempted to erase any acknowledgement that that had just happened. After you showed your Nigerian passport to the ‘too nice’ lady at the check-in counter, whose face was wrinkled from too many decades of forced smiles, who asked you about Africa too much, who was trying too hard to force a conversation, you went straight through security and ran to the gate as fast as you could, never mind the terrified stares of the elderly white couple who you knew saw you as a threat, a parasite in their nation, another illegal, radicalised African immigrant trying to kill them. You were just too tired to care, the constricting, heavy feeling around your chest choking you with every move. You were the black head of the white serpent lining up at the gate, and you went to the night garden as soon as you collapsed into your seat, all thoughts wiped from your mind.
The journey through Murtala Muhammed International Airport was so familiar to you; the reverberations of loud, large families reunited, the oh-so-familiar smell of hawkers selling suya as the Sun shone, a flaming ball covering everything with light. You didn’t even have to look up to know that your family was ahead of you. Mother’s frail voice welcoming you, a chorus of ‘There you are, ezigbo!’ from the whole extended family was all that you needed. On the van home, you talked to Mother, who explained that Father had a heart attack while driving and that without your money, he would have had to be buried in the home garden, with just a flimsy cross to mark his final resting spot, without palm wine, jewellery
92 2020 Northern Territory Literary Awards or water for the afterlife. You saw the fright in her eyes, that of a lion cub whose mother had been shot by poachers. She asked you ‘How was America? Did you bring everyone presents? Do you have a big house yet?’, and you felt a pang in your chest. You told her that America was not what she thought it was, that so many people are ungrateful for what they have, that there is a massive divide between people, that greed rules. Your whole family made a shocked ‘Ah!’, an aunty asking ‘How come?’. You broke down, all the words rushing out of your mouth like the water from a dam collapse, through tears as thick as sinoo, telling them about the America you knew.
As the van pulled up at your house in central Lagos, you ran up to it, feeling the coarse dampness of the red ụrọ ụrọ walls, the rough, sandy floor burning like the Sahara, forgetting to take your shoes off and place them at the door for the god Chukwu to see. And you paced into your old room, eyes wild with anger at your sudden self-betrayal, not knowing what you’d find there. And you howled with the rage of a thousand winds when you saw him, smiling at first, then grimacing curiously at your display. You felt like a caged, unintelligent animal being watched for his own entertainment. Words could not describe the verbal punishment you gave him until you calmed down and simply started laughing. Not at him, nor yourself, but at how pointless all of your shouting and self-pitying was. You asked him to come with you and you both strolled into the living room, where the family was waiting for you, concerned. You told them about how you had met him and how you two were in love, although obviously he had already told them. Then, your Mother announced a homecoming celebration dinner for you and all seemed well. Busy, but well. Then, as you two were sitting together and he was telling you how he had secretly booked a flight earlier, planning to surprise you, your mother came out and asked to have a word with you. Privately.
You obeyed and she took you into father’s old room-cum-office, a sacred place that you had rarely been allowed to enter. When you did, it was always about something of ‘great significance’, as your father used to say. You clearly remembered the smooth walls, the small, electric lamp on your father’s table that used to amaze you. You managed to notice the stacks of untouched paper on your father’s desk before mother pulled you away. Everything hit you so quickly that you couldn’t register it all at once. Mother had seen a doctor for headaches, which
Kath Manzie Youth Award 93 had turned into a Stage 4 brain cancer diagnosis. For fear of being ostracised, she had told nobody else, but she only had about a month left. She told you that she would not, could not, give you her ngozi blessing for marriage, necessary to appease the god of family Ezinụlọ, if you were with him. He was a white foreigner who she said would rip your culture from you and replace it with his own, who would try to keep you away from your roots, your family. His kind, she said, were the cause of Nigeria’s violence and kept your people as slaves. He would be the same, she said, and all the family, even the ancestors she’d prayed to, agreed. Blood pounding, trying painfully to calm your anger, you told her that she’d see what he was really like, that you were at home with him. Your raced like a cheetah into your room, covered yourself with a pillow and screamed your heart out, your voice muffled by the choking feeling invading your chest like an explosion worse than Kano. Then there was darkness, as if your hair was covering your eyes.
When you awoke, dazed by the bright surgical lights and an unnatural beeping noise, you were aware of a unique hand, wrinkled, warm and coarse like the plains of the Sahara, clasping yours. You heard her voice, seemingly inside your head, telling you that you had her blessing, to hurry up before it was too late. Then you realised that you were sitting in a hard, plastic chair. It was your mother who was in a patient bed, looking disappointed, regret etched across her face. You cried and hugged her, as she told you that she had felt a great wave of pain overcome her and cause her to collapse. He had found her and immediately picked her up and directed the family to drive his ‘mother’ to the hospital. Thanks to his actions, the doctors were able to revive her and remove the tumour. You told her that you were so, so, sorry for all you had said to her, that you were so grateful and appreciative of her blessing. Hugging you back, your mother told you to please bring in ‘Ọcha, my son’.
Epilogue:
As the white man and the black woman held hands and conversed, the child ran up to them, smiling, saying in Igbo ‘Nigeria number one!’. Meanwhile, the grandmother finished knitting her ceremonial ịchafụ and placed it around the
94 2020 Northern Territory Literary Awards child’s neck, telling him that ‘This, Matata, signifies you as the force uniting our peoples’. The child screamed with pleasure and the inner-city Lagos house was filled with laughter that was young, old, male, female. This was the Nigerian Dream: of a happy, grateful, connected household. As the woman whispered in his ear ‘this is what I saw that day, nwa’, they symbolised the strength and development of their country.
Kath Manzie Youth Award 95 NT Writers’ Centre Poetry Award
Winner
Johanna Bell If I were a bird 97
Finalists
Kaye Aldenhoven Civilisation . . is.. 100
Johanna Bell We all adapt to survive, don’t we? 101
Brian Obiri-Asare in search of something beautiful, perhaps? 102
Brian Obiri-Asare & maybe 106
Leni Shilton brown goshawk 108
96 2020 Northern Territory Literary Awards If I were a bird by Johanna Bell i. Albatross
When she goes I stand on the hair of the cliff stubble grass scratching my cheeks the wind, a blender of love lost to the pull of the sea she glides away from the click and blink of nest always-chirping crickets mark another day where she must feed herself before she feeds anyone else an arctic blow a freeze on her beak whipping as a friend would whip if friends were allowed to do such things while whispering notes of deep blue pilchards ballooning off coasts cutting through salty flesh drizzled in oil from a tin on a white-cloth bench in a suburban dream we haven’t yet met
Northern Territory Writers’ Centre Poetry Award 97 ii. Bowerbird
Even when you try you cannot stop fossicking through backyards and bins op-shops and magazines walking the high-tide line glued to the next big thing what if today is the day rummaging what if today is the day you come across the precious thing methodical in your scratchy steps and the sideways swing of tilted head listening listening for the shimmer BEEP! of wedding ring
98 2020 Northern Territory Literary Awards iii. Lyrebird this time she calls him what he really is and tiny drops of spittle sit upon his cheeks as the morning shifts his mouth makes songs to keep her where the bracken meets the eucalypts his favourite reggae mix and jazz dub hip-hop bluegrass soul electronic rock and roll but she is far off in the undergrowth scratching dawn she finds a quiet grub and swallows whole delight!
Northern Territory Writers’ Centre Poetry Award 99 Civilisation . . is.. by Kaye Aldenhoven
Although all art is autochthonous I spend Sunday horizontal reading Porter’s Selected And Malouf’s Elegy, their twin escapes from miasmic Brisbane. And Tranter’s advice to poets, my teeth clogged with mango fibre, a twinge of urinary infection because I forgot to drink yesterday, Well, anticipate my tendency to drowse and drift
as I stumble with soporific medication, Gag/swallow huge capsules, piss in a plastic bucket. Civilization is cigarette paper thin. Yet in the end it’s my fault that sloth is the gatekeeper (until sacked) And ye may not enter in.
Oh yeah. Who could believe that crap? The girl around the corner pirouettes in the rain, Her school uniform stuck to her legs. The kid slugs mangoes like he’s using John Howard’s bat, caught out at silly-mid-on. Caught out. Caught out. Well at sixty five the pieces lie about.
This time round, thank the Saudis and Assad, Lug in the 25 kg bag of salt - the pool overflowed. Frogs celebrated, my lily bowl slimed with gelatinous spawn. On another planet Li Bai’s star is watched, but we don’t, can’t, won’t. Civilization is as thin as cigarette paper.
100 2020 Northern Territory Literary Awards We all adapt to survive, don’t we? by Johanna Bell
The nights are filled with nankeen dreams each toe a claw on a roundabout in a street where people sleep between besser blocks and aircon calls where carpentaria is a midday song and picking up fronds is a pastime nobody enjoys the sweat that builds in orifices and trickles down walls blossoming mould is the number one topic on talkback radio – vinegar or bleach? you know which camp you’re in when the police knock to say there’s been an incident when the newspaper prints another beat up spelling mistake you don’t feel the sting like you did when you stepped fresh onto the tarmac in your skinny jeans when words like box jellyfish got you jiggling when you stopped the car to see if the man asleep - his head in the gutter - was alright when the cry of curlews haunted your sleep and you wondered whether you should maybe call the DV hotline not now you just turn the AC up and stick a pillow over your head
Northern Territory Writers’ Centre Poetry Award 101 in search of something beautiful, perhaps? by Brian Obiri-Asare
for heaven’s sake
the sun bakes summer dry swallows the kitchen whole
as my hunger wilts inside a crisis with no sound. no
white noise can show me soul I need to hear you talking
but all I see is ache (but here, the horizons. imagine a caress)
no sunday morning thrills so I emailed nick. I should’ve
called. they’re trying to police our music out of the desert
102 2020 Northern Territory Literary Awards some desperate adventure
nerves are spent, held together in prayer because in between tonight and the sirens muddying us if only we could wish the colour away. but complexion’s a mess and out in the open last night
I let two strangers in. two tongues in my ear, cold hands fumbling down my pants but I missed your voice. a billion singing stars and I was so hungry and everything, so out of tune
Northern Territory Writers’ Centre Poetry Award 103 this space is unforgiving in its boundaries
babe, hear me out - nameless faceless, voiceless. I get it
a symbol or a victim a site of curiosity
I get it. they have no sense of me as a man
and even though I said today I felt better, and even though
I’ve taken too many pills
is it ok to be straight up and say, babe I don’t feel ok
to ask you to wish the colour away
104 2020 Northern Territory Literary Awards sunday morning and infinity
white noise chokes the desert and leaves a taste of blood in the wind. I can read it in my pulse in the kitchen, a new day presses its depressive largesse in me the stain of its poetry burning a taste of exile in my teeth. and I know
I promised to call but before life hummed, remember how bright the dance of our searchlight fugue moving wild and unheard hand in hand in the dark, two black comets cascading through black infinity, black heavens like gospel?
Northern Territory Writers’ Centre Poetry Award 105 & maybe by Brian Obiri-Asare
this one time, Cody’s dad tore up a veil of dust before leaving one morning & never coming back & maybe this is why we’re sitting
in a chasm of quiet while Cody’s mum hurtles us towards his funeral, mum up front & four of us packed in the back tight like the tobacco
in them rollies Cody’s mum puffs away on non-stop, in her beat-up commodore where a year earlier Cody sealed the deal
with his missus from over Mt Isa way over at the dam. & later that night, buzzing camped out in snappy gum & a din of cicadas
they shared a joint & saw the secrets of the universe & the next day when I heard him tell this story, I thought about what it meant
for a boy to become a man. but right now it’s just us in the commodore with Cody’s mum’s cigarette smoke curling
from her lips until it catches the breeze from the busted driver’s window & glides back towards us, searching for a nose, a throat
106 2020 Northern Territory Literary Awards to move into & smother & I don’t know what despair, what regret a man has to sit with all by himself after he leaves one morning & never comes back. there was this one other time not long after mum & me fled when a hazy morning sky clutched at my heart
& never let go. that’s the reason why I get how the stain of sorrow can stick & my stomach churns because the silence is sitting so heavy inside us & Cody’s mum’s hand starts to tremble & still wears a wedding ring, so she pulls over steps out, & we can’t hear the laughter, the crying consuming her until we’re moving again & her ring is beside the Stuart Highway, behind us. & maybe this is why at the funeral Cody’s mum said only the desert can coax the ghosts out of her. & maybe this is why whenever mum sits staring at the empty space dad left, my head fills with dust.
Northern Territory Writers’ Centre Poetry Award 107 brown goshawk by Leni Shilton
honeyeaters riot in the mulberry tree
as the brown goshawk sits high in the speckled light of the salmon gum
yellow eyes striated feathers a grey beauty not too small to cause trouble.
Since it last visited the backyard biome has been reworked
swing set replaced by a vegie garden and children’s tree house has fallen down with the tree creating homegrown firewood and a bower bird with a chainsaw repertoire the tree house is gone the children grown
108 2020 Northern Territory Literary Awards I rehydrate soil blocks from Sri Lanka, and in no time green tendrils spring in the mix of foreign soil and desert dust
I like to think this is doing good.
Slowly the honeyeaters calm, they dive and catch sprinkler droplets and all too soon the brown goshawk, its juvenile grey soft and lovely, has gone.
Northern Territory Writers’ Centre Poetry Award 109 Zip Print Short Story Award
Winner
Miranda Tetlow TAKE SHELTER 111
Finalists
Mhairi Duncan Of Ruts and Roars 120
Karen Manton Bull Buster 128
110 2020 Northern Territory Literary Awards TAKE SHELTER by Miranda Tetlow
Over the rise, Cora can see a black cloud swathed in late afternoon sun. Until now, the windscreen’s held nothing but bitumen, orange gravel and sky, the occasional scrubby tree. She rubs her eyes. An approaching storm with a halo, she thinks. Why not? But with a pump of the horn, the cloud breaks apart. Scalloped wings, hooked beaks. The feasting birds scatter, leaving a lumpen body behind. For a moment, it lies half-deflated on the road, like the forgotten balloon at a child’s birthday party, before the wheels thump, crunch, and spit the carcass out behind them.
Her driver gestures towards the remaining cattle, still grazing on the verge.
“No fence, see? Them cows always on the road this time of day,” he says. “You like steak?”
“Vegetarian,” Cora lies.
“Too bad,” he says. “I usually get me a killer or two.”
For a few seconds, Cora pictures him in silhouette, butcher’s knife in hand, carving off flanks.
Hers?
No, she thinks fast. The cow. Of course. He’s talking about the cow.
Cora’s mind snaps again, like an elastic band. She can see the coil of intestines, the stiffening limbs. Swarming flies. The smell of blood, dried and not so dry.
The truckie scratches his nose. He grins and nods to himself as if he’s privy to her imaginings. “Yep. Now that’s a good job fer hitchers.”
Cora blanches. The truckie raises both hands from the steering wheel then smacks them back down. He roars with laughter, almost chokes with the stuff. The window rolls down and he hocks; a gob of spit hits the churned-up dirt below.
Zip Print Short Story Award 111 “Just kiddin’ you, girlie!” He shakes his head. “Roadkill. Leave it where the truck flung it, that’s what I always say.”
The truckie shifts gear and the cabin shudders again. He stares at her, long enough to make Cora squirm. This one picked her up just outside of Mt Isa; she hasn’t got a good read on him yet. Cora tries not to breathe in that mix of beard, instant coffee and unwashed clothes. His limbs are loose and lanky around the steering wheel except for his stomach, which folds neatly over his seatbelt. She tries not to think about that either, or the dead animal scrunched between tyre treads.
His eyes are back on the road. “So, what’s a girl like you doing out here, anyway?”
Cora expects this question. She has a whole playing deck of answers. They can be cut, shuffled and dealt, a different hand each time.
Time to make something of herself, you know? She is trying to pronounce that like the Australians do: hard ya, drawling no. Her boyfriend (if you could call him that) has just joined a cult (Cora is definitely calling it that). He took their dog with him, a bitser named Keith. And most of the money she made in the last year. Her best girlfriend just found God. A few old workmates are busy getting married, planning babies. Her parents were long out of the picture. Cora could head back to the UK, but honestly, who was still there, where she’d left them?
No. This is her chance to straighten out, travel, find a real job. And then there is that letter from her older sister, postmarked Darwin.
A few of those things are even true. A couple more are half-true, and one is a good idea, if Cora is being completely candid.
But mostly she is just happy to see the back of The Co-Op, a farm on the outskirts of Cairns where she’d been shacked up for seven months. It was such a brief and insignificant layer in her life’s crust, but Cora can imagine an archaeologist dusting through the remains. The wooden bowl spilling over with rotting apples and bananas, would historians understand that they had been liberated from the supermarket skip? A manifesto for Living Through The Light, taped to the fridge. Peacock feathers poking out of terracotta mugs. A saucer where the roach from
112 2020 Northern Territory Literary Awards yesterday’s joint had finally been stubbed out, soaked with the saliva of a dozen hangers on. Would it all make sense in ways that had never occurred to Cora, in all those hours under that roof, in all the time she spent chanting and screwing and eating lentil mash and smoking and, very occasionally, and only under great duress, washing up the community’s dishes?
Probably not, Cora decides, staring out the window. But even if they razed the house to the ground with all of its inhabitants, those items would still live on in the annals of history. The least important things always did. She could almost see the roach, the skeletal fruit, the manifesto, all of them, sitting behind glass in a museum of the future. Exhibit A. Exhibit B.
The truck rounds a bend and a curve of sunlight hits her straight in the eyes. She looks up. He’s waiting for an answer. Instead, Cora shrugs and raises her eyebrows in a direction she hopes is north.
The truckie reaches into the console and rattles his hand around until he finds a bag of liquorice all-sorts. He offers her one, the black spliced with green and baby girl pink. Cora declines.
“Suit yourself. Bad habit, these. But there are worse.”
He chews for a bit. “It’s a real milk run, this one,” he says. “I do Brisbane to Sydney, that’s my normal route. Straight through. Sometimes over to WA. Perth’s OK, if you like beaches and that river. Or Adelaide. That’s nice.”
He looks at her again, a bit harder this time. “Bit posh but you’d go alright, I reckon.”
The air is still inside the cabin. Cora fidgets in her seat, the plastic sticky on her bare legs. Sweat dribbles down the truckie’s forehead. He flicks it off with one finger and the perspiration hits the dashboard with a small splash.
“What do yer parents have to say about it all? Girl on her own, like you.”
Her parents? Cora hesitates. “Dead,” she says.
Zip Print Short Story Award 113 There are no more questions. With an air of desperation, the truckie squints into the rearview mirror, as if he is scouring the horizon for other friends and relatives that might rescue Cora from herself.
He won’t find them. They are sprinkled between England and Jamaica, Rhodesia and California. Cora would struggle to pull them out of a telephone directory. Last time she saw some of those cousins, they were sitting at the kitchen table passing around an orange. It was nearly the end of the war, though no one knew it at the time. Her nineteen-year-old sister Joan had been combing the local Officers’ Mess for a husband, though she often brought American GIs home, as well. Cora liked them better: the uniforms were more dashing and they came with better treats. Corned beef, freshly minted bars of chocolate, and that day, the orange. They had taken it in turns to marvel at its texture, waxy and rough. She remembers the weight of it, heavy in her toddler hand. Joan divided the orange into segments, one each, but she slid the biggest piece into Cora’s mouth. Because she was the youngest. Cora could taste it now in the back of her throat, the pith and flesh, the bitter and the sweet. The other kids all staring while she chewed that coveted slice. And then Cora spat the orange out in a perfect projectile arc that landed on the dirtiest part of the kitchen floor.
She never was any good at gratitude.
The truckie is tapping his fingers on the wheel. Searching for a radio station that isn’t there. So, Cora throws him a bone, especially since her parents were very much alive the last time she checked.
“My sister Joan’s up in Darwin,” she says. “I haven’t seen her for a long time.”
He nods, muttering something about blood. Water.
The truckie drives Cora to the Territory border and then a bit further. The miles keep clicking over, and she watches changing constellations of clouds out the window, the road unravelling beneath her like black carpet on red dirt. Every so often, Cora is surprised by odd bursts of civilisation, mostly roadhouses that sell the basics: tinned steak pies, petrol, cigarettes, and bottles of booze under the counter.
114 2020 Northern Territory Literary Awards After the truckie, she finds another ride. There is always another one, a new driver scooping her back up. Cora finds herself a bank Johnny, all sandals and socks to the knee, his car polished with wax. There’s a right-on hippie crew in a VW, then some ringers heading back to a cattle station. After them, a man shooting buffalo near Adelaide River. The seats in his car reek of gun metal and bull dust. For three nights, she watches a milky stream of stars from his swag.
When the buffalo hunter finally drops her in Darwin, Cora finds herself walking along a strip of coast, looking across the harbour. The Arafura Sea curls around the main part of the town like a fist. The vibe is tropical, casual. It’s 1974, but it could be twenty years earlier. No building more than two or three storeys high, the city a grid of just a few streets. The air is redolent with frangipani, fish and chips, armpits and slightly off milk.
She fingers Joan’s letter in her handbag.
It doesn’t take long before she finds the pub. Pushing her way through the door, Cora peers through the low hanging lights to make out words on a blackboard. The specials all involve chips. A couple of ceiling fans try to push the air through the room and fail dismally. Most of the tables are full, even though it’s early for a Saturday. Kids run in and out, collecting hermit crabs in cups and tipping them onto the floor with an eruption of giggles. On the wall, a picture of the Queen in sash and crown looms over the assembled drinkers, out of kilter with the uniform of shorts and thongs circling the bar.
Cora sips a beer and lets herself be dragged into conversation by locals who are suspiciously friendly. There is talk of a tinny. She isn’t sure if that’s a boat or a beer can, but eventually decides it can be both. The footy. Kids graduating from high school and whether Macca’s daughter will go to Adelaide for university in the new year. Christmas barbecue plans, storms, maybe a big blow this year? Would there be enough legs of ham at Coles? Probably not. Cora wonders if these are things that Joan talks about. Does she blend effortlessly into this crowd of Sandras and Kevins, Terrys and Susans?
Suddenly Cora feels a stab of cold water down her shirt, a small block of ice grazing her navel.
Zip Print Short Story Award 115 She spins on her stool. “Hey!”
He’s crinkly around the eyes, spiked with grease and paint. Decent looking, she supposes. He runs a finger down the length of her neck and smirks.
“A girl that hot’s gotta cool off, right?”
“Davey, you’re a pig!” Moira, one of the bartenders, slaps him with a tea towel. “Ignore him, Cora. He won’t like that.”
But Cora picks the ice out of her top, throws it back at him. Davey buys her another drink.
The hours pass in sips, shots, schooners. And then it is later, much later. The hermit crabs released; the kids gone home to bed. The pool table’s hosted a punch up. The cover band is played out; the kitchen is down to its last plate of leg ham and pub salad: cucumber, raw onion, tomato, dried up shavings of carrot. A woman named Maureen confesses that she’s never really liked this godforsaken hole of a place. And Cora finds herself arranging the empty beer cans by colour: red, yellow, green, blue.
Time stops, and when it starts again, Cora is out on the street with Davey, pressed up against a streetlight.
His tongue feels furry against her teeth, then choking. She feels Davey’s hand graze her nipple. He pulls her bottom into his crotch, pushes his fingers into her shorts, between her legs.
Cora tries to wriggle out of his arms. “Sorry,” she says. “I think I’ve had enough fun for one night.”
But his grasp is tight. He’s breathing heavily. “Sorry,” he says. “But you’ve had nowhere near enough fun.”
Cora feels the street sway, the beer rise in her throat. She fakes a regretful smile. “I really should be going.”
“No chance.” His voice drops a gear.
116 2020 Northern Territory Literary Awards This time Cora shoves him backwards. He grabs at her hair; a few wispy strands rip off in his hand. She runs onto the road. Davey chases after her. Cora is drunker than he is, less sure on her feet. She loses a thong in the loose gravel and curses. He’s gaining on her.
“Fucking cock tease!”
A car comes around the corner, too fast, no lights. She runs in front of it before he can. The driver smashes the brakes, beeps furiously, and Davey slams his fist on the bonnet.
“Get back here, slut!”
Cora sprints down the street, feet thudding, heart pumping. The air is like soup; sloshing down her face, along the back of her legs, into the nervous pits of her arms. Her mouth tastes like bile. She hits a cul-de-sac. Fuck.
Then she sees a laneway. Cora follows the path into a small park: just a couple of suburban swings and a slide, a thicket of long grass and hibiscus flowers. Falling into the bushes, she drops to her stomach. His feet slice up the ground beside her, and then Davey stops, too. She can hear him breathing, almost taste the cheap whiskey.
Davey doubles over, catching his knees. His voice changes. “Ah, come on, Cora!”
She wills her limbs still.
“Don’t be like that. We was just having some fun.”
One breath in, one breath out.
“Cora!” He paces towards the swings and kicks the black rubber seat.
The soup starts to cool. A rumble, a flash of light. The smell of rain.
Davey picks up a beer bottle and hurls it into the dark. “Well, fuck you, uptight bitch!”
Zip Print Short Story Award 117 The glass shatters on the concrete and he disappears down the laneway, back into the night.
The lightning flashes purple; it cracks like a whip across the sky. And then, the rain. The singlet Cora threw on twelve hours ago is soon glued to her skin. An army of frogs set forth. Stu-pid, stu-pid, they croak in unison.
When the weather eases, Cora rolls out of the bushes, and dry retches into the kicked earth. Crossing her arms, she shivers with the unexpected cold. She wants to cry; she can’t.
Opposite the park is an elevated house surrounded by a tall fence draped in black mesh. Beware of dogs, the sign on the gate says. But there’s no bark. Cora unclips the latch; it swings wide open. Nothing.
She climbs the stairs and knocks on the door. Still nothing. Just the dull echo of her hand against the wood. Cora tip-toes along the verandah, running her hands over the louvres. The swimming pool glistens under a crescent of moon. She finds the back door, tries the handle. Unlocked. Inside, Cora feels for a light switch. The walls are covered in bark paintings: fish, birds, crocodiles, all in x-ray, their bones stark white against the ochre. A refrigerator buzzes away in the corner.
She is starving. Cora rifles through cupboards until she finds a sleeve of biscuits. They are sweet, cream-filled, and she crams two into her mouth at once. Cora eats until the packet is empty, the bench covered in her crumbs.
Sated, she staggers through the house. It’s both familiar and alien. Framed photographs and children’s paintings, piles of books and unsorted washing, footy boots and fishing rods in an umbrella stand. At the end of the corridor is a room with a double bed. She unties the mosquito netting and lies down. An embroidered Indian quilt covers the mattress and Cora huddles underneath it, tracing the raised thread with her fingers. The ceiling fan clicks above her; no one remembered to turn that off when they flew south for the Christmas break.
118 2020 Northern Territory Literary Awards It is midday before she wakes up and remembers the letter from her sister. Cora pads back into the kitchen, where her handbag sits on the bench. She retrieves the wad of damp paper with Joan’s familiar swirls. Is it here? The years Cora spent giving the finger to everything and everyone. The parents that never were. That stream of officers and GIs. The biggest slice of orange. The reason Joan left.
Is Joan just a few streets away? Her sister. Her not-sister.
Here, in somebody else’s home, neediness fills her like a fever.
Outside, the frogs are at it again. Stu-pid, stu-pid. Cora walks over to the pool, holding Joan’s letter. And then she watches it fall through her fingers and into the water.
For a while, the envelope sits on the surface. Joan’s inky letters collapse into each other, leaving a faint skim of black on top of the pool. Then the swollen envelope begins its slow descent to the bottom.
Cora strips off her singlet and shorts. She stands at the edge, hands up high above her head. Cora is 12 again, in a rubber cap and private school one-piece. The bleachers are filled with other people’s families and false cheer. She salutes the judges. They shuffle scorecards that say nothing good.
This water isn’t the right shade of blue but Cora plunges in anyway. Her fingertips skim the broken tiles on the bottom. Emerging with a gasp, she flicks her hair back. Cora stretches back, arms and legs splayed, her small triangle of pubic hair glinting in the Darwin sunlight. The borrowed pool cradles her like a newborn.
Zip Print Short Story Award 119 Of Ruts and Roars by Mhairi Duncan
In the winter months, when food is hard to find, red deer gather on the lower slopes of the Cairnsheild Mountains and the moors come alive with the sounds of ruts and roars. The largest of the stags will stand on the Ragged Peak, tilting his head back to growl and gape wildly at the silver sky. It’s the same sound my father used to make releasing the gas of an effervescent pint he’d guzzled far too fast after the hunt. But both had meaning, music maybe even to the trained ear. They’d start with a long low note, a semibreve perhaps, held at first then slowly slipping up the octave from low to high. Then the rumbling rolls of grunting through their wild, muscular instruments towards the eventual, forceful full stops, urp urp urp.
Over the years, I’d watched my father clad from head to toe in rough felted tweeds, shifting his body through those frozen hills with wild dexterity. With his fierce falcon expression, distinctive black moustache and sharp tobacco- stained talons, he’d hunt those moors with a razor sharp, primal perception. His eyes could stalk the faintest flicker of movement. But unlike a bird of prey, he’d never swoop or weave amongst the trees, instead my father chose to hunker for hours in positions lying in wait. Waiting, just waiting. Like a red fox planting his padded feet silently and surely upon the land, he’d manoeuvre himself slowly into positions so he could pounce or stun or surprise. On and off the hills, this is how he would hunt, and Father trained me well to do it too. Trained me to become a canny predator, a thriving human wolf upon the hills.
*
In the cold days of Autumn, when the first of the thirsty Silver Birch leaves fell, Father liked to tie his beaten leather knapsack to my back, tightening its rough leather straps with a violent tug. Standing there with it on my back, he’d fill it up, and me down, with pound bags full of sugar which he still kept on the cupboard which were once solely for Mother’s baking ingredients. Off he’d march me down, down, down to the bottom of the garden between the two mature birch trees
120 2020 Northern Territory Literary Awards standing proudly five meters apart. When we got to the tree on the left, the one farthest from the house, he’d give me a swift thump across the back, knocking me to the ground, then he’d set up his position on the dyke. With a match, he’d spark up his pipe and mumble to me out of the side of his Popeye mouth.
“Stalk to me. Keep low. I don’t want to hear a sound. This is how you learn.”
Of course, his message was clear, but hunkered down amongst the season’s dry leaves, it was impossible not to make them crackle and crunch. More often than not, he would have me out there until the evening light dwindled - along with my strength - or until he decided he needed some supper and a drink. Exhausted and sweating with the weight of my Mother’s old ingredients strapped to my back, I would plant my face amongst the muck, suck in the taste of the sodden ground and pick myself up quivering my way back to the house.
But once I’d mastered balancing my Mother’s sugar, keeping a low centre of gravity and the weight at a certain point on my back, I managed to slither along, placing my hands and feet without much fuss at all. Then, late one evening in ’87, I figured he was pleased since father finally graduated me to stalking living things.
Bonnie, our elderly Springer Spaniel was the fourth bitch named Bonnie I had been blessed to have within the confines of our callous home. The original Bonnie apparently ran away one winter’s night after not getting fed and was never seen again. Father told me that the sunset that night was the exact same colour as an apricot. The second, supposedly, perished in a storm and the third, I found had been shot - quite by accident - by my father during a hunt. But it was with Bonnie IV that father taught me the art of surprise, how to stalk one’s prey over distance and most importantly, in silence.
The challenge was simple. Let Bonnie loose in the wood behind the house. Let her scarper away into the thicket to ruffle and roll amongst the sensual smells of another dog’s piss. Let her run, run far into the sickly undergrowth as we just innocently lagged behind. Then, with the sharp click of a glare father would signal
Zip Print Short Story Award 121 the hunt was on. We’d slink and stalk our dog from place to place hiding from her in whatever way we could. Father wanted to see how close I could get to her without her noticing me a jot. If Bonnie stopped, looked around confused trying to spot where we’d gone, I would have done well. If father could sense even just the slightest chink of panic in her, I would have done very well. If he could see her breathing quicken slightly or her lolling wet tongue quiver even slightly, I would have done excellently. But that was not all. Whilst she was frozen, ears pricked up and tail rigid out back, we’d spring out from behind our hiding spots to dive upon her screaming a ‘wah’ into her face. If this ever caused her to yelp and cower off into the brush, I’d even get a pat on the back.
I can’t remember how many times I had to catch Bonnie out before he took me up the hills, but the night before my first real hunt, father said, as a reward for all my hard work, he’d paid for a twin room with two single beds in The Hoof and Horn. Nestled away in the woods at the bottom of the Carinshield Valley, from here it was a short half-day walk in to the spot where he’d want us to stalk. I’d slept in our house with father for 11 years and yet, the prospect of sharing a room with him filled me with horror. At home, from the relative safety of my own bed, the low rumble of his snoring through the walls had often soothed me in the dark. But in all those years, I had never seen this man without his clothes on, not even in a pair of swimming trunk or without a shirt. I worried that up close the dark rumbles of my father would vibrate violently throughout that room and overpower my chances to sleep.
As he ordered two drinks; a pint of bitter for him and a lemonade with lime cordial for me, I was more silent that ever, trying to figure out how bedtime would work: could we undress in front of one another or should I do it in the bathroom down the hall? Did father clean his teeth at night like Mother had always made me? The lemonade was almost flat, just water and syrup. I nursed it slowly with the straw stirring it around the edges of the glass as father opened his mouth and poured his beer down his throat in three heaving gulps.
He ordered another. Another. Another.
122 2020 Northern Territory Literary Awards Like a hawk, I knew he had spotted something from our table when there was a shift in his demeanour and his eyes honed in. He straightened himself up in his chair, slowly, a little higher and brought his glass to his mouth to pour the remainder of the bitter down his gullet. Even now, even now, I can play that night over…
“Another?” he grunts at me. I shake my head and watch as he slides up to one end of the bar.
“Another?” the bar man asks to which father gives an affirmative flick of his head and brow. He doesn’t say one more. He is silent, motionless again except for his eyes which rove around the outline at the other end of the bar. A woman. First, he looks for her eyes to check that she is not looking. Not yet. The longer she doesn’t look, the longer he can look at her legs, ankles, knees, inner thighs, picture what lies beneath by her pretty white skirt which hangs like limp petals. He lets slip a burp, low at first slipping up the octave. Urp. He blows the remnants out the side of his mouth as a sort of apology, a sort of hello and then she looks up. Still, he stays still, but her eyes go wild for it. She shifts, springing along the bar from stool to stool until she settles herself on the one closest to his. I wonder to myself if this is what he did with my Mother, drew her in close to him to make her feel momentarily like she had a choice. Still he doesn’t move. Like a boy in autumn leaves with pounds of sugar on his back, he keeps his movements deliberately low, slow. She places a hand on his crossed arms and he clamps his hand down on top of hers, snap. There it goes. The capture. The capture is complete. They shift a little and I can no longer see their faces as they wriggle and writhe at the bar.
I stir the lemonade. It’s too sweet and completely flat now, but somehow there are still some bubbles clinging to the sides of the glass.
He comes over and flicks me a key through an arch in the air.
“A room to yourself. A treat. Big day tomorrow. Get some sleep, you hear?”
Zip Print Short Story Award 123 The woman has gone and as he makes his way to the stairs he turns, “Okay.” he commands, not asks.
But I cannot sleep. I do not hear the sound of my father snoring, but listen to the muffled whimpers of a woman who has slipped out of her pretty white skirt, whimpering into a pillow face down. My father with his wild groaning calls, grunts madly on top of her. His breath is heavy; he is excited. He gulps down his thrill, trying to slow himself, but he throws his head back roaring and it is over too soon.
The door creaks open and hurriedly slams shut. By the time the floorboards outside my door creak, my father’s snores begin to rattle through the slender walls. But tonight, between the stiffness of the hotel sheets, I cannot take comfort in those rumblings.
*
He chose a spot he knew the deer liked to move and graze in. After walking all morning through the frozen mist, we hauled up on a steep bank and lay ourselves amongst the plump purple heather and great swathes of pretty little snowdrops, giving ourselves elevation and advantage. This was just as father liked it. We waited, just like he had taught me, lying in silence. I dared not move, willing myself not to squirm even though I could feel my bladder pressing up against me. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched as he played with a snowdrop he had plucked, rolling the stalk between his fingers making the petals twirl frantically, like a woman spinning on a dance floor. But then, without a moment of care, he dropped it to the ground, sniffed and shot me a look; they had arrived.
He motioned for me to follow as he dragged himself along the ground, his hips firmly pushed into the heather, his shoulders shuffling side to side as he crawled. His breath was heavy with excitement. He gulped, trying to slow his breathing down as the biggest stag stood on the Ragged Peak, tilting his head back, roaring, and gaping wildly at the silver sky.
124 2020 Northern Territory Literary Awards “I’ll place the rifle. Don’t put your head up to look. Just look down the sight.” I responded in silence; he never wanted an answer. We only communicated in looks, nothing more. “Slip in behind me. Don’t put your head up to look. It’s in position.”
I nodded my understanding and breathed a heavy trembling breath. As instructed, I slipped in behind him like a shadow, into his place to take charge. He let out what sounded like his beer burp, imitating the stag and daring him not to move off my target. Uuuuuurp. Momentarily the beast was stopped in its tracks, trying to figure out where this foreign challenge was coming from. I realised I was no longer breathing and my blood rushed between my ears. I softly moved my finger into position over the contour of the trigger and applied a little pressure.
Smoke released from the end of the gun. A shot had gone off. Impossibly loud. A mist of red floated from the beast.
It stood still on all fours, mocking me like I hadn’t hit it. But then, it sprang into action, drunkenly stumbling down the hill, stopping, starting again, hesitating and then keeling over with a final thump.
“Shot,” he muttered out the sides of his mouth, clapping me softly on the back.
That night in The Hoof and Horn he ordered two drinks, a pint of bitter for him and half a lager for me. He poured his beer down his proud throat and ordered us another and another and another. As the bubbles in the beer hit the bottom of my hollow stomach, I could see the dark eyes and lolling tongue of Bonnie and my stag spinning before me as I vomited up my spittle onto my shoes. Father clapped me on the back once more.
Zip Print Short Story Award 125 “I did the same,” he said through an urp. He thumped me harder still. “It’s a thrill, okay?” he stated and I believed him. He bought me another half and I drank it to get rid of the taste of my own bitter bile as prickles crept over the surface of my skin. I was warm, but something sent a cold excited shiver through my body. This was it. This was being a man. To settle your boot on the bleeding chest of a thing which had once had life, to see the blood running from its veins and knowing you did that. Your eyes and your fingers gently caressing the curve of the trigger, they did that. As he leant over to order another beer, he looked me straight in the eye.
“What a feeling,” he said. “I’m proud!” As the words of my father spun in pulsing, nauseating echo around me, I pictured my finger stroking the trigger. I was a man. A hunter upon the hills.
In the winter months, when food is hard to find, red deer gather on the lower slopes of the Cairnsheild Mountains and the moors come alive with the sounds of ruts and roars. The largest of the stags will always stand on the Ragged Peak, tilting his head back to growl and gape wildly at the silver sky. It’s the same sound my father used to make releasing the gas of an effervescent pint he’d guzzled far too fast after the hunt. But that was when he was at his peak. In his prime. Like many of the stags on the misted moors of the Cairnshields, father did not live to be an elderly man.
Struck down by influenza, he contracted a pneumonia and was resigned to a bed in the old wing of The Knoll. Slowly, he became a slim withered worm, one which slunk further down the cold damp sheets each day. As he wriggled and writhed on his back panting out painful wispy breaths, I watched him with hawk eyes from the wooden chair meant for loving relatives. I did not move, just sat still, listening to my breath as it became heavy and lower in my lungs. The air in that room was cool and I could feel the howling gales outside as they were pushed through the cracks in the rotting timber window frames.
126 2020 Northern Territory Literary Awards I breathed in the air, slipped my hand in behind his head and swiped the pillow from under him. His limp neck, unable to steady the weight of his skull bent crookedly and his head slunk to one side almost onto his shoulder. His lolling eyes momentarily fixed upon me and he responded in silence; I didn’t need an answer. We only communicated in looks, nothing more. I gulped in mouthfuls of fresh, thrilling air, as I pushed the pillow down into his face with a determined wrench. Further and further. I pictured the innocent petals of a freshly plucked snowdrop rolling between my plump fingers and it was over. His wild life, with a rattle and hopeless groan, was gone. My father went stiff then limp under his sheets, leaving me to stalk the hills alone.
Zip Print Short Story Award 127 Bull Buster by Karen Manton
With a clang the gate rushed open and the bull was out, bucking like crazy, with a flank rope at the back and god knows what at the front, it was a whir. The bull was bucking high, was winning cheers from the crowd. Music thumped to the jumping of the bull. The rider’s left hand was high in the air. His other hand held onto the bull. The tassels on his chaps flew. The bull stood on his forelegs, back arched, hind legs kicked up. The cowboy leaned back like the Man from Snowy River riding down a sheer cliff. One second of glory and it was over. The rider was down, rolling himself away from the stomping hooves of the bull, running to the fence to leap up on a rail. The fence swayed with him. He sat there, the sequins on his chaps glinting. He wasn’t afraid. He wasn’t afraid at all.
Her hair smelt of shampoo. At her ears little heart earrings glinted like crystal.
‘Where do you think you’re going?’
‘The rodeo.’
‘What the fuck for?’
Sunny looked back at her nan, wishing for clever words.
‘There’ll be fights, girl, they’ll fight all night.’
‘I’ll just go for a bit,’ she found her tongue. ‘It’s free for kids.’
Her nan lit a cigarette.
‘It’s the only rodeo I can walk to from home,’ she tried.
The older woman half-laughed, then broke into a coughing fit.
128 2020 Northern Territory Literary Awards ‘You wear me out,’ she said. ‘It’s not even a rodeo. It’s a bull buster. And in that small space at the back of the pub? The bull’ll get out and have nowhere to run. Look at you, you’re dressed like a tart. Go and take that stuff off your face.’
Sunny hurried off to the toilet block. Leaning in to the mirror over a basin she wiped off the touch of lipstick, a faint whisper of eye shadow.
When she looked up her nan was standing behind her reflection. She had her hands on Sunny’s shoulders. The cigarette smoke misted across the glass of the long mirror.
‘You hold onto yerself, Sunny,’ she said.
Sunny grinned back.
‘Be back by dark — or you’re grounded for life.’
So here she was, counting her lucky stars, and half-deafened by the loudspeaker. It felt odd to be back in this town. For months she’d been travelling down south with her nan’s cleaning work in the van parks. Now people seemed like strangers and familiar at the same time. She held out her wrist for a pink entry band and followed other bodies inside. The air was alive, electric. Every breath was a wave of excitement. She was gulping vibe.
There was a bull in the ring, dancing around, kicking like it knew what the crowd wanted. No mind to run through the exit gate. The men in the ring were trying to usher him through. But he wasn’t playing their game. Sunny sidled between people, pushing forward. She could smell the animals. She’d seen them on her way here, shadows behind the cyclone wire fence and bulging creeper. A portable yard had been built just for this event. She’d watched them shifting around, restless. Like the bull in the ring now, moving here, moving there, before finally loping through the exit gate.
Sunny scanned faces in the crowd, looking for Billy, though she guessed he’d be round the back, waiting for his turn. Her eyes went to the men behind the
Zip Print Short Story Award 129 chute. They were up on the rails, doing the ropes, preparing the next bull. There was a struggle, a banging in the chute. The gate crashed open, and a bull skidded out onto the ground. The crowd rose with a Whoa! Sunny saw nothing but a cloud of dust and hoof. No man, no beast. People were shifting in front of her, blocking her view. She squeezed through to stand behind a chair where a pregnant lady sat nursing a toddler. The fallen bull and rider were gone already. They’d evaporated in a cloud of dust. The music was louder than ever, the announcer was revving up the crowd.
Behind her was an older woman wearing bright red lipstick and heavy makeup. She had a shock of red hair, frizzed out.
‘It’s the flank rope that makes them buck,’ she explained to the curious tourist beside her. ‘Not the rider.’
Sunny could hear her nan having words about the flank rope. She wasn’t into it, parading animals, making them buck around arenas for entertainment.
‘Tie up those riders with a flank strap and then I’ll come and watch,’ she’d say.
The woman with the red hair held a plastic cup of wine in her hand. She pointed out the judge and the sponsors for the show. She’d grown up with the rodeo circuit, she knew who was who.
‘He knows all these bulls,’ she was talking about the stock contractor now, the man in the yard with long blue socks and a blue shiny shirt who was inside the yard. ‘He knows these bulls, works with them every day of their lives.’ She sipped her wine. ‘They have a good life. If they weren’t here they’d be at the meatworks.’
A clown was in the yard too, dressed in red. He walked around, smiling and bowing for entertainment, picking up the rope dropped from the last bull. Sunny couldn’t see him properly for the rungs of the fence. He was a segmented clown, with red socks. He wasn’t really here for the crowd. He was keeping an eye on the bull, keeping the bull’s eye on him when needed.
130 2020 Northern Territory Literary Awards The music blared Guns ‘n’ Roses. The sound system distorted, screeched. Sunny wondered if the bulls liked the music or not, if they thought, What happened to the quiet paddock? Soon, when it was dark, the tall lights would beam down on them. She could feel the music vibrating through her. She was hungry, but the queue to the food looked too long.
While they were waiting for the next bull she scanned the crowd again. The whole town must be here; and hundreds of others. The caravan park was full to the brim, overflowing. There was a buzz among the young. They wore tight jeans, colourful shirts, big buckles on their belts. They had cowboy hats and walked carefully in expensive boots. She felt distinctly op shop. Her boots were about fourth hand and she’d spent all her pocket money on them. They were black leather with embroidered stitching and scalloped edges. Her shirt was too short for her arms so her wrists showed. She’d made a bracelet, a leather thong strung with square beads, each one sporting a letter, so the whole string spelt B-I-L-L-Y. The heel of her left boot was coming away, but she held her head high and thought of her nan singing at karaoke, These boots are made for walkin’. All the same, Sunny knew she was an outsider. She wasn’t like the other girls. Her grade six teacher used to say, ‘You’re from another planet kiddo.’ Sunny hadn’t cared in those days. She’d tried it out as an introduction.
‘Hi. I’m Sunny, I’m from Mars.’
‘OK everyone — .’
The loudspeaker blasted in and out of the crowd’s hype. Sunny half-wished she’d stayed outside and climbed a Raintree for a crowd-free view. Like she used to do with Billy before he left town. Look at the world from a tree. And go places. It’d been Billy’s idea to jump from the tree over the pool fence that night. She was floating on the calm, cool water when he ran up the rigging to the blue and green canopy overhead. She could see the dark shadow of his feet carefully walking out across the shade-cloth. And then the mighty rip, the fall, the splash that echoed
Zip Print Short Story Award 131 through the whole town. She’d plunged underwater to hide. Above them half a moon peered through the windows Billy had made — two gashes in the cloth, one for each foot. And all of it on camera. So Billy was banned from the pool, and sent to work on a station with his uncle. Serve him right, people said.
‘Serve you right too,’ her nan told her. ‘That Billy’s no good for you.’
Now Sunny saw him, suddenly. Over the other side of the ring, sitting astride the fence, looking like a real cowboy. Looking like a man. She was too young for him, she could see that now. Her heart was in her mouth, she felt sick. And as if he knew, as if one of her angels had passed him the thought, he looked out across the ring and saw her. She knew he’d seen her. His wave was beautiful, she could eat it. She waved back, and on the warm air sent him all the good luck she could muster. She was breathing out the good luck for an angel to hold and carry to him.
She felt a strange lightness, something between fear and dread and excitement. She was so lightheaded she could float away on her own breath. She wondered if anyone could see how strangely un-weighted she was, that they might have to catch her by the foot as she drifted up and passed overhead. He was talking to someone else now. That older girl in her pretty watermelon-coloured shirt, and her jeans with the tassels. The older girls moved in pairs or threes. They were all similar, the same person wearing the same clothes.
The chute opened and pushed out a bull with a cowboy who toppled off almost straight away. The bull trotted to the edge of the fence, snorting. And his flank rope looked like a chain. When he turned to rush for the gate he suddenly paused, so close Sunny could see his eyes through the gap in the fence rungs.
‘This’ll be young Billy, next,’ said the red-haired woman, looking down at Sunny. ‘You know him?’
Sunny nodded, dropping her hands from her arms, trying to look normal. Billy would be binding his glove now, taping it around and around to stay on his right hand. Sunny could see his cowboy hat bobbing above the fence, he was getting ready.
132 2020 Northern Territory Literary Awards ‘Billy,’ she prayed, and wasn’t sure what to pray next, but she gave his name to the angel, and asked her to do something with it.
Sunny was still psyching herself up when the gate burst open and Billy rushed out on the bull. Time slowed, every second made a resounding thud with her heart. Her heart was a mallet.
‘Hold on Billy, hold on,’ she whispered.
He was all there with the bull, rising and falling and folding and bending.
The crowd roared with delight. She couldn’t believe Billy was still holding on, left hand in the air, grasping the invisible angel.
‘Go Billy, go.’
He was hanging on for dear life, no one could believe he was still on. The crowd was pressing in; their hollers were a rush. The sound of everything was held in suspension, except for the throb of a pulse in Sunny’s ears and the thud of her heart. All around were wide-eyed, sweaty faces. But now Billy’s body was folding too much, folding and arcing. He was out of sync, the boy and the beast had lost their song. He fell in slow motion. Sunny closed her eyes and begged that airy angel to catch him or break the fall. She looked just in time to see his body punch the ground and raise a plume of dust.
The bull was close, yellow horns shoveling dirt as Billy rolled away. The crowd was ecstatic. Billy was up on the fence with a grin like a wild cat. The judge gave him a thumbs up.
‘On ya Billy boy,’ boomed the loudspeaker, ‘A legend in the making!’
‘Like a chip?’ The woman with the red hair asked.
Sunny inhaled the chip too fast. It burnt all the way down and brought tears to her eyes. She let them fall with the burn in her throat and relief Billy was there on the fence.
Zip Print Short Story Award 133 ‘It’s safer than it looks,’ said the red-haired woman, waving her arm at the arena. Her plastic cup was full of beer now. Sunny felt ill at the urine colour of it. She ate another chip.
‘It’s all show,’ the woman said with a wide smile to Sunny.
‘It’s safe ‘til you’re dead,’ Sunny’s nan would say.
The announcer was talking up a new competitor, an old hero who was 75 today. A cheer went up.
‘Victor! Victor!’ the crowd chanted.
People roared to see him behind the chute. The red-haired lady with the chips shook her head in admiration. There was no outdoing or holding back or holding down Victor.
‘He’s as his name,’ she beamed.
‘I know him,’ said Sunny.
‘True?’
‘Yeah.’
She didn’t say, ‘He’s my granddad but we never see him’.
Sunny wondered what her nan’d do if she knew Victor was riding. Maybe she did know. Maybe that’s why she hadn’t mentioned the bull buster. Everyone was staring at the chute. Suddenly Victor was through and the bull was bucking with a ferocity no one had seen this show. Victor was on for all of three seconds before he made the drop. Everyone held their breath for the old man, but he was up faster than anyone, running to the side of the ring. The crowd was wild with shrieks and whistles. The bull waited, snorting, and took a run at the rider, but Victor wasn’t fazed, they were both old hands at this. The exit gate opened and the bull hurried through. Victor was still in the ring. The loudspeaker piped up Happy Birthday and people climbed the fence from the other side to lean down and shake his hand.
134 2020 Northern Territory Literary Awards When he left Victor walked near to Sunny, so near she could have touched him. She followed him through the crowd into the pub. People stopped him to shake his hand, pat him on the back, rush up for a kiss. She’d like to do that, but he was walking swiftly out. The spurs on his boots trembled with every step. He was out of here, slightly bow-legged, grey-haired, built like a brick. People chanted his name again and clapped, ushering on their hero. He’d have liked to stay longer on that bull, she could tell. A woman in a peach-coloured miniskirt pulled him close. She rested her face on his shoulder, make-up smudged from sweat or tears or laughing. And then he was gone, passing tourists who wouldn’t have a clue he was the greatest rider around. And though her nan might kill her for it, Sunny followed him out into the car park to see which was his ute. She whispered to his back a secret something, and while no one was looking, blew a little kiss. He didn’t turn or notice a thing. It’d be up to one of Sunny’s angels to carry that message and wrap it around him in the night.
The twilight was deepening now, she didn’t have long. The Raintrees were patient shadows. She would have a last look perhaps, from up in a tree. The floodlights zinged on, the ring was a beacon of light. Everything seemed different further back, the air less taut. She waited for another bull, another rider to fall.
Suddenly Billy’s face was there in the almost dark.
‘Hey you!’
In a moment he’d scrambled up the trunk as if it was a ladder.
‘Did y’ see me ride!’
‘Yep,’ she said.
‘And Victor!’
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘He just left.’
Zip Print Short Story Award 135 Billy slid down behind her to sit against the trunk and let his arms rest lightly on her. She thought he might have been in pain, and no wonder, the way he fell, the way he’d bounced on the ground. He stank of sweat. She could hear the thud of his heart, and her own.
‘So whadidya think?’
‘You’re a legend,’ she said.
‘Who’d’a’ thought, out here at the back of our pub!’
‘Yeah.’
‘So you comin’ to see me when I’m a pro?’
He jammed his hat down on her head.
‘I dunno,’ she sort of laughed.
‘Whatchya mean?’
She was looking for a good way to say it but she couldn’t think so she just said straight out, ‘I reckon that flank rope’s mean.’
She had her hand over the bracelet so he couldn’t read his name.
‘Yeah,’ he said, drawing her into him, so she could feel his heart beat.
His fingers suddenly pinched her sides. She held onto the tree, clutching at bark, forced to laugh.
‘It’s true,’ she said at last, and his fingers let go.
She wished the invisible angel was near, up in the higher branches of the tree or hovering on the incoming night. Instead the dark clouds flickered lightning. She drew in a breath.
‘There was one bull real close, like he was looking right at me. His eyes were sad.’
136 2020 Northern Territory Literary Awards Billy’s head was on her shoulder, as if his skull was too heavy to hold up even against the sturdy tree. More and more his foreahead leaned into her. All of a sudden she was losing balance. Her thoughts were spiralling. The night had swept in on her too quickly. She was holding on for dear life, to the tree, to him. She could feel herself slipping away. Any minute now she would hit the ground.
Notes: These boots are made for walkin’ lyrics by Lee Hazlewood.
Zip Print Short Story Award 137 NORTHERN TERRITORY LITERARY AWARDS 2020
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