Issue One Hundred and Four | Winter 2016 Voiceworks New fiction, nonfiction, poetry, comics & visual art from young Australians

$12 GST FREE EDITOR PUBLISHED BY EXPRESS MEDIA Voiceworks is published quarterly Lucy Adams by Express Media, a national GENERAL MANAGER not-for-profit organisation that DESIGN AND ILLUSTRATION Pippa Bainbridge provides opportunities in the Lynley Eavis literary arts for young people CREATIVE PRODUCER aged twelve to thirty. Express EDITORIAL COMMITTEE Fiona Dunne Media presents an annual artistic Cathy Tran program that encourages and Clare Millar SCHOOLS PROGRAM develops the work of young Ella Jeffery PRODUCER Australian writers. Ellen Cregan Alice Chipkin Find out more about our program Eric Butler at expressmedia.org.au. Fiona Spitzkowsky FINANCE AND Jonno Revanche ADMINISTRATION VOICEWORKS SUBSCRIPTIONS Joshua Barnes COORDINATOR Ensure you don’t miss a single Katerina Bryant Victoria Bennett issue by signing up as a subscriber Kat Gillespie to Australia’s premiere youth Kelsey Oldham MARKETING COORDINATOR literary journal. A one year Lily Mei Samantha Taylor subscription is $60 and includes a Michelle Li print edition delivered to your door Mira Schlosberg EXPRESS MEDIA BOARD each quarter, a PDF edition and a Myles McGuire Tracy O’Shaugnessy (Chair), subscription to the monthly Express Nina Carter Andrew Trnacek (Treasurer), Post enewsletter. Shu-Ling Chua Kate Wilson (Secretary), Julia Tim McGuire Carlomagno, Chris Dodds, The views and ideas expressed in Vince Ruston Meredith Curnow, Martin Portus, Voiceworks are not necessarily John Gillman, John Ferguson. those held by the management VOICEWORKS INTERN committee, staff or volunteers of Alexia Brehas EXPRESS MEDIA PATRON Express Media Inc. Every effort is John Marsden made to substantiate statements of PRE-PRESS AND PRINTING fact made in Voiceworks. Printgraphics Pty Ltd EXPRESS MEDIA 14 Hardner Road COMMUNICATIONS INTERN Express Media are proud to Mount Waverley VIC 3149 Chanel Zagon acknowledge this journal was printgraphics.com.au produced and edited on the CONTACT DETAILS traditional lands of the Wurundjeri Express Media people of the Kulin nation. As a The Wheeler Centre national magazine, we also pay 176 Little Lonsdale St our respects to the traditional Melbourne VIC 3000 custodians of all the lands from which the stories and artwork in this issue was sourced. VOICEWORKSMAG.COM.AU/ EXPRESSMEDIA.ORG.AU/ FACEBOOK.COM/ ISSN 1038 4464 VOICEWORKSMAG VOICEWORKS @VOICEWORKSMAG ISSUE NUMBER 104 (03) 9094 7890 WINTER 2016 COPYRIGHT 2016

‘The Swimming Pool Cake’ is by Emma Hough Hobbs (19), an artist and flm student from Adelaide. When not watching anime... Wait, never mind, she’s always watching anime.

Editorial Holly Friedlander Visual Art Liddicoat It’s Almost Time (now, Lucy Adams this time, here, in Emma Hough Hobbs Surviving The Apocalypse Leipzig)—p. 36 The Swimming Pool —p. 4 Cake—p. 1 Hugo Branley Eric Butler A More Modern Torso Brigit Lambert Sweet Tooth—p. 6 —p. 47 Banana Cake—p. 8

Chloe Mayne Lee Lai Tectonic—p. 63 Friday—p. 15 Fiction Gina Karlikof Danyon Burge Gigi Hadid—p. 72 The Cake Ahead—p. 28 Eda Gunaydin Meat—p. 9 Jocelyn Deane Ania Gareeva Apples—p. 82 Birthday Party Matches Kelly Palmer —p. 56 Anthrax—p. 29 Zhi Yi Cham Cusp—p. 88 Lucy Hunter Jonathan O’Brien Apples—p. 90 —and anyway, we Emily Crocker promised you a story, Sprouts—p. 103 Gabby Loo didn’t we——p. 49 It Took Me To Where I Needed To Be—p. 102 Mikaella Clements Vertical Wine Tasting Nonfction Anwyn Hocking —p. 65 PsychideliCake—p. 112

Lauren Farquhar Alex Grifn Road Kill—p. 83 A Brief History And Short Future Of The Imaginary Comics Bethany Leak Sharehouse—p. 19 These Hands—p. 97 Bartholomew Pawlik Harry McLean The Surprising Carretera Austral Psychology Of Food (Route 7)—p. 38 Poetry —p. 41 Julia Trybala Nathan Mifsud Slow Burn—p. 79 Mindy Gill Bajitar Paradise—p. 57 Orang asing—p. 16 Ellen Wengert Louise Jacques By The Half Dozen—p. 74 Prix Fixe—p. 26 Kim Lateef No Wedding Cake For An Illegal Romance—p. 91

VOICEWORKS • 3 EDITORIAL

Surviving The Apocalypse

By Lucy Adams

Each morning, aftEr dusting the brimstone of my boots and zipping up my hazmat suit, I strike out into the acid fog, skipping over toxic waste puddles, on my way to the Voiceworks headquarters. The journey has felt perilous at times, what with the apocalypse still hanging in the air. On a day of reckoning now known as Black Friday, Express Media, which publishes Voiceworks, was one of sixty-two arts organisations defunded in the most recent round of Australia Council grants. There’s been plenty of media coverage on the devastation the cuts will have on the creative landscape of Australia, and the dominant narrative reads like doomsday. Before the cuts, we already existed in an environment fundamentally hostile towards young writers—a culture that dismisses the validity and legitimacy of young voices. Writing by young people is so often patted on the head and sent to wait in the corner until it’s ready to play with the grown-ups. If the terrain for young writers was once inhospitable, now it’s been irradiated. The current state of alarm is warranted, and the outrage appropriate, but what all this means exactly for the fate of the defunded organisations remains uncertain. Our readers and contributors want to know: what will happen to Voiceworks? A world without Voiceworks is my idea of a dystopian hellscape. Left with no-one to value or publish their work, young writers—rogue and feedbackless— would take to keying poems into train windows or Artlining short stories onto spools of toilet paper. But we’re not there yet—this is not the end of Voiceworks. In dark and dangerous times such as these, it’s difcult not to internalise the apocalypse. We live in a perpetual state of unease brought about by the realisation that our lives depend on things—institutions, policies, errant asteroids—beyond our control. As young people, we feel this lack of control acutely. There’s a huge disparity between the strength of our ambitions and desires, and the lack of power or agency we’re granted by society. At times this discrepancy is so stifing it can feel like the world is ending. But there are strategies for surviving the apocalypse. Knowing I still had to see this issue to print, despite Nostradamus tapping at my window, I looked to learn from those who’ve already succeeded in surviving several mass extinctions.

4 • VOICEWORKS I transformed into an editor extremophile—a critter that withstands catastrophic conditions detrimental to life on Earth. At frst I channelled the tardigrade (aka water bear or moss pig), a micro-animal able to withstand all manner of extremes—pressure, radiation, dehydration, boiling and freezing temperatures, the vacuum of space—by entering a cryobiotic ‘tun’ state that renders it practically indestructible. Lesson: be a real tough guy. Then came the mummichog, a fsh with the ability to activate and deactivate a large number of its genes according to its environment. It can thrive in any water type—fresh or salty, warm or cold, polluted or clean—and even in the weightlessness of space. Lesson: adapt and modify. When all of this failed, I became the lingula, a clam-like creature with a hinged shell, which burrows deep under the ocean foor to shelter from cataclysmic events. Lesson: retreat from the world, need nothing and no-one until it’s safe to emerge again. It turns out the best animal to model yourself on when faced with human problems is the human—a creature fundamentally reliant on community. There’s only so much we can achieve through toughening up or burrowing down. The magazine in your hands wouldn’t exist unless I’d asked for help. Reaching out to other humans makes for a pretty good survival strategy. If post-apocalyptic young adult sci-f has taught us anything, it’s that our future rests on the shoulders of a rag-tag gang of loveable young misfts (and that at least one of them can operate a crossbow). In case you haven’t fgured it out yet, that means you. When we lose faith in the ability of our institutions, our safety nets and our federal government to consider our needs and take care of us, we need to turn to each other for support. In a culture that tells young writers what they do doesn’t matter and isn’t valued, Voiceworks provides a safe space—a rebel base, a radiation free zone, a rogue space station. You don’t need a bankable name to be published here or to be welcomed into our community. We hear your voice, and it does matter. When the world has abandoned us and deemed us expendable, we get scrappy, we get resourceful, we build a shanty town out of blasted tin and tell each other stories.

VOICEWORKS • 5 ED(COMM)ITORIAL

Sweet Tooth

By Eric Butler

to my sixtEEn-yEar-old sElf,

I’ve been doing my breathing exercises for an entire year, preparing to blow out this twenty-ffth candle. In for fve… hold for fve… out for fve… perpetually curling up and unfolding. My diaphragm gets stronger with each repetition, but my heart still beats like a sparrow’s. Putting yourself out there can take a lot—living safely is often easier than actually having a life. Walking blindly without actually seeing, existing without being seen. Having your cake, but not eating it, keeping it in the freezer. Three years ago, I was falling for boys with their fngers in so many pies. By 2014, I wanted to be one—a thing easier said than done. As a child, I watched with admiration as my grandmother served sponge cake with cream and ice-cream. There was never anything wrong with wanting both, having both. I was taught not to feel guilt for the things that feel good. Outside of this environment, things were diferent. There’s a precedent for how boys and girls should act, you must be either one or the other, and you stick to your assigned role and projected sexuality. Anything outside that is greedy, shameful, less than. Growing up queer in a small city (read: anywhere), self-preservation often trumps authenticity. There is one discourse, one culture, one community. You must assimilate or hide. Luckily, books, sheet music and canvases all make great hiding places. But the time inevitably comes when you have an anxiety attack reading Pride and Prejudice, realising you’ll never marry a Bennet sister—at least not without simultaneously pining for Mr Bingley. You skip dinner that night. Embarrassingly, it can be difcult to realise that marginalised people shouldn’t have to squeeze themselves (their gender, sexuality or otherwise) to ft into these narratives. Most marginalised writers and characters are excluded from the canon deliberately. We don’t exist in fctional form because people don’t want us to exist at all. By the time I was sixteen, I had turned myself inwards, not quite wanting a way out, fearing it. Passively, I prayed for cheekbones, hoping I was the ugly duckling, the before photo. In year ten—contact paper covering books, dandruf covering contact paper—we watched The Breakfast Club, and I pined for a makeover from Molly Ringwald. I mean, why watch eighties teen movies when you can be one?

6 • VOICEWORKS Practically everyone looks pretty in pink. Sadly, the peer-support network we had evidently didn’t extend past Saturday detentions. Besides, self-actualisation is often something that you need to do on your own. Openness about our selves takes constant strength, but it is vital. Coming into Voiceworks, some eight years later, I realised that there is a strong community here. Everyone comes to your party, there’s a support network to bounce ideas of. Your own work becomes less masturbatory when there’s someone there to help you. Even while you’re sitting there, doing Tim Tam slams in the meeting room, the world becomes slightly less scary. Inside my current bubble, the minority is the majority. More and more publications are (fnally) listening to people, regardless of their positionality. How sweet it is. Sometimes it feels like there’s a boy at my window with a boom box, but I’ve got my headphones on. Seeing opportunities when they present themselves isn’t always easy, taking them can be even harder. Instead, I choose to bury my head in the doona. I blast bubblegum pop so sweet I get a toothache, until I can’t quite tell where the Mandy Moore lyrics end and my own writing begins. Leaving the house helps. Failing that, you’ll never be alone when you have wi-f. As I’m typing, my phone chimes Heyyy, and my next application is just a click of the ‘Submit’ button away from being fnished. It can be hard to keep up momentum when there are people out there trying to silence your voice, erase your existence, hurt you. But you are on the right track. And you are not alone. Be louder: you can have your cake and eat it too.

Missing u like candy,

E x

Eric Butler (25) wonders if there'll ever be a power couple as good as Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell (and wants in).

VOICEWORKS • 7

• FICTION •

MEAT

By Eda Gunaydin

‘Wa, it’s okay.’ Berna chants this privately—enough times a day. A good amount of times a day. Probably thirty to ffty. She wakes up at four most mornings. That’s also okay, it’s fne. She doesn’t have to purée the chickpeas every morning because sometimes Yağmur purées them the night before. She adds oil and garlic and salt and pepper and to half of it she adds paprika because people like it orange lately. She barbecues eggplants in between cigarettes on the open stove. She lights the cigarettes with the fame from the hob, barely noticing she does so until Yağmur tells her of one morning. As far as her daughter knows, she doesn’t smoke, so this is a blow to the careful economy of information they maintain between themselves. She waters Yağmur’s peace lily, which Yağmur doesn’t water anymore. It agitates Berna to care for the plant.

‘Banana Cake’ is by Brigit Annie Lambert (22), a Melbourne-based visual artist. Her work uses a range of mediums such as photography, video and illustration.

VOICEWORKS • 9 • MEAT • Eda Gunaydin

Her stove’s pilot light has conked out, says Yağmur, so she must light each hob with a match. It reminds her of—well, ovens made of shit, which she has left behind her, scattered through various homes in a blue-red trail since she arrived here. But also her mother’s house. She adds the tahini and the onions and the yoghurt. She drives to work. She passes Fremantle Prison, and is exasperated anew at the tiny fock of tourists already parked outside. Running late, she motors up Hampton Road. Today is the day the guys who run the telephone app come to flm. I make the sauces myself, she mouths as she parks, weighing the words’ contours, trying to just this once strike a balance between authentically foreign and not-going-to-be- laughed-at. She pats her boss friendly-like on his shoulder for practice. She’s not sure how strong her accent is—she doesn’t want to ask Yağmur. It would be fne. But she doesn’t want Yağmur to make fun. Speaking English hurts her jaw because—well, it’s okay. Speaking English is okay. They have an eight-star rating on the telephone food delivery app. Apparently their service is good and their food is cheap but sometimes they mix up orders. That’s good. They’ve had to extend their trading hours because kebabs are a drunk-person food, and people drink—a fne amount. But late into the evening. Her sister’s kids eat tripe soup back home, when they’ve been out late drinking. Or lamb intestines. Yağmur thinks it’s hilarious the interest in intestines. It makes Berna think of Yağmur, seven, in Turkey with her for her mother’s funeral, and how she would refuse to eat kokoreç, despite the smoked woody odour wafting out from the coals of the street vendor’s carts, their friendly calls, which warmed them briefy as they bustled past. ‘It sounds like cockroach!’ Yağmur would shrill, making to run away and startling yet another street cat. In the interest of cultural exchange, at least, Yağmur also refused to eat couscous—because it sounded like the Turkish for vomit. Berna herself doesn’t eat most Australian foods. She resents the taste. Whites don’t eat their own food anyway, she thinks often. ‘Meatloaf!’ she jokes, any time Yağmur is home around dinner-time, if she’s not at work or at her ‘friend Selin’—her boyfriend Ali’s—house. Yağmur insists that the white people don’t eat meatloaf. ‘That is what I am saying! They cannot even eat their invention!’ says Berna.

Yağmur is almost done with university now. Berna had lied to those who asked at the beginning. Or, at least, she never said the word TAFE. Which was fne. Yağmur understood. ‘Turks are so fuckin’ judgemental,’ she once said. ‘Can’t I just live my fuckin’ life?’ ‘Yes, sure. I just want you to have a good life.’ She lied about where Yağmur worked because—retail. It’s glamourless. Some shifts Yağmur has to wear a large cardboard T-shirt-shaped advertisement on the walkway outside the store. Her sister in Izmir told her that one of her friends who ran a shoe store had once, and only once, bade one of his employees to do the same. There had been a city-wide outrage and it had hit the newspapers it was considered so degrading. It makes Berna really wonder what the fuck sort of labour

10 • VOICEWORKS • FICTION •

they’re doing over there lately if that’s humiliating. Yağmur is fred en masse one day, along with fve others, because they’re over eighteen. ‘Now you can fnd a nice job,’ Berna says. Yağmur becomes a waitress. ‘Your father and I don’t want you to do waitressing,’ she says. ‘Find a nice job.’ ‘You work at a kebab shop,’ Yağmur says, clicking her phone’s lockscreen. Wow, she’s serious, Berna thinks. ‘I work like a dog,’ she says. ‘Every day I work like an ass. Is there a day I don’t smell like sweat and meat? Name that day,’ she says, stepping into Yağmur’s space. ‘Name that day. Of course I don’t want this for you.’ ‘Bırak beni!’ she mutters, bounding up the stairs. ‘Benim suçum ne? It’s not my fault.’

They flm the thing. Berna smiles in forty diferent directions for forty seconds apiece for forty dollars. Then she works the twelve-hour shift and at the end of the day wads the two hundred dollars into her purse and crams the leftover meat into some takeaway boxes. The beef has long ago cooled down, its oil turning luminescent and white and tacky and solid and which she will microwave when she gets home, if only for the satisfaction of seeing it revert to ingestible shape. She will wrap it in some bread and eat it at the kitchen counter and slip into bed and rest her legs high up against the wall and will her feet go back to being a size eight. And she too will melt back into shape, ft for human consumption. She asks Yağmur to drive her to work tomorrow because—well, it’s fne. She only doesn’t like to drive lately, as it makes her headache trill like a birdsong but one that slices into her. Her scalp heats up. She knows she’s dying but she can’t kill anyone on the road because she already has a good behaviour bond on her licence (because she truly believes it’s safer not to wear a seatbelt than to wear one, and she and Yağmur fght about the topic often enough). She holds of just this one time. Then another time. She keeps not driving as a favour to their souls.

Kenan has been trying to sell for a year now. He started at one-twenty grand and now he’s down to thirty plus rent (including water and GST). No one wants to buy despite their eight-star rating on the food delivery app and the fact their YouTube promo video has 120 views and one enthusiastic comment praising garlic sauce. No one mocks her accent in the video. Yağmur fnds it and she sends it to some of her friends. Yağmur says they all like it but she laughs and squeezes Berna’s cheek and says ‘Aynı nine gibi çıkmışsın! You’re a loveable granny!’ ‘Git, lan!’ she says, smiling despite herself, shooing her out the door on her way to spend time with her friends. Kenan has the funds to go back to Turkey. He’s going to buy a summer house by the water. His daughter has just explained to him why she knows the answer to everything—that if you type the right things into a website called Google all of the questions that agitate you can simply be answered. He has had her print out a list of fsh found on the Aegean coast. All his fshing until now has been done illegally,

VOICEWORKS • 11 • MEAT • Eda Gunaydin

in Rous Head Harbour on the weekend (before he started working weekends). Now he wants buckets of barbunya. ‘Satmam gerek, bacim,’ he keeps saying. ‘I gotta sell.’ He is scrubbing at the spray-paint marking the glass sliding door, proclaiming ‘fucking lebs’, which has drip dried almost illegibly. She’d had to get Yağmur to lean out the car window and decipher it for her because they’re not Lebs, and it’s hard to pick out things in a foreign language when they’re not easily assumed from context. It seems important to note that she’s not an Arab, so she says it to Yağmur while she brushes up her eyeliner in the car before heading to campus. ‘Are we Arabs? No.’ Yağmur laughs surprisingly uproariously, given her mother is known for not having a sense of humour. ‘Can we really aford to be picky, though? Really?’ She kisses her on both cheeks and tells her to have a nice day and leans out the car to shout Thank you at the man who lets her merge. She and Kenan chat about the grafti while tossing kilos of salad, speculate about which set of drunkards or schoolkids wearing hoodies did it. Kenan’s money is on South Freo. Berna points out Kenan should have just had those cameras installed two years ago. ‘Bu etiket aynı işe yariyor!’ He points to the glass door which bears the grafti, and the sticker that gently suggests the presence of CCTV, insisting that you only need the sticker anyway. Berna wants to note that’s demonstrably false in this instance but she’s fatigued. A reporter swings by without warning at four, asks about the grafti. Kenan jostles to prepare him a cup of tea and the reporter insists he wouldn’t like any, but Kenan strongarms him, and through sips Kenan explains in an enthused shout that it’s okay, it’s fne, it’s not normally that sort of neighbourhood, but he’s concerned it’ll afect his ability to sell the place. He’s selling it, you know? Could you write that in the article?

Kenan’s taking his kids back to Turkey with him, even though they’re twelve and fourteen and don’t speak a lickity-shit of the language. She’d been concerned a little at frst but her sister back home convinced her that all the kids do over there is take selfes, just like in W bloody A. ‘Özel okullara gonderirim, merak etme,’ he says. She raises a couple of eyebrows but doesn’t say anything in case there are indeed specialist or intensive schools in Ildır and she never knew they existed because she only earnt her high school equivalency after she had Yağmur and if he rubs it in her face it will be— fne. Irritating. But fne.

She spends Sunday stomping through her backyard garden picking green peppers, wearing too-large black Crocs and a wool vest, pausing every so often to try to take a picture with her phone of just how many peppers she has managed to grow. She

12 • VOICEWORKS • FICTION •

scrolls through the image previews, carefully zooming to determine which is the best pepper picture, and succeeds in sending one to Yağmur on WhatsApp. ‘So talented mum!!!!’ comes the response. Berna pops each pepper’s top over the sink with a single methodical gouge, stufs them with mince and rice and seals them back up again with a lid-shaped tomato slice. Ali Baba and Aria don’t sell anything but döner and chippies and so people eat döner and chippies and blame their constipation on trashy Turkish fast food. Berna’s mother had always claimed she invented that—the tomato lid. She’s not sure but she won’t check. If it was someone else she prefers to wonder. She smokes three cigarettes, then one long long cigarette, realises she’s almost been eaten alive by mosquitoes—which is fne—and goes inside. She rifes through Yağmur’s drawers until she fnds a calculator then asks Yağmur if it’s legal to withdraw thirty grand in cash from the bank, or if they have a law about that as well.

Kenan acts like she’s saving his life and she smiles as much, but less insincerely, as the day they shot the video for the app. He tries to give her pointers on the running of a small business, emphasising the difculty of feeling responsible for every customer, how it’s diferent. He goes on to proclaim he won’t miss the work at all, that he could probably fnish the construction on the house on the water with some money left over to get him by while he looks for a job not selling kebabs. He brags about the low cost of living, the easy way of his milliyet. ‘Anladım,’ she says. ‘I know how we are. Resmen kıskandım.’ It’s true that she’s jealous, but it’s fne. She’s being sarcastic.

Kenan goes; she goes to work. She wants to have CCTV cameras installed. Kenan comes up right on this—they’re pricey as fuck and she’s not Kerry Packer. (Yağmur reminds her every time that he’s dead, but she forgets.) She installs the cameras herself through sheer force of will. She gives herself a pay rise and the son of a family friend she hires gets ten dollars more than she normally got per day. That’s just good business. Uğur refers to himself as an ‘import’ and wears a stream of hats she disapproves of, but which she knows he uses to hide his premature bald patch. He works the close shift most nights and has enough latent youth that he can be matey with the revellers who visit the shop after midnight and she can stream ATV at home in her slippers instead of vacillating constantly between a snarl and a grimace, hearing people rant about halal snack packs. She knows they don’t eat halal because they’re not Muslim. No one is crowding around desperate to be Muslim. That’s how she knows they’re not. It doesn’t aggravate Uğur. So he does that particular labour. The same, or diferent, hooligans smash in their window a month later. Uğur hears the commotion from the back and is young and reckless enough to chase them of cursing. After that his matey style is performed almost relentlessly.

VOICEWORKS • 13 • MEAT • Eda Gunaydin

She leans into the ‘homemade’ aspect of the business model of the place, and starts wearing a tülbent to work. Customers see the head covering and more often than not surmise that she, a wise homemaking sort, makes the sauces, and stufs the vine leaves, and rolls the pastry out for the pides and gözleme herself. She does, of course, do all these things, although the food delivery app has been pushing her to outsource them so they can expand their delivery hours and use the app’s delivery drivers. She has no choice but to say okay and that’s that, although she shivers a little with disgust every time she sees the vine leaves which have so very clearly come out of a tin get put in plastic to be sent to some unsuspecting person’s house. Yağmur calls it ‘autentik plus’ and it makes Berna smile, grimly. Kenan sends word he’s coming back to WA a week before he does it, with no house and no business, and never clearly explains the problem. Berna predicts that he’s managed to piss away his savings and kebab profts and didn’t get the house fnished after all, because he believed the tradespeople when they said he’d have to pay upfront. She insists to Yağmur that it’s because he’d lived here for so long. ‘Turkler iyi kazık atmayı biliyorlar,’ she insists. ‘We don’t have to rip people of like that here. Siz safsınız be. So naïve. We’d see how good you’d be at scams if you didn’t have a Centrelink.’ Yağmur considers and says, ‘Nah, there are heaps of shit people here though. What’s wrong with being honest anyway?’

Kenan comes around snifng for scraps, and in the well-worn Turkish tradition of feeding and maintaining all the street cats and dogs through uncoordinated collective action, she gives him a meal. ‘You sold me for too low,’ she says. She tries to speak English more often now because—it’s fne. The food delivery app people speak only English. When they poke around so often she makes the adjustment. ‘Come back on the business as manager on new shop. Your kids been through too much.’

Eda Gunaydin (22) is a researcher and writer from Western Sydney. She is a perpetual student-in-the-making.

‘Friday’ is by Lee Lai (23), who makes comics, illustrations and food with varying levels of seriousness. She is currently based between Montreal and Melbourne.

14 • VOICEWORKS

• POETRY•• •

Orang asing

By Mindy Gill

Mindy Gill (20) is currently eating her way through her honours in creative writing at QUT. Her poetry is forthcoming in the Australian Poetry Journal.

16 • VOICEWORKS • POETRY •

Klang, you’re not so diferent from the last time I saw you. You’re consistent. I like that in a city.

At the wet market across the street from my grandmother’s house I hail a taxi, lucky gold cat Blu-tacked to the dashboard, rambutan husks in the bottom of my bag.

You are sitting in the driver’s seat, cigarette stuck to bottom lip, aircon blasting your hair back and I say Klang, Klang, you haven’t aged a day.

We cruise down the highway, one banana plantation after another, and it makes me think of my father’s white Opel Kadett, tandoori drumsticks in an oily plastic bag in my lap.

When we hit a hundred and ten I want to roll down my window, ai ai aii! But we get stuck in a jam and I think it is better this way. Klang, I think home is a highway without memory.

At the mamak restaurant, steel fans spray mist as we drink pulled tea and Milo ice, and Tamil men talk politics, Agni Paravai, haze, fipping roti canai dough and cooking coconut rice.

Stick around lah, you say, what’s the point in leaving if you’re only going to come back.

I watch the stray dogs lie in the carpark sun raising snouts to open palms that pass by. Tak tahu, I don’t know, I don’t know.

The air thickens until it breaks into hot rain and Klang, you’re asking again if I’m listening. The dogs roll under cars and I want this moment in a parcel of newspaper and banana leaf.

VOICEWORKS • 17

• NONFICTION •

A BRIEF HISTORY AND SHORT FUTURE OF THE IMAGINARY SHAREHOUSE

By Alex Grifn

thE studEnt sharEhousE might at IGA, or residing exactly where your be dying out. When I say sharehouse, friends are moving into next weekend. it’s not with any particular address While the dream remains bewitching, in mind, no long-decomposed the reality that made it possible might couch dragged home from roadside be slipping away. But why does it mean collection, no TV with the sound so much? How did the sharehouse gone. I mean the one in our collective become the sharehouse? And if it’s imagination, the one that may have going, why? only existed in barely remembered stoned conversations on the couch, ‘Yoooo… who’s ready to get weird?’ unanswered texts to heavenly Gumtree —Werewolf Jones in Megahex by ads, or the House of Trouser that Toadie Simon Hanselmann from Neighbours lived in. As personal and shifting as this idea has been, it’s As Steinbeck’s Cannery Row shows us, always hovered on the fringe of access, the main thing that throws a heap maybe over the next page of Gumtree of unrelated people together into a listings, maybe stuck to the noticeboard dilapidated room is changing economic

VOICEWORKS • 19 • A BRIEF HISTORY AND SHORT FUTURE OF THE IMAGINARY SHAREHOUSE • Alex Grifn

circumstances, and the twentieth- the family estate and the lack of stables century Australian student sharehouse once they arrived. comes from just that. I mean, before After World War II though, big World War I, the idea of unmarried changes started to swing. With a large students of diferent genders, races and number of servicepeople returning from ages living together was pretty much war with guaranteed places and living beyond immoral; you’d likely be laughed payments from the Commonwealth out of the front bar at the pub for even Reconstruction and Training Scheme, suggesting it, your ears full of smoke. as well as increasing scholarships To gloss a Pollock of urban and and falling fees, student numbers social complexity down to a thin black quietly exploded, fowing into town stripe or two, where you lived and with from the ‘burbs. Returning soldiers whom was the site of intense moral weren’t particularly keen to swap the scrutiny, couched in early twentieth- barracks for the dormitory, and the century language about contamination, food of students from the suburbs strength and moral purity. Students put pressure on transport networks, would stay at home ’til wedded of, overwhelming the limited (and socially or lodge with relatives or in boarding exclusive) amount of housing stock on houses (which were universally looked campuses. Housing pressure, for want down upon). This was particularly of a better term, was going buck wild. harsh on women, who had more than Farrago, the University of Melbourne enough trouble just gaining access to student magazine, reported in 1953 that higher education. Once accepted, they students were increasingly ‘unwilling weren’t able to attend institutions to take lodgings in outer suburbs’. In without the guarantee of a room on 1949, there were close to 32,000 higher campus or an ofcially approved education students in Australia. By the guardian outside of it (which was time of Whitlam’s universal education easier said than done). in 1972, 182,000.2 And they all had to This was all well and good while live somewhere. universities remained exclusive The magic of gentrifcation (until it’s institutions. In 1914, less than 0.1 per all ffteen dollar cofee and unnervingly cent of the population attended uni, banal commissioned street art) is that roughly 4,700 people.1 Since Australian the bane of one renter’s existence can cities rejected ye olde English tradition be the boon of the next, and so it was of academic pastoralism (think Oxford with inner-city housing for students, out in the middle of green nowhere) especially in Sydney and Melbourne. by sticking our frst universities in the Workers’ cottages in suburbs like centre of the city, the only real problem Carlton and Brunswick, for example, for non-boarding, far-fung students had been dominated from the outset by was the length of the horse ride from rogue, predatory real estate business

1. Commonwealth Bureau of Census and Statistics, Ofcial Year Book of the Commonwealth of Australia 1916 (Melbourne: McCarron, Bird & Co, 1916). 2. Higher Education Students Time Series Tables (1949–2000) (Canberra: Higher Education Division, Department of Education, Training and Youth Afairs, 2001).

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practices, partitioning up old terraces and living independently outside and villas to squeeze out rent, and relationships. By the seventies, the converting anything bigger into a mobility of young people was pretty boarding house. As inner-city workers much taken for granted. My dad tells cashed in on the Long Boom and shifted stories about rolling in and out of out to their dream property in the sharehouses up and down the west coast with a regularity bordering on the manic, and sneaking into the army ‘...the sharehouse has barracks at Scarborough after the been the defnitive pub curfew to keep drinking with the social formation of the soldiers. A cultural pattern became set; you move out after high school to work last ffty years.’ or study with a bunch of people, just to see what happens next. But what did suburbs, these places became ideal for this all mean? students looking to live cheaply and conveniently, and they duly piled in. ‘Milo and I sat in the living room later Likewise, the industrial character that night, surrounded by the debris, of inner-city areas began to change at sunburned and hopelessly drunk…’ a clip. Factories started barrelling out —He Died With a Felafel in His Hand to the outer suburbs, which shifted by John Birmingham those chasing work further away from the cities into the sprawl. While that To try and sum up how this dream happened, the building of the ‘gumtree’ imaginary sharehouse shaped us over universities outside of the city centre, thousands of messier, real life examples like Monash in Melbourne, Murdoch in is stupid, but here’s a try, because the Perth and Western Sydney University, sharehouse has been the defnitive fanned out the sharehouse ethic across social formation of the last ffty the suburbs. It wasn’t all fun. Farrago years. The nuclear family might have reported that one writer was a ‘little been the way of life politicians have distressed to fnd [her]self living… pandered to, but the sharehouse has over a fshshop’, but the tendency for been on the edge of all the change and students to move closer caught on, upheaval of the last decades, through and coupled with increasing levels of universal education, disco, AIDS, bush permissiveness in the sixties, these doofs and going fve ways on a Netfix new, mutant rental households began subscription. The things that go into to develop in a food. People didn’t living in one taught us a lot about need to get married to move out of how we feel we’re meant to live today, the parental home, they realised, and like a fnishing school for foundering everyone else got tipped of. If we think in postmodernism, learning how to FOMO is a modern phenomenon, it is negotiate infnite and overlapping most defnitely not. uncertainties, or the slow accumulation While a signifcant amount of people of all the layers of twenty-something. still moved out to marry and establish To expand on that, sharehouse their own households, they were a living is the transfer of personal agency falling proportion, and the emphasis to the self, but without taking on was on students and people working responsibilities beyond that—a period

VOICEWORKS • 21 • A BRIEF HISTORY AND SHORT FUTURE OF THE IMAGINARY SHAREHOUSE • Alex Grifn

where you can hibernate before making isn’t so impossible to move from the a leap, or where you can settle in a suburbs to the city and meet people rut without owing anyone anything. from the other side of the tracks. You Change and uncertainty aren’t things can rub shoulders with anyone; after to avoid but a way of life. In short, all, even Clive Palmer bummed around everything becomes casualised—who in sharehouses on the dole, writing you live with, who pays for what, how his poetry.3 This kind of loosening of long you hang around—which is all in stark contrast to the social formality of moving when you’re married. Like, we ‘Was I horrifed? live with housemates but we can only Maybe. Did I want to go depend so much on them. You might to a party there? Oath.’ wake up one day and Heather is gone, and that’s just that. The rest is in your court. Which means experimenting, be social relations, that we’re able to grip it throwing everything in the fridge in a and graft and slide between diferent pot and hoping for the best, or sleeping households and lifestyles, has been very around for no particular reason. To be much a preamble to the ructions of the creative with your own life, and one new job market, where we’re meant another, is the idea—fridge-magnet to upskill, downskill, adjust and settle poetry, making up drinking games for whatever’s available. But the watching The Bachelorette, or that real freedom is the space to express hastily Artlined sign (which never yourself, to explore your own identity, comes down) telling everyone at the outside of the surveillance of family. party the toilet’s broken. A room of one’s own not just to write, but a house in which to create yourself. ‘Don’t know if it was a gap year/Or a Basically, maybe the sharehouse exists gap life…’ in the common imagination as a —‘Gap Life’ by Dick Diver place to become yourself in ways you hadn’t expected. Living with people to whom you have Like, the idea that anything can no formal ties means having to be happen is central, be it meeting accepting of swings and roundabouts. someone at a party, or the bathroom Social access also means social mobility. window falling of in a slight breeze. Pinballing around sharehouses means As Keats conceptualised it in a letter that connections are less limited to to his brother, the idea of negative work, sport or other conventional capability means that a person ‘is outlets, which has weakened older ties capable of being in uncertainties, and formations over time. The need mysteries, doubts, without any irritable to join something more rigid, like a reaching after fact and reason’. The social or a bowls club, dims when you sharehouse is negative capability as a have Jill’s house up the road and the lifestyle. With your housemates, you pub on the corner. All of a sudden, it make it up as you go along, building

3. Guy Rundle, Clivosaurus: The Politics of Clive Palmer, Quarterly Essay 56 (Carlton: Black Inc., 2014).

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ad hoc out of doubt towards, well, not Nora and Jako’s long, sad waltz out exactly clarity, but towards less doubt, of each other’s lives. Yet there aren’t engaging merrily (or not) with all of so many novels which focus on the the messiness that comes along the sharehouse. It might be because it way. More or less, moving out, that rite doesn’t conform well to a narrative, of initiation and maturity into society, since life in the sharehouse is a series is now very much a DIY kit, rather than of episodes. Only when someone shifts an old-fashioned replica of your folks’ of does a new season begin. (The fip is marriage. My frst sharehouse involved that, usually, the time to leave is when someone with a six-month-long vow you feel as if you’re stuck in a rerun.) of silence and a PhD student living in a It’s more archaeological than linear, yurt he constructed in the backyard. I a layer cake constantly refrosted over regret nothing. with the total discontinuity of how it’s shaped and formed. The most refective ‘…and three: a foral pillow slip will examples might be those classics cover up any overnight drivel.’ of housemate gothic, He Died With a —The Sandman, Good News Week Felafel in his Hand, or Simon fuckin’ Hanselmann’s Megahex. Of course, as it evolved into a way and a But the true sharehousehold art place that people lived, the sharehouse form might be the oral tradition that’s became that other thing, a lifestyle, sprung from it. After all, the stories with a whole set of codes, ideas and people tell about sharehouses are how clichés, a language of being in the the sharehouse lives on as a dream. world. Arguably, the poet laureate of Part grimy kitchen-sink prurience, part distinctive oral history form, they can be educational screeds, implicit ‘My frst sharehouse slices of moral instruction, and rich, involved someone weird lamentation. Anyone who has with a six-month-long passed through a sharehouse has one to impress a stranger and to spook a vow of silence and a parent with. Hugh told me the story PhD student living in a about the punk house his brother yurt he constructed in Iven lived in where a hole had been punched through the shower recess, to the backyard.’ be covered up with Glad Wrap for a few years. They left a roll in the (broken) that lifestyle was the Sandman. In over bathtub to reapply it. Was I horrifed? 271 episodes of the Triple J radio serial Maybe. Did I want to go to a party 214 Bell Street, he excavated in his shaky there? Oath. gravel-and-custard voice the wreckage Through this rosy tint, the (emotional and otherwise) of communal dream sharehouse comes into view. living while skirting lightly around Somewhere, in your price range, his own domestic failures. Nothing in there’s a house with people who might Australian lit better scrapes out the be the best, worst, or best kind of angst and horror of people tangling worst thing for you. It could be so good. together than Monkey Grip, where Everything begins to look possible multiple sharehouses form a stage for through this gentle nudging of pushing

VOICEWORKS • 23 • A BRIEF HISTORY AND SHORT FUTURE OF THE IMAGINARY SHAREHOUSE • Alex Grifn

one another a little more open; that welfare net is closing on students, communal dream of fnding your best and the casualisation of labour makes selves through navigating uncertainty. it harder to juggle classes with This probably sounds bong-heavy, unpredictable and unaccommodating but this is what the magical realism work schedules. Besides all that, of the sharehouse myth does—it can the low black shadow of housing translate the quotidian temporarily afordability chalks another mark into something fringed with gold and against frittering money away on rent. possibility, until, as all dreams must, it wears of and through, and you’re left looking at getting up and moving on. ‘The sharehouse is a site for cultural ‘I will never forget the smell of his productions that just wetsuit, festering on the dining room table because he left it in a plastic bag, haven’t happened sopping wet, on there for two weeks. elsewhere, like the And he played classical piano…’ punk houses of Perth —AC on his worst housemate or the tiny band And wearing thin it is. As people marry scene of Melbourne in and couple later, rents skyrocket and the eighties...’ boomers increasingly dominate the rental market for their own ends, it’s becoming more expensive for people Symbolic deaths abound. York St who have cracked into the professions in Brisbane, immortalised in Felafel, to earn enough to break out of the is becoming a fourteen-room block of sharehouse and into home ownership. apartments. And if you cleave like me As such, the supply of sharehouses for to the idea that something only truly students is on the wane, and they’re dies when it becomes a start-up, then becoming older, more professional, check Base: a sixteen-person ‘curated’ and more expensive. The numbers are sharehouse that selects housemates spiritually and physically painful to dependent on their potential as read, but here are a few to chew on. entrepreneurs, to ‘connect and incubate Returning to the nest—or not [thinkers]… for the new paradigm’. As leaving it at all—is increasingly the a way to live, it sounds like drinking way things are going, with students the Kool-Aid from a Voss bottle. (The citing expense and housing stress as idea is that the house will eventually key reasons. ABS statistics show that reinvest profts into a hedge fund for in 2011, 29 per cent of Australians the occupants’ ideas.) aged 18–34 were living at home; There are subtler shifts, like the compared to 21 per cent in 1976.4 apps (google them) being toted as Bouncing around from place to place solutions for sharehouse bookkeeping, is dropping too. At the same time, the which is the anathema of sharehouse

4. Rachel Clun, ‘The Changing Face of the Australian Share House’, Domain, 25 March, 2015.

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improvisation. With an increase in sharehouses means less room for demand for housing, incumbent serendipities of the kind that don’t roomies can be a fair sight pickier. come readily through a screen; chance Dream houses on Facebook are encounters, brief dalliances, new becoming fetish items, swathed in connections. The sharehouse is a likes, comments and tags, while site for cultural productions that just inboxes are regularly fooded with haven’t happened elsewhere, like the earnest self-declarations of being the punk houses of Perth or the tiny band best housemate possible—some combo scene of Melbourne in the eighties that of arty, interesting, good at cooking, spewed out the Primitive Calculators clean, quiet (but not too quiet!) and (see Dogs in Space immediately if you glad to unwind with a wine and a chat haven’t yet). I don’t say this to be come Friday. In short, professionally nostalgic; it’s the future I’m worried Good At Life, which is almost the about. Where will all the young, weird opposite to where we started of, with and artful miscegenating happen, if not Monkey Grip’s merry-go-round and the sharehouse? vivid, gross bacon lunches. I don’t know if this is an elegy for Moving out of the familial home something. The Herald Sun comments now, if you’re fortunate enough to section might say about bloody time, but aford to do so, might just be a kind of we lose so much when we pull away economic foolhardiness: a very diferent from people we haven’t met. Sure, kind of bravery to that of the fshshop skipping the sharehouse means not ffties. We might be coming to a point making so many horrible, memorable where the cost of the sharehouse mistakes, but it also means fewer will make moving out less a rite of risks, fewer chance encounters, more passage and more a lifestyle choice, the coming to know the world at a remove domain of those who are willing and instead of way too bright and close. able to invest in the rituals of youthful The world shrinks. If you’re in a self-sustainability and emotional sharehouse today, put everything down carnage, of buying into the process of for a moment: leave the washing on creative destruction that the generation the line, don’t sort the mail, let the before us idly gallivanted into. Living dishes sit in the sink. Look around you, young and independently might mean and remember that while none of this studying or apprenticing until you’ve happened by accident, pretty much all landed the Adult Job, rather than the of it did. That was the point. grimy luxury of making it up as we go. In a world where we outsource our romantic lives to Tinder, fewer

Alex Grifn (23) is a writer and researcher living in Melbourne. He likes Boris Groys and hates the beach.

VOICEWORKS • 25 • POETRY •

Prix Fixe

By Louise Jaques

Louise Jaques (24) is a poet. In 2015, she edited the UTS Writers’ Anthology. She was thrilled to write about cake, one of her favourite subjects.

26 • VOICEWORKS • POETRY •

the gap in the venetians lets through a slice of sun, to stare hairily at a stripe of dust bated breath waiting for patrons— day one. scrupulous in its preparations, rituals forgotten; even the spoons were commissioned. I watched them hammer out the precise depth from long, sterling billets the distressed furnishings are teak, shades of valencia orange peeking around the charred indentations the menu features carefully selected words like battered, honeyed, shucked and drunky. late nights spent staining embossed paper with wet teabags and serif glass cabinet like the dome of a submarine encases early morning toils of a sugar-dusted creature rising like the yeast he kneads in the hour of pre-heat glistening lime jellies hint at nuclear desertion as soft, bitter chocolate pudding sags in the middle, like the navel of a schoolgirl the beauty’s in the texture; fresh marscarpone clinging to the soggy lemon sponge

VOICEWORKS • 27

• FICTION •

ANTHRAX

By Kelly Palmer

anniE and russ arE fattening scrunched wrapping paper over the carpet when their mum tells them there is anthrax in the sky and soon everyone will be dead. Russ lets go of his new Matchbox car. Annie scratches at a freckle that might be dirt. ‘See that cloud?’ their mum asks. She tells Annie and Russ to come out onto the balcony. ‘See the tail? It’s toxic.’ The white cloud hanging above the KFC on the Broadwater isn’t bigger than Annie’s hand when she holds her fst to the sky. A bell chirps. Annie steps onto the lowest beam of the railing and leans over. Below, a boy her age runs with his bike and jumps on as he breaks through the invisible line that divides the apartment complex from the street. ‘It’s just a cloud,’ Annie says. She rubs her eyes. When she reaches out to a palm frond, she can feel the damper air lingering beneath the balcony, away from the breeze. ‘See? Look.’ Her mum taps Annie’s arm with the back of her hand. Annie pulls back, scared that the drink in her mum’s hand will spill and leave both their

‘The Cake Ahead’ is by Danyon Burge (21), an aspiring artist. He likes drawing, non-western music and obscure sports. He studied fne art at UWA.

VOICEWORKS • 29 • ANTHRAX • Kelly Palmer

dresses smelling like the pub. Her mum pulls Russ to the railing by his shirtsleeve. ‘It’s a spore cloud,’ she says. ‘Full of germs. It’s a biological weapon.’ Russ snifes, rubs his face with a fst. The arms of his sweater are shiny with snot, and there is a dark ring of sweat around his neck. With her hand at her forehead, Annie can look to the sun. As long as she keeps that brightest spot covered. Millimetre by millimetre, Annie starts to shift her hand away. She blinks hard and sees that the sun is really a black ball hiding in sunrays. Her hand covers the sun again and gold beams escape from behind her fngers. ‘Don’t look at the sun,’ her mum says and slaps Annie’s hand away from her face. Annie squints and finches. ‘I wasn’t.’ ‘You know better than that.’ Russ gasps through tears. He hasn’t stopped crying since their mum said this would be his last birthday they’d ever celebrate. The threat came after Russ complained that the green icing on his birthday cake looked yucky. ‘That’s what anthrax looks like,’ her mum repeats, then lights another cigarette. ‘When we breathe it in, we’ll die.’ Annie bats the laundry carousel and Russ winces when stained underwear swings at his face. Behind a towel, he cowers from the pool of sun where their mum stands. A division as crooked as the International Date Line gives their mum half a face smeared in ash, while the other half drowns in the plush of yellow light. Most things are either dark grey or yellow in January. The light is a hiding place. ‘Sul knows. Sully,’ their mum calls. ‘You know about this. Right?’ The glass door is wide open; the track between the carpet and tiles keeps inside and outside from being one room. Her mum steps over the track, onto the carpet. ‘What?’ Sully says from the couch. He slumps forward like a sack of potatoes. Russ sits on the other couch. As he brings his feet of the foor, his knees smack against his chin. The adults don’t seem to notice his teeth clunk. ‘Stop crying,’ Annie says to Russ. ‘What are we talkin’ about?’ Sully asks. He reminds Annie of an overweight blue heeler she once saw sleeping with a man outside the toilets in the park. She wishes he’d fnd a new place so he won’t be on their couch for another week. Sully stares at the swollen ashtray on the cofee table. Ash and butts graze an old TV guide. The icing-smeared plates from earlier have been cleared but for some wet fecks along the chipped laminate. ‘Anthrax,’ her mum says as she drags the glass door closed. ‘Anthrax? I don’t know anything about that,’ Sully says. ‘I do,’ her mum says. She turns of the TV, then tosses the remote onto the couch. ‘It comes from dead animals. Disease-ridden meat. But governments put it in the sky to massacre whole cities with it.’ ‘Your mum has watched more documentaries than anybody I ever met,’ Sully says to the kids, lifting each syllable under the strain of whatever he had to drink the night before. ‘Listen to her. She’s a smart woman.’ Annie picks at a burn mark in the carpet. When she looks up her brother is picking stufng from a split in the couch’s arm. ‘Can I go outside?’ Annie asks. ‘Aren’t you listening to me?’

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Annie mumbles something that sounds like yes. Her mum raises a can to her mouth. ‘If anthrax gets inside you, you’ll be vomiting blood and shitting your pants until you die. Just crap coming out both ends, drowning you in flth. It’s death in the sky, Annie.’ ‘Okay, Mum.’ ‘Do you want that?’ ‘No.’ Annie thinks of the time her mum came home drunk with her arm in a sling. The cops had driven her home after she fought someone. Another time she limped through the door and blood was running down from her hair. Sully stands and walks through the middle of the lounge room to the hallway. Everyone watches. Her mum drops into a chair at the dining table, which has been pushed into the corner. A laptop is open in front of her. Some kids outside scream. ‘Inside is boring,’ Annie says to her mum before she can load a game. ‘It’s so hot.’ Their mum twists around in her chair. Her eyebrows pinch together. ‘I want plants,’ Russ adds. His face is stained pink, but he isn’t crying anymore. ‘Plants?’ her mum asks. ‘There’s fucking plants right there.’ She points to the balcony and the palm trees on the other side of the railing. ‘They’re not inside,’ Russ says, almost smiling now. ‘Inside?’ her mum asks. ‘I want plants inside,’ he says, now leaning over his crossed legs, hands in front of him. Annie isn’t sure where to look. ‘Yeah, and who’s going to water them?’ her mum asks. ‘You?’ He leans forward further—just enough to show he’s in the game. Annie runs the tips of her fngers back and forth against the carpet until it hurts. She’s sure she’ll make another burn mark. ‘We could have plastic plants,’ Russ says. Her mum squints and shakes the idea out of her head. ‘I hate that,’ she says. She holds her hands out in front of her as if cautioning them. ‘I hate plastic plants. Gets us used to everything being fake.’ ‘Hey. Hey,’ Sully says, as if calling a dog. She looks to him. ‘Hey, Mum,’ Sully says, mocking Russ. ‘Just let the kids go, why don’t cha?’ he says. The couch creaks as he shifts to the edge of the cushion and his hand falls on hers before she pulls away. ‘Come outside with us,’ Annie says to her mum. ‘We’ll go to the water.’ ‘Not by yourselves,’ her mum says. ‘I said come with us,’ Annie says. ‘They’re old enough, aren’t they?’ Sully asks. ‘What do you think?’ Sully won’t raise his voice, but his lack of eye contact scratches something in her mum as clearly as Russ has been tearing the couch open. Her mum talks back in a controlled yell, so Annie can’t tell her to stop, because she isn’t yelling, not really. ‘You’re not being reasonable,’ Sully says.

VOICEWORKS • 31 • ANTHRAX • Kelly Palmer

‘What? What did you say to me? Reasonable? You wanna talk reasonable? I just forked out dough for two birthdays and you can’t shout me one pack.’ ‘I was just thinkin’ we could have a chat while the kids are gone,’ he says and shrugs, his eyes on the foor. Her mum stares down at his head. ‘A chat? That’s what you want?’ Sully looks up at her mum, and when his eyes meet hers, he holds up his hands for protection, finches as if she had moved to hit him. Her mum snatches Sully’s wallet of the table. She removes a ten dollar note. ‘Yeah, alright,’ Sully says. Metal crashes and rumbles—the sound billows up from beneath them. Annie jumps after Russ jumps frst. The dumpster had hit a pole in the carpark downstairs. But usually the sound isn’t so much like a growl. ‘What was that?’ Russ asks. ‘Don’t go outside,’ her mum says. ‘Really, sweetie?’ Sully asks. Annie stands with her arms stif, held straight at her sides, and refuses to breathe. She’s not sure what she is listening for until she realises the kids outside aren’t laughing or screaming anymore. ‘Don’t open the door,’ her mum says and catches Annie’s dress before she reaches the balcony. Annie jerks back and stumbles. ‘Mum, I can’t hear anything.’ ‘Do you want to be next? Don’t open the door.’ She pulls her dress out of her mum’s hands and stands still to prove she won’t try it again. Annie thinks about pretending to use the toilet and sitting on the lid for a few minutes on her own. Instead she walks straight to her room. Russ follows, no longer smiling, and Annie closes the door behind them. Russ climbs onto Annie’s bed and twists the bottle of nail polish that Annie told him yesterday not to touch. She sits on the foor, leaning against the door, and watches her brother slather the tips of his fngers in gold polish, dripping glitter in the folds of her sheets. She can hear the blunt charges of her mum and Sully arguing. She makes out a few words, but forgets them quickly. ‘How long are we staying here?’ Russ asks. Annie shrugs and throws him the remote. It lands on the bed, but he ignores it. After, Annie realises Russ might have been asking if they’ll move to another suburb again. He says, ‘She doesn’t listen.’ Annie’s room used to be her mum’s. But two days ago, on Annie’s eleventh birthday, her mum said that she and Annie could swap, so that Annie could have her own room. Russ would share with their mum. When he found out, Russ turned the TV up as loud as it would go and threw the remote at the wall. Now the paint is chipped right in the centre of a pale rectangle where a drawing used to hang. Her mum yells louder. Annie hears, ‘You’ve never even had kids. You don’t know what it’s like, to think of them dying all the time.’ Her mum’s words vibrate through her as if rolling with the soft thunder of a jet.

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‘Wanna leave? You can get out. I’ll throw you out.’ Sully groans. ‘Get the fuck out!’ ‘Hey,’ Sully says sharply. ‘Hey, hey, hey.’ Annie opens the door and rushes down the hallway in time to watch her mum push Sully from the couch to the front door. Sully steps forward as he trips, holding his hands in front of his chest to keep his face from smashing into the bookshelf or the door handle. He curses at her mum and bends his knees so it looks like he might just drop to the foor and wait there until she gives up. ‘No!’ Sully says. His breath stammers. For a second Annie thinks he might have a heart attack. When he is less than an arm span from the door, Annie’s mum shoves harder. It takes Sully too long to work out he has to open the door himself. He twists the handle and the chain catches the door. Annie swears she can smell acetone funneling into the apartment. Sully stands there fumbling with the chain and Annie’s mum punches him in the shoulder. ‘Get out!’ ‘Mum!’ There is a rolled towel stopping the base of the door from opening too far. Sully shufes out, not having had time to look back before the door is slammed on him. Her mum scoops the wallet and a pair of glasses of the cofee table and darts onto the balcony, leaving the door open behind her. Annie pulls the top of her dress over her mouth the way a frefghter at school taught her to do. When Russ appears by her side, she instructs him to do the same with his sweater. Annie’s mum hesitates at the railing, then pegs the wallet and glasses at the ground. The sound is underwhelming—a quick tap at the concrete a storey below. Annie hurries to her mum and reaches for the railing. Her mum swings around and says, ‘Why do I have to get mad before you do anything I say?’ The world is so quiet that her mum’s voice seems to smother the whole block. Annie steps back into the middle of the room. She shakes. Her mum slides the door closed and ficks the lock down. She jerks the blackout curtains across the door with one hand, her can now in the other. Instantly, the room cools. ‘It’s dangerous,’ her mum says. ‘Why would you do that?’ Annie says. ‘Don’t,’ Russ says to Annie. ‘Why do you always have to take her side?’ Annie asks him. He says, ‘Because.’ A blur of light burns in the space between the drawn curtain and the wall. The light seems condensed, powerful: a lamp in an interrogation room. Annie angles her face away. Her mum sits at the desk. There is a pulse of silence where her mum looks almost reverent. ‘I know,’ her mum says, looking at Russ. ‘I know, sweetie. I’m scared too.’ She pouts, then holds her arms out. Annie almost laughs before Russ stands and buries himself in their mum’s hug. Her mum’s eyes fick to her for only a second. Annie squeezes her eyes shut and leans against a deep bookshelf packed with videotapes, the labels crossed out, rewritten, and crossed out again. She’s seen all the flms and shows over and over again. There isn’t one about anthrax. ‘I don’t even know what anthrax is,’ Annie says.

VOICEWORKS • 33 • ANTHRAX • Kelly Palmer

The dressing gown bunches a little at her mum’s shoulders, and her arms around Russ slacken. She looks again at Annie through the corner of her eye. ‘I told you,’ her mum says. ‘Told me what?’ ‘Shut up, Annie,’ Russ says. Annie can’t tell if he is genuinely afraid or if he just wants to be held. He seems to hug their mum more often when he hates Annie, or even when he hates their mum. ‘I bet it doesn’t even exist.’ Annie says, ‘There’s no such thing as anthrax.’ ‘Yes there fucking is.’ Her mum jolts up, knocking Russ onto his feet, and points to the window. ‘Yes there is. It killed a bunch of people in World War One!’ Annie doesn’t need to check. Her mum’s tone is truth enough. ‘Wouldn’t other people know?’ Annie asks. ‘Oh, yeah, right,’ her mum says. ‘They probably want us all dead.’ ‘Other kids are outside,’ Annie says. ‘And they’ll probably die.’ ‘Mum!’ ‘Annie!’ her mum mimics. Annie slumps back into the shelf and looks at the foor. ‘Mum! Mum! Mum!’ her mum steps towards her, leaning down to her. ‘How do you like it?’ Annie keeps her eyes straight at the foor and her hands at the back of her own neck. She tries not to look at her mum’s face, which she knows will be twisted and still like a monster mask. Annie says, ‘Why would I want to live if we were the only people alive?’ ‘You little shit,’ her mum says. ‘What?’ ‘You’re a mean person, Annie. That was mean.’ ‘I didn’t mean it like that.’ Her mum walks back, this time kneeling on the foor beside Russ, pulling him to her chest. He holds her but stares wide-eyed at Annie. Maybe he’s confused, maybe he’s hurt. ‘I’m sorry,’ Annie says. Annie closes her eyes. She sees the anthrax drifting in front of the sun, the shadows losing their edges. The anthrax, like baby powder, falls over rooftops, over palm trees. The anthrax billows at the feet of the glass, seeps in under the door. Annie wraps her arms around herself and coughs. It burns her throat like a poison. She stands. At frst, her mum pretends not to notice, but then Annie is sliding the chain of the door. Annie is stepping outside into the stairwell. Annie takes the stairs down, her hand hovering over the railing, then starts running when she hears her mum at the door. When Annie’s feet hit the concrete and she feels the gum of an oil stain, she doesn’t take the path to the street, but runs across the empty space reserved for their car. She’s holding her breath. If she knew where to go, she would run for a kilometre without stopping. On the other side of the driveway is a narrow garden with brittle trees and a wooden fence.

34 • VOICEWORKS • FICTION •

When she fnds a paling with some give, Annie puts a foot against the fence and pulls back with all her weight. She hangs of the fence until she trips backwards with the plank in her hands. Annie ducks under the beam and steps through. She stands under twisted trees that lean over the creek. Today the creek is at low tide, so she sees the Telstra phone box, all those trolleys, and sticks spiking out from the mud. Her bare feet are frm on the grass. No one else is using this strip of green that lies behind the fences as a shortcut. Annie picks up some macadamia nuts from the ground. She can hear trafc from the Gold Coast Highway. She can smell fumes and chicken salt and creek gunk and her own milky sweat. The leaves hanging above glow a translucent green. When she reaches out to them, she can touch the sun.

Kelly Palmer (22) didn’t cry when she was born so her grandmother tried sending her away. Now she teaches creative writing and cries all the time.

VOICEWORKS • 35 • POETRY •

It’s Almost Time (now, this time, here, in Leipzig)

By Holly Friedlander Liddicoat

Holly Friedlander Liddicoat (23) has previously been published in Cordite, Otoliths, Seizure, Queen Mob’s Teahouse and the UTS Writers’ Anthology. She lives and studies in Sydney.

36 • VOICEWORKS • POETRY •

he dangles nikes over balcony legs stuck through the metal bars paint fecks snowing on his jeans rust revealed. he picks at it sucking on a dart the window’s closed, hoping she wouldn’t see—not that she cares about the cigarettes. watch the sun plunge fatly down, reds and browns coming home to roost. wake stand cook clean rinse wash sit sleep repeat. she sits herself neatly inside watching not watching sleeping not sleeping. her entire being wants to fuck wants with his cheaply: but fucking needs talking she’s sick at the thought of this knowing unknowing—she pulls postcards from their walls, the plaster comes. she uncorks a red, leaves him to his ciggies and rust specks she hurtles down stairs, across Ausstraße to the cemetery—anaemic she sits on a bench in the autumn leaves wishing she could stay there watching the going-down sun that sparks once, then dims. eventually he comes inside eventually she comes inside in bed bone-tired head to toe head to toe two crescents of barbed wire. there had been years of Them and now just half-deaths and skin-fecks.

VOICEWORKS • 37

• NONFICTION •

THE SURPRISING PSYCHOLOGY OF FOOD

By Bartholomew Pawlik

thE koala rarEly WritEs deciding what was safe to eat and what monologues about the relative merits might kill us. But Pollan argues that of the eucalyptus leaf. That’s probably the abundance found at the modern because koalas are specialised eaters supermarket intensifes the omnivore’s —a species subsisting on a restricted dilemma. We no longer have to worry diet—and therefore experience less about what may or may not kill us— food-related angst than us humans. incidents with packaged lettuce and In his 2006 book, The Omnivore’s frozen berries aside—and so the choices Dilemma, Michael Pollan writes that available to us can seem endless. humans must navigate an ‘existential I’ve always felt that I’m responsible food situation’: as omnivores we for my own eating habits. Like most can eat almost anything that nature people, when I go to the supermarket ofers us. Historically, a lot of our I take a prepared list of what to buy— cognitive resources were invested in and consequently eat. But studies

‘Carretera Austral (Route 7)’ is a comic by Harry McLean (23), who makes comics in Melbourne. He previously studied philosophy and now studies publishing and communications. He likes reading, running and drinking beer.

VOICEWORKS • 41 • THE SURPRISING PSYCHOLOGY OF FOOD • Bartholomew Pawlik

in the modern psychology of food students. The students entered the have revealed that there’s a veritable laboratory four at a time, believing that cornucopia of infuences that shape they were about to sample and rate a what we consume, from lighting new tomato soup recipe. Unbeknownst and music, to colours and shapes, to to them, two of the bowls were rigged location and visibility. Even at our own with copper pipes leading to large dinner tables, there are factors outside containers of soup; regardless of how our conscious awareness that guide much they ate, their bowls would our knives and forks. When, listening never completely empty. To ensure to a Yale open course, I inadvertently that no over-eager students picked stumbled across a small sample of up a bowl, exposing the tube beneath, this research, I became determined to undergraduates were asked to leave investigate these external infuences the bowls on the table, ostensibly so and see what they mean for our everyday lives. If outside forces were dictating our decisions, I wanted to ‘Wasnik’s award- take back the driver’s seat and make winning research my own food choices. My investigation involved a bowl of soup, led me from the local McDonald’s to laboratories at Cornell University and which, like the food in back again; the journey made me see the Australian story, supermarkets and pantries in a brand The Magic Pudding, was new way, ultimately leading to changes never-ending.’ in my own eating patterns. One of the pioneers of this research is Brian Wansink, a bespectacled, they didn’t ‘get distracted’. Only one sandy-haired American professor at person managed to spot the con, seeing Cornell University. On 4 January 2008, the copper pipe when he leant down Wansink was named ABC World News to retrieve a dropped spoon, giving up Person of the Week, demonstrating his the gig to the three students he was infuence beyond college classrooms seated with. and laboratories. In 2007 he received an Wansink and his colleagues set Ig Nobel Prize, a satirical award given up the experiment to determine how for unusual or strange achievements this never-ending food supply would in science. The award claims to afect the amount the students ate. The acknowledge achievements that frst results were striking. People with the make people laugh, but then make Magic Soup Bowls ate over 60 per cent them think, which is exactly how I more than people without them; most reacted to Wansink’s quirky studies. of those participants were still eating Wansink’s award-winning research when the experiment ended, a full involved a bowl of soup, which, like twenty minutes after starting. Yet when the food in the Australian story, The asked how many calories they thought Magic Pudding, was never-ending. they had eaten, the students with the Wansink and his colleagues ofered never-ending bowls gave remarkably undergraduates a free meal in return similar answers to those with regular for completing a questionnaire, a bowls, with one student even expressing time-tested way of luring in university how flling the soup was.

42 • VOICEWORKS • NONFICTION •

These results point to the broader their free M&Ms to opaque containers, theme of Wansink’s research: the hiding the sugary deliciousness inside. way we eat relies heavily on external They also put healthier snacks— cues. His team has found that people including dried fgs and pistachio given free popcorn eat more if it’s in a nuts—in visible, transparent glass larger tub; people using smaller plates jars. The results were astounding. In eat less; people using bigger spoons Google’s New York ofce alone, their eat more; and people presented with employees consumed a 3.1 million fewer greater variety of foods eat for longer. calories from M&Ms across a period These sorts of cues even infuence our of seven weeks. A similar intervention conscious experience of hunger. You encouraged employees to drink more may have heard that our stomachs water. Google placed bottled water don’t realise that they’re full until behind transparent glass at eye level, twenty minutes after eating; according and moved their fzzy drinks behind to Wansink it’s true. Lacking the cue frosted glass on bottom shelves. Across of an empty bowl, the college students another seven-week period, their kept eating the soup, and their bellies employees drank 47 per cent more didn’t tell them to stop. Yet despite water, and at the same time, they took all of the research, most people would in 7 per cent fewer calories from the claim that they’re not infuenced by sugary drinks. seemingly trivial things like the size of External cues don’t just afect what a plate: of course, other people might we eat at the dinner (or laboratory) be, but not me. When I shared these table, they also afect what we buy fndings with a close friend of mine he in the frst place. And marketing replied: ‘That’s ridiculous’. I told him companies know it: in some cases, that it’s true and there’s a lot of science they’re the ones doing the research. showing that it works. ‘I believe you,’ The food and grocery industry is worth he said, ‘but it shouldn’t!’ 114 billion dollars in Australia alone. Tech behemoth Google have There are fast food joints that want transformed their ofces into real- us to upsize our meals, restaurants world testing grounds for Wansink’s that want us to order dessert, products fndings. The company is famous for its that compete for our attention on excellent working conditions, ofering supermarket shelves—supermarkets employees all kinds of freebies and who themselves want to sell products benefts, including free meals. Google for the largest proft. In order to see co-founder Sergey Brin once announced if the academic research I was reading that no employee should be more than lined up with the reality of Australian two hundred feet from food. But there’s life, I decided to put down the books a downside to all of that generosity: and head back into the world armed Google has told new recruits that it with this new knowledge. may have an impact on their health. I made a trip to my local Adelaide You can’t ofer people candy without supermarket, the Frewville Foodland, consequences. When the company which had recently received the award became concerned about employee for best international grocer. When I health, they turned to Wansink’s ideas. walked in, I was greeted by rows of In one experiment, afectionately winter melons, green paw paws, and dubbed ‘Project M&M’, Google moved dragon fruit, underscoring the variety

VOICEWORKS • 43 • THE SURPRISING PSYCHOLOGY OF FOOD • Bartholomew Pawlik

of the grocer. Have you noticed how beneft from culinary thoughtfulness in supermarkets always lead you into the my workplace. I’m a crisis counsellor at fresh food section when you enter? Lifeline Australia, working night shifts It’s no accident, it’s carefully planned. talking to people who are distressed, The produce section has everything the struggling with mental health issues, supermarket wants to be associated or even contemplating suicide. It’s with: the wholesome and the healthy. a stressful job at times, as you can I was always confused as to why my imagine. Regardless of the day’s ups local Coles keeps fresh produce on ice, and downs, I have to be there for other which seemed much less convenient people in crisis. People’s emotions than a refrigerator. It turns out it’s can be intense, yet people often have yet another marketing ploy. According logical reasons for their distress, which to marketing guru Martin Lindstrom, are often only revealed once someone the ice is another signal of freshness. listens without judgement. Research has found that the produce In such a stressful work section creates a ‘health halo’. If you environment, it’s hard to get through grab your fresh food frst, you actually the night without a snack. Salads, it end up spending more money—picking seems, aren’t satisfying. Maybe it’s the up that banana gives you a licence to stress. Research suggests that stress purchase those Mars Bars, guilt free. hormones, like cortisol, can turn people In Frewville’s fresh food section, towards sugary, high-fat comfort foods. they had a live pianist, a man with If I don’t plan for a late-night snack, dreadlocks tied up into a tight pony tail I’m faced with an obstacle: McDonald’s. and a short black goatee that framed his The big ‘M’ sign beckons, luminescent face. He wore a black shirt, sunglasses in the dark of night, promising warmth tucked into the collar, and played a and comfort and satisfaction. After a rendition of the Beatles song, ‘While My hard night, it’s hard to say no. Guitar Gently Weeps’. While most local As a practising psychologist, I know supermarkets might not have a live there’s a danger here: I’m worried act, it’s impossible to ignore that they that I might form a habit. Ha-bit. It’s always—always—have music playing. a small word, seemingly inane, but There’s a reason for it: research shows those two syllables have a striking that music makes people buy more. power. Habit is character, Aristotle tells The list of subtle manipulations goes us. There’s a charming sound bite in on. Items that appeal to children are neuroscience that ‘neurons that fre put at their eye level; products on sale together, wire together’. Every time we are at the height of their parents’ faces; act out a habit the neurological wiring home brand products are on the bottom supporting it becomes a little stronger. shelves—you have the inconvenience We can’t simply undo or remove those of bending down if you want to grab pathways; we have to build new habits those savings. And, like casinos, and connections. Eventually these new supermarkets are made deliberately neural links will be stronger than the difcult to exit—just how do you get previous ones, and the old wiring will out if you haven’t bought anything? fade from disuse. After exploring the research, I Cues from our environment can fnally took a close look at my own food become triggers for our habits, a fact habits. In particular, I thought I could that any introductory psychology

44 • VOICEWORKS • NONFICTION •

student is familiar with. Ivan Pavlov, a more temperate option: putting a a German scientist, rang a bell before smaller portion into a Tupperware feeding his dogs and, well, you probably container. It’s not rocket science. It know the story. Over time the dogs doesn’t need to be. started salivating at the sound of the Michael Pollan writes in his book, In bell, even if no food was served. Their Defense of Food, that for most of human brains associated the bell with food; a history we haven’t had to ask what to neural connection had been forged. I eat, we simply ate what our parents was worried that I would be sculpting ate. But in today’s world many people’s my own, unwanted, connections in my diets difer from those of their parents brain: a drive home equals McDonald’s. and grandparents. Food trends now This may help to explain why self- change several times within a single control is, for the most part, unrelated to eating habits. Many research psychologists argue that self-control ‘There’s a good chance is a limited resource. We only have so the potatoes you buy much before our tank runs dry, leaving at the supermarket us vulnerable to temptation. Yet we face hundreds of food choices each day. are the same species When we have a cookie in front of us, that has been used it’s easy to say no the frst time. But if by McDonald’s, the that cookie remains, it will call to us Russet Burbank.’ again. We tell ourselves ‘no!’ a second time. How long can we really last? Eventually, with our defences worn generation—kale and quinoa aren’t down, we’re likely to give in. exactly traditional Australian foods. People who maintain healthy eating But this refects another, much larger habits manage their environments. change: we live in an increasingly They know that the fght is best pre- global and interconnected world. empted, because otherwise it’s a losing Our diets used to be at the mercy of game. The cookie is put away, out of the seasons, but now we can import sight, or not bought at all. They pick Mexican mandarins, Brazilian bananas their battles with the shopping list, not and American apples. the pantry. Brian Wansink’s research This means that our choices have demonstrates the power of being aware global implications: they are bigger of, and changing, our surroundings. than us as individuals. McDonald’s For example, he found that simply serves as a prototypical example, downsizing household plates can reduce a company so big that its business calories consumed at meals by 22 per decisions afect food infrastructure cent. What did it all mean for me, in worldwide. There’s a good chance the my workplace predicament? Well, the potatoes you buy at the supermarket best ways to avoid spending money are the same species that has been used on unwanted fast food were simple: by McDonald’s, the Russet Burbank. pick a diferent route, thereby avoiding That specifc potato has become the golden arches, and plan a drive- dominant because its size met the home snack in advance. Plus, instead needs of McDonald’s, perfect for their of taking a whole bag of chips, I chose long, skinny french fries. That choice

VOICEWORKS • 45 • THE SURPRISING PSYCHOLOGY OF FOOD • Bartholomew Pawlik

has fltered all the way down to our The eighteenth-century French own kitchens: farmers have adapted gastronomist Jean-Anthelme Brillat- their infrastructure to grow these Savarin said that gastronomy governs particular potatoes because McDonald’s the whole life of man (and, of course, is such a large commercial buyer, woman). Now, in the twenty-frst meaning that there are also more of century, our food choices have them available on supermarket shelves. consequences beyond our own lives. But the supermarket is a democracy. Michael Pollan tells us that eating is We vote with our hands every time always an ecological act, a political act. we pick up our groceries—if we buy If what we eat can change the world, fair trade goods, companies will it behoves us to take responsibility for produce more of them. The widespread our choices. We need to take back our use of the Russet Burbank has been culinary decisions from the companies criticised as it uses an intensive that are solely driven to empty our amount of water and requires the wallets. The next step for me will be heavy use of pesticides. In response to go beyond reducing my workplace to that criticism, McDonald’s has calories—to investigate how I can eat moved towards developing and using ethically, and build habits to make more environmentally friendly tubers. those choices easier. Maybe, just Changing consumer preferences has also maybe, we can all make a diference by led to the use of free-range eggs and choosing a smaller bowl of soup. rainforest-friendly cofee at your local Maccas. What you choose to eat matters.

Bartholomew Pawlik (25) is a psychologist based in Adelaide. He’s previously been published in Lateral Magazine. You can fnd his musings on literature, philosophy and science at rationallycurious.com.

46 • VOICEWORKS • POETRY •

A More Modern Torso

—After Rilke By Hugo Branley

My body in a certain light shines bronze. My arms stretch to heaven. I could advertise cologne. My strength is careful; it ripples in the sun. Women stare. The generous application of bronzer. My breasts have been compared to apples, missiles, generous sharing handfuls. Men stare. I am utterly hairless. I spend a long time in single positions, each pose an act of love. Tourists stop. They snap the horizon between my thighs looking for new vistas. Filters. Caloric efciency. Even my sweat cannot be trusted for shine. I sculpt my hands into giant baskets, as though to carry the infant Moses. Slow twitching. My hips smirk, down in the dark where there is no spark of procreation. No place from which I am not seen. Look. Must I change my life?

Hugo Branley (22) was born quite young and has no real memories of how it happened. His work has been published in Demos, Knack, Woroni and the Sydney University Anthology.

VOICEWORKS • 47

• FICTION •

—AND ANYWAY, WE PROMISED YOU A STORY, DIDN’T WE—

By Jonathan O’Brien

—WE did, yEs— —so we might as well get on with it. Pass me my drink, would you— —which one’s yours?— —the light- coloured one; the cider. Thanks. Anyway. We were driving through town the other day, on our way to Makin’ Mattresses— —well, I was driving. You still had your hand in that cast— —semantics, Bruce. We were passing around where all the big ofces are, and that’s when we see, going the other way down the street, sirens blaring, is half a dozen fre engines— —it was two, hon. Two fre engines— —but it was two big ones, wasn’t it? Might as well’ve been six. So we see these six sirens go past, and Bruce, you said something like, what, Strewth or something, in that stupid way your father always used to, and craned your head backwards and

VOICEWORKS • 49 • —AND ANYWAY, WE PROMISED YOU A STORY, DIDN’T WE— • Jonathan O’Brien

almost crashed the bloody car— —we were fne, Sandy. We weren’t gonna crash. We were fne— —we got honked at— —by an eighty-year-old— —still honked at— —her arthritic left hand probably slipped. Christ. We didn’t almost crash. That’s the important bit. Anyway, so of course Sandy says— —well of course I say, Bloody hell, Bruce, what d’ya reckon’s going on with those engines? Cause there’s at least half a dozen— —two— —of them buggers— —and she makes me do a U-turn at the next intersection, crazy woman, can you believe it? Are they even legal in the city?— —I’m sure they are, dear— —I was asking the others— —I know, but besides. You know I know best— —don’t pull that with me— —but I’m just a sweet little thing— —you stop that right now— —so he chucks the youie and we set of behind those engines, right down into the Valley, sirens all crazy. It’s midday mind you, so we haven’t really got their lights to follow. It’s just noise and— —you make it sound harder than it was— —you almost got lost. If I hadn’t been there to tell you which way they went, we’d’ve been— —fne. We’d’ve been fne— —you’re deaf in one ear, that’s your problem. All those years of rock n roll when you were a kid— —that has nothing to do with it— —it has everything to do with it. We almost lost the fre engines cause of Metallica— —are we going to actually tell the story, hon? C’mon, get of your phones guys, I promise it gets good. So we follow the fre trucks out for a few kays, and sure enough, we pull up at a bank. Now, let me set the scene. Two cop cars— —there were defnitely more than two cop cars, Bruce— —nah. The whole day was groups of two. Noah’s ark— —you know that isn’t how it happened. I was wrong about the fre trucks, but there were at least fve cop cars. Promise. Swear on my bleeding heart—

50 • VOICEWORKS • FICTION •

—so there were two cop cars already there, and an ambulance that shows up later, but for now it’s just the fre trucks and the coppers, and we’re like, Oh shit, what’ve we followed out here? Right? Because I mean, shit, we were waiting any moment for a guy in like a balaclava to pop out the front door carrying like a damn ATM or some shit, on a trolley or something, ready to dump it in his getaway car, which, lemme think, was it a ute? Did they say on the news— —it was a ute, yeah— —right, so we’re kinda in park, more or less in the middle of the road, watching the whole thing, and I turn to Sandy and I say— —he says something like, Oh shit, Sandy. We gotta get outta here— —I didn’t say it like that— —you did. You were scared shitless, hon— —I wasn’t— —Bruce— —Sandy— —you were scared shitless— —ef of— —I’ll ef you later, if you’re g— —I hate you so much sometimes— —yeah, but you’re covering a— —don’t. Efn hell, Sandy. Don’t bring it up in— —let’s not get all shy now Br— —I’m gonna get another drink. I’ll get you all another round. All fve of you keen? What you just had is good? Great— —so anyway, he was scared shitless— —I can hear you— —I love you honey. Anyway, Bruce kinda eases up on the clutch, and so of course that means we’re stuck there, awkwardly, and the aircon’s shat itself, and you know what the weather was like last week. Stinking. So we’re kinda sat there, and he’s swearing at the gear stick, sweating and not just from the heat, and that’s when we see the kid jump out from round the back of the bank. Makes a run for it, right down the driveway and towards the road and— —and that’s when he slams into the car. Our car. And that’s when it’s Sandy’s turn to scream— —so you admit you were scared— —the point is that he slammed into the door and Sandy turned so fast she whacked herself as well— —bruised myself through my cast— —well you shouldn’t’ve punched through that window in the frst place, should you?— —shut up.

VOICEWORKS • 51 • —AND ANYWAY, WE PROMISED YOU A STORY, DIDN’T WE— • Jonathan O’Brien

I was upset— —so the kid dives into the back seat. I swear, he fies in through the back door and he swings it open so hard it almost comes of its hinges. Do car doors have hinges? Is that how it— —and the kid, when he’s in the back, I say kid because he wore a beanie and looked prepubescent, the kid just says, Drive. And so what d’ya reckon Bruce does? He stalls the bloody thing— —I did, it’s true. God, that was the most awful moment. I felt my heart stop beating altogether, I reckon. He yells, Drive. And I. Christ, sorry— —you’re all right, dear, it’s just— —no, no, I’m— —you’re?— —I’m fne. I fucking start the car and I fucking drive, and I don’t think, I just drive, he had a knife, you know, and I started to drive before I saw the policemen fling out of the bank and towards us and the screech of the tyres— —Bruce, slow down. It’s okay— —I know— —yeah?— —yeah— —okay. So we drive away, and he’s got that bloody knife near the gearstick, right between us, so he could slice either of us at any time. Now, I betted he’d’ve sliced me more likely, since I wasn’t driving, so I’m scared too at that point, of course I’m scared, cause this isn’t just a fre engine and some coppers, this full-on Bruce-doing-eighty-in-a- ffty-zone kinda shit. And we just keep going, like, this guy just wants us to keep going, he keeps yelling left, left, right, left, right, and Bruce is doing his best, but sometimes the kid yelled two things at once, and it was impossible— —impossible— —and the kid’s just getting angrier, you know? Can’t blame him for being all hot-headed, I guess, since he was wearing a silly bloody beanie in the middle of the bloody day. No wonder he thought robbing a bank was a good idea— —he was on drugs too, hon. That was a big factor— —he tried to kill you— —that’s a little harsh— —you’ve still got that cut, but. See, just under your collar. No, don’t hide it, Bruce. C’mon. Yeah, there it is. Fucker stuck out a knife and hooked it right round Bruce’s neck. Said if he didn’t start doing ninety he’d cut harder. Said if Bruce braked at all the momentum’d do the work for him— —I could hardly breathe, and the kid knocked of my bloomin glasses— —and the cop cars were behind us this whole time, sirens and everything, lights going even though it was daytime, and we’re just kinda following this crazy kid’s instructions, and—

52 • VOICEWORKS • FICTION •

—this is where the story gets good— —because we’re out on the highway now, with a kid and a couple sacks of cash in the back, and just half a dozen cop cars behind us— —I wouldn’t say that many— —I swear to God, Bruce, if you don’t shut up about numbers right now— —sorry. Anyway, they were gaining on us, and for the frst time it feels like getting Frank to soup up the car was a good idea— —except it made us look more suspicious since the bloody thing wasn’t roadworthy— —it was fast though— —it was fast— —where is Frank, anyhow? He said he’d be here. He was meant to hear this story. I’ll have to tell it to him some other time— —just make sure I’m around. So you don’t go fbbing about how brave you weren’t. I know how you and Frank get, out in that garage of his, with those Rocky Balboa posters and that home brand jerky he always leaves lying around. Halfway through a carton each. But I suppose he’d have to be drunk to believe the version of the story where you were the brave one— —why am I moving in with you?— —you can pull out if you want. No. Don’t wink at me. Goddamn. Just tell the bloody story. We take a turnof, and half the cop cars don’t merge fast enough— —half being one— —half being three— —whatever— —the point is, we’re still being tailed, but less intensely I guess. And the kid starts taking us down weird streets, but less randomly and he’s only talking when he needs to and he’s taken the knife away, which is around when I noticed the blood on Bruce’s neck. But of course I don’t say anything, pretend not to notice, and Bruce is just driving, driving, driving— —You’re my accomplices, the kid says. Messed up if you ask me. Says, You run with me, you live or die with me. You go to jail with me. You go free with me. Got it? and of course we both nod, and he says for us to fucking say it and so we fucking say it and he nods and slumps back, starts giving directions again, and he starts asking me how good the car’s suspension is— —I never liked Frank till that moment— —you don’t like Frank?— —well I do now, obviously— —what’s wrong with Frank?— —nothing, nothing’s wrong with

VOICEWORKS • 53 • —AND ANYWAY, WE PROMISED YOU A STORY, DIDN’T WE— • Jonathan O’Brien

Frank. Just the way he talks sometimes, the way he hangs round a lot. Lots of stories about girls, you know? You must’ve noticed— —no. We all love Frank. Right guys? See? God, Sandy I can’t— —shit, I’m sorry, Christ. Point is, he knows his suspension, so when the kid has us turn of the road, right then— —you keep saying us, but this was certainly me— —fne. Bruce expertly manoeuvres Michael- bloody-Schumacher-style right of of the fucking tarmac and onto the bloody dirt and through the trees— —you gotta imagine tight corners, split decisions, still that one cop car behind us, bouncing through the woods. You gotta imagine the thoughts going through my head. I didn’t have my glasses, remember? And I was just kinda zooming through a blur, thankful again for Frank. Could someone text him by the way? This is unlike him— —he’s probably foating of somewhere— —and then I hear this huge slam and crash behind us, and there’s still that cop siren going, and then there’s another sound only it’s more like a creak, like a hinge or something, not like a car door, like a door with actual hinges, and then it’s way behind us, and then there’s quiet, and the kid’s just staring out the back window and then at us with these death eyes and then he says— —Stop— —and I bring the brake right down, and we’re all fung forward— —and I bruise my bloody hand through the cast again— —and then we’re out in this forest, and there’s just the sound of the three of us breathing. We sat there for, oh, I don’t know— —about ten minutes, I’d say. At least. Bloody kid doesn’t move. Dunno what he was doing. Listening, probably. And then he just bolts. Bloody kid just runs of into the woods with his sacks of cash. And we’re sat alone in the car, sweating and quiet, and we watch the kid til he disappears— —no. He said something to us before he disappeared— —no he didn’t. What’d he say?— —he said, Thanks— —he did not— —he did though, and it was beautiful, Sandy. So genuine that, that’s why I— —that’s the reason you proposed?— —I was blown away by it. His authenticity, you know? Really, I couldn’t not ask— —I can’t bloody believe that’s why, Bruce. I mean, guys, he got

54 • VOICEWORKS • FICTION •

down on one knee then and there, you know, popped the question and everything. I thought it was sweet. In the middle of the bush, as it were, and just like high school again, what with us in the back like that— —Sandy— —what, like these guys are gonna care where we fucked— —well, they don’t need to kn— —it’s not like Frank’s here to hijack the conversation just cause we talked about fucking— —where is he? Someone send him a text. He has to hear this story soon, I— —the version where you save the day, or the true version?— —that’s not the point and you know it, Sandy— —I’m just stirring and you know it. Oh, c’mon Bruce, I’m just— —the point is— —right, sure, the point is we’re— —we’re getting married in July and you’re all invited. Frank too. Yes, thank you— —thanks. I know— —yes, cheers indeed.

Jonathan O’Brien (20) used to think formal experimentation was just what you did at the afterparty of your high school graduation. jonobri.com / @jonobri.

VOICEWORKS • 55 56 • VOICEWORKS • NONFICTION •

BAJTAR PARADISE

By Nathan Mifsud

Both my nannus, aftEr they remember waking my nanna, Doris, to migrated to Australia from Malta, wander the frosty paddocks together, purchased farmland. Paul had a 102- picking up thin sheets of ice formed acre property not far from Goulburn. from puddles overnight. And if I close My most vivid memories there are tied my eyes, I can imagine the snap of gum to the land, a rolling mass made dense branches falling and the whispering with association, individual synapses olive grove, cultivated on a fertile linked to each bump and curve of the hillside—a distinctly Mediterranean hard dirt roads. I can instantly recall labour of love. the spot where a red-bellied snake Andrew had a diferent, smaller bit me, the rabbit warren visited at farm, more typical of his homeland. It dusk, the grassy slope where we shot was not a place of zoological diversity, clay pigeons, their graceful arcs and like Paul’s—no roaming cattle, no violent bursts superimposed on a aviary, ferrets or guinea pigs—only quintessential pastoral backdrop. I possessing a modest chicken coop.

‘Birthday Party Matches’ is by Ania Gareeva (23), a Russian-born artist, who studied in Sydney, the UK and Japan. She loves travelling, Soviet animation and cats.

VOICEWORKS • 57 • BAJTAR PARADISE • Nathan Mifsud

The land was not for grazing, but the 1800s as hardy stock fodder for for food, especially rows and rows of use in drought years, it proceeded to zucchini, enormous, coarse-skinned invade the continent with a ferocity and deep green. In the centre of the like few other weeds since. O. stricta farm: Nannu’s shed. Every bolt drilled encountered favourable climes and by him, every steel beam. My memories no serious enemies, and its plentiful here blur into one: bright, sweaty days, coloured fruits attracted birds who were cold cans of Kinnie, hands red and black instrumental in its relentless, wide with rust and dirt, washing them with sweep over the land. soap like sandpaper. Outside the shed, we roamed a labyrinthine graveyard ‘...in contrast to of machinery, its tangles of spider Australia, Maltese webs and artifcial topography. Rising above it all, his hand-built windmill, people love the prickly guillotine blades creaking in the wind. pear, where it is known A no-nonsense place, but one whose as bajtar tax-xewk rough edges were rich material for an active imagination. (‘spiny fgs’).’ Tall walls of overgrown prickly pear lined the tractor path around the Despite increasingly desperate control perimeter of Andrew’s dam—the same attempts such as poison, excavation dam where he taught his daughters and burning, crushing with livestock- to swim by throwing them into its drawn rollers, and even destroying murky waters. Those looming, thorny tens of thousands of emus, crows and structures crowded the edge of the magpies who had helped disperse the farm with their rotting pads and sickly seeds, by 1920 the common pest pear sweet scent, and standing beneath had managed to infest ffty-eight them as a child, far from the safety million acres across New South Wales of Nannu’s presence, turned real life and Queensland. A trail of destruction to fantasy. For to creep through that was left in its wake—in part, man- spooky tunnel replete with crows and made: Judith Wright notes, in Cry for hidden snakes, alone or in the company the Dead, that poison drums emptied of my brothers, was a quest with no in the ecological fght against the pest reward but the sunlight at its end, soon leached into waterholes and creeks the open vegetable felds beyond the across the country, leading to the death dominion of the prickly terror. Freely of colonists’ livestock. This was a cruel facing those zombie cacti was the irony, since those cattle and sheep had surest test of courage. prepped the land for Opuntia’s conquest in the frst place, by degrading native grasslands previously managed by traditional Aboriginal burning practices. Introduced to Australia by colonists in The prickly saga reached its zenith 1788 to establish a natural dye industry, in 1926, when, following six years prickly pear (genus Opuntia) was at of evaluation by the Queensland frst unremarkable. However, when Prickly Pear Land Commission, over the species now known as common three billion eggs of the Argentinian pest pear (Opuntia stricta) entered in cactoblastis moth (Cactoblastis cactorum)

58 • VOICEWORKS • NONFICTION •

were bred and distributed. In their the menacing but non-invasive species larvae stage, the grubs work together enclosing Nannu’s dam. How did O. to chew a tunnel through the tough fcus-indica come to inhabit Andrew’s surface of the plant, and then devour farm? Before beginning the six-week the soft interior. Less than a decade voyage to Australia in 1951, Jane—his later, the O. stricta infestation that wife, my nanna—wrapped a stem of had haunted rural settlers was mostly beloved prickly pear in a shirt and eradicated. The efectiveness of posted it to him in a discreet package. Cactoblastis as a biological agent was It cracks me up to think about this as stunning as the initial spread of the simple act—the knowing rebellion noxious weed they were introduced to against biosecurity, yes, but more so control, a success later mimicked in how it represents an expression of other parts of the world. fondness for a plant better known, in their new country, as a scourge. It also niggled at me. They were not pretty plants, after all. I wondered Malta, the homeland of my if there was something deeper to the grandparents, is a tiny cluster of islands botanical attachment which explains a stone’s throw south of Sicily—the the cactus in every second Maltese entire nation is 78,000 acres, a blip yard, something left unsaid by Nanna. in the Antipodean arm of the O. stricta Searching YouTube, I came across a empire at its peak. However, in contrast perspective which hints at the cultural to Australia, Maltese people love prickly memory bound into prickly cladodes, pear, where it is known as bajtar even those sprung from diferent soil. tax-xewk (‘spiny fgs’). As testament, In one video, a farmer from south- in 1975, soon after Malta became a western Sydney, standing singlet-clad, republic, the heraldic coat of arms was sketches the history of the resplendent replaced with an unceremonious design O. fcus-indica plants behind him, that featured prickly pear on a coastline, with distinctive Australian birdsong an emblem which endured until 1988. audible in the background: ‘During Perhaps a reason for this diference in the wartime, back in Europe, in Malta endearment is that O. stricta is absent. where I come from, they ate a lot of Instead, the slightly less troublesome [prickly pear fruit] because, uh’—here, O. fcus-indica is found in every open he pauses and looks at the ground— space across the Maltese islands, used ‘we were nearly starved. So uh, I as impenetrable farm dividers and recommend that you try it one day, but protection from strong prevailing be careful when you peel it.’ winds, and celebrated for its summer He refers to the Siege of Malta fruit and saccharine liqueur. between 1940 and 1942, in which To tell O. stricta and O. fcus-indica the Axis powers determined to bomb apart, you need only look at the plants the country into submission because straight on. The former is unlikely to of its strategic importance in the reach your shoulder, ruining arable land Mediterranean, straddling vital supply by covering vast swaths in low, dense and reinforcement routes. For over scrub. Meanwhile, the latter species, two years, starting from the day at a height of up to fve metres, can after Mussolini aligned Italy with the dwarf any human, and must have been German forces, Malta became the target

VOICEWORKS • 59 • BAJTAR PARADISE • Nathan Mifsud

of several thousand enemy air raids, Maltese-Australian poet, said that to severely choking food supplies to its adequately capture their experiences, beleaguered population. In particular, a writers had to appropriate many English terrible stretch of 154 consecutive days words, such as buxx (‘bush’). and nights, which brought them to Many of the migrants were the brink of surrender and starvation, considered unskilled, and, for better proved the most sustained bombing or worse, labour-intensive work attack of World War II. As testament to is not language dependent beyond the resilience of the Maltese, the George the operating instructions of each Cross—the highest possible British task. My paternal grandfather, Paul, military decoration for civilians—was was a prototypical example of what awarded for the frst and only time to fuelled Australia’s post-war industrial an entire people, and is now woven development, gaining employment into Malta’s national fag. Little at a steel pipe manufacturer shortly wonder, then, that sweet fruit borne by after migrating and remaining there widespread local cacti became a subject for the rest of his working life. Similar of adulation. That across an ocean, narratives played out for scores of the sight of them, populous, gnarled young Maltese men. A bona fde and dominant in an otherwise foreign immigration success story, then—but environment, provides some comfort. in fact, this was a case of third time lucky. As Stephanie Afeldt documents in Consuming Whiteness, Maltese workers were severely discriminated against Following the war, with their country in two earlier periods of workforce ravaged and unemployment high, replacement: following the departure of thousands of Maltese left for l-art fejn Pacifc Islanders from Queensland sugar hemm futur (‘the land of the future’) cane felds in the 1880s, and following with the aid of Australia’s frst assisted World War I, when Maltese immigration passage agreement since the Ten was, for a time, halted altogether, even Pound Poms. According to historian as migration schemes were arranged for Barry York, 55,000 people—one-sixth their Spanish and Italian neighbours. of Malta’s population at the time—had The labour movement responsible settled in Australia by 1966. Beyond for the political pressure which lead to the diferent cultural and spatial these exclusions had concerns that were dimensions to become accustomed racially motivated. Notwithstanding to, these dislocated islanders had to their British citizenship, the Maltese contend with that common, alienating were feared as ‘a primitive, dark barrier: their limited command of race’; as late as 1916, Worker, a union English. Their highly distinctive Semitic newspaper, implicated them in a ‘deep- language, which had survived over a laid scheme […] to bleed out Australia thousand years of economic and military of its white manhood by conscription incursions to the Maltese archipelago, [and] infuse the colored and cheap into was only useful within their post-war the land’. That same year, a 214-strong communities. Indeed, even within boatload of Maltese agricultural these linguistic havens, their new labourers was refused permission to surroundings defed description; disembark in Australia, ostensibly Manwel Nicholas-Borg, a prolifc because they failed the dictation test,

60 • VOICEWORKS • NONFICTION •

which had been administered in Dutch. and industry in Australia began to wind This was not an isolated event. Before down. The number of Australians born their change of fortune in 1946, the in Malta peaked in 1981, and Maltese Maltese were the second-largest group entries have dwindled ever since. The of people, after the Chinese, to be overall rate of immigration now tips in prohibited from immigration due to the caprices of the White Australia Policy. The public debate over Maltese ‘...across an ocean, ‘whiteness’ can be read into a cover the sight of them, cartoon of the Worker from 1916, in populous, gnarled which a piebald Trojan horse, newly arrived on an Australian shoreline and dominant in an as a ship bearing conscripts departs, otherwise foreign secretly hosts the ‘coloured’ workers environment, provides whom the labour movement protested. The Maltese were the piebald horse, the some comfort.’ immigrant group whose complexion and honourability was whitewashed the other direction, as some migrants by their well-intentioned supporters, return home, and newer generations the people who were harbingers of seek the eternal Mediterranean sun. a ‘coloured’ invasion that would be I made my frst visit to Malta in difcult to dispel. Extending the ugly 2015, a privilege of leisure ultimately metaphor, the cartoonist invoked a made possible by my grandparents then-national obsession with the having endured the reverse trip some eradication of an agricultural invasion: sixty-odd years earlier. It was not right above a large sign reading ‘White intended as a cultural pilgrimage, but Australia’, as if the loathsome seed truthfully could not have been anything had fallen from the cloth of the piebald else. I met open-armed relatives who migrants and newly germinated in had known me only as a child, or the sand, is the subtle illustration of a not at all, and went to the cemetery fedging prickly pear plant. where half my forebears are buried. I visited the Rotunda of Mosta, whose impressive dome was pierced by a Luftwafe bomb in 1942. The bomb Miskina dik it-tajra li titrabba f’art hażina. fell—with luck, unexploded—among ‘Pity the bird that is reared in a barren three hundred locals gathered for land’, goes the Maltese saying, perhaps mass, one of whom was my great- speaking to the isolation felt by those grandmother Teresa, then a little girl. early migrants. Fortunately, Australia In the end though, I was most ended up a blessing for those who interested in assaying the outskirts arrived in the literal and demographic of the towns, getting lost in the maze waves of the 1950s and 1960s, and of farms which still constitute most when multiculturalism was embraced of the land area. It was easy enough in the 1970s, the Maltese community to cycle from coast to coast, moving became an integral part of their new rapidly between urban and rural zones, country. At the same time, the quality when the longest dimension of the of life on the islands began to recover, main island is only twenty-seven

VOICEWORKS • 61 • BAJTAR PARADISE • Nathan Mifsud

kilometres. The rocky hillsides were unoccupied for years. My great-aunt oddly reminiscent of the Southern (who lives a few doors down the same Tablelands, a topographic antipode street) had to spray the lock to pry the of the Parkesbourne farm my dad’s door open. I entered cautiously, not parents had cultivated to retreat from knowing what to expect. Dust carpeted Sydney suburbia. The diference, of the traditional patterned tiles beneath course, was that these hillsides included my feet, and apart from a religious a hearty dose of Opuntia. Each spiny icon—striking in its dim, spare copse I passed reinforced the notion surrounds—most contents were long that the biota surrounding us shape our removed. I walked down the narrow experiences and, over time, sneak into hallway, towards a band of sunlight. our identities. In the enclosed backyard, I was It was while visiting my mum’s greeted by none other than a healthy relatives that the place of the prickly specimen of you-know-what. It pear was cemented in my mind. became obvious that I could no longer We went to our ancestral home in consign the humble bajtar to childhood Mellieħa, where the house has sat nightmares—it is part of the family.

Nathan Mifsud (24) analyses electrical brain activity in his spare time. He dedicates this piece to Andrew and Paul.

62 • VOICEWORKS • POETRY • tectonic

By Chloe Mayne

storm-bellied clouds hang hazed like sheets, gauze-netted nest gently hemming me in

i lie here, dormant for days curling and slowly unfurling, watching the hands in moving pictures as

they press palms to fushed cheeks, stamps inked with blotted breath, conversing in secretive tongues

like efervescent ear whispers, submerged and sinking sighs or the titanic heave and swell of your shoulders, tectonic plates to me.

Chloe Mayne (24) is a rainbow trout swimming in watermelon tides.

VOICEWORKS • 63

• FICTION •

VERTICAL WINE TASTING

By Mikaella Clements

Vertical wine tasting (n.) diferent vintages of the same wine type from the same winery are tasted, emphasising the diferences between them.

it Was a diffErEnt species. The way she moved, the jerky way she took of her coat, the half-fung elbow near straight into the maître d’s face without a moment of self-awareness. Julia sat at the table with one arm resting on the back of the chair, half leaning to the side, unable to look away. Everything took so much more efort. Everything was full of overcharged energy. By the time Rachel made her way over to lean down and kiss Julia hello, Julia expected her to be out of breath. ‘Hiya,’ Rachel said, and slipped into her chair. ‘Sorry I’m late. How was work?’ ‘Fine,’ Julia said, and rolled her eyes. ‘Busy. Your boss is an idiot.’ Rachel laughed, looking guiltily delighted, the way she always was when Julia let her in on some ofce politics that Rachel wasn’t privy to. ‘She’s nice to me.’ ‘That’s why she’s an idiot,’ Julia said, lifting the bottle of wine and flling

VOICEWORKS • 65 • VERTICAL WINE TASTING • Mikaella Clements

Rachel’s glass. She preferred red, but Rachel had told her, laughing and grimacing, that she’d once had a very bad night on red wine and couldn’t drink it anymore; it was fne. Julia would just order the salmon. ‘She’s nice to everyone.’ ‘Mm, well,’ Rachel said. ‘Are you hungry?’ ‘Yes,’ Julia said. She gestured at the menu. ‘Order, and then you can tell me about your day.’ Rachel did, looking pleased. She still started every evening shy, like she was sure she was boring Julia, which was charming in its brevity—Rachel was funny, and gained courage from being funny, and the more Julia laughed the easier Rachel spoke. They drank two bottles of the white without even noticing, and then Rachel was cracking at the top of her mousse concoction while Julia ate small slivers of goats cheese and said, ‘No, go on, you were saying that Emil in marketing—’ ‘Yeah, he keeps trying to talk to me about all the weird sex he has,’ Rachel said. Her laugh was more of a cackle—wild and delighted and rude. She didn’t have to worry about it making her sound old. She still used witches as an aspiration. ‘The best bit was his new theory that because he likes sometimes being, I dunno, whipped and told he’s a sissy, he reckons it’s queer sex. He told me that he’s queering heterosexuality.’ Julia laughed. ‘That’s the problem with the way gay culture is evolving at the moment. There’s a place for everyone, even straight people.’ ‘Uhm,’ Rachel said. ‘Well, I’m not sure I agree with that.’ ‘You know what I mean, though,’ Julia said, uninterested in getting into another debate about politics with Rachel. Rachel still took everything too seriously, too personally; sometimes when they argued she would cry, furious, and declare that it didn’t mean anything and that Julia still had to listen to her, when Julia just wanted to quieten her down, stroke her hair, let her be calmed. ‘Yeah,’ Rachel said, and then ofered Julia a grin. ‘I used to tie my ex up. In case that interests you.’ She waggled her eyebrows. ‘You want to tie me up?’ Julia said, amused. Rachel shrugged. ‘Whatever. The other way, if you want.’ ‘We don’t need to do any of that,’ Julia said. She reached out and cupped Rachel’s cheek in her hand, turning Rachel’s face to hers. Rachel met her gaze, looking embarrassed. ‘You’re very sweet.’ ‘Don’t talk down to me,’ Rachel said. ‘I’m long past the age for experimenting with things like that,’ Julia told her. ‘Lots of people discover this stuf later. To spice up their life.’ ‘But I don’t need to do that,’ Julia said. She reached for the bottle of wine and topped up their glasses. ‘I have you.’ Rachel hufed out a pleased breath and took the wine in a bony-knuckled grip. She looked distracted, and her hair was falling strangely from where she’d run her hand through it a few moments ago. Julia wanted to fx it, but she had a strange, awkward feeling about it. Rachel’s knuckles were still red from the cold.

Outside, waiting for the tram, Julia was idly explaining one of the many ways that Rachel’s boss had gotten in her way today when Rachel’s phone rang, cutting her

66 • VOICEWORKS • FICTION •

of. Rachel glanced down at it with her thumb already hovering over the mute button, then paused. ‘Ah, man,’ Rachel said. ‘It’s, uhm, it’s Shiv, do you mind?’ Julia shook her head. ‘By all means.’ ‘We’re trying to do the staying friends thing,’ Rachel said apologetically, but didn’t wait for Julia’s answer, picking up the phone and swivelling her shoulder in a tense block to Julia, pacing a few steps away and answering with a too-bright, ‘Hi!’ It was strange, trying to remember how it felt with just the one signifcant ex, the way one person could cast a shadow where three or four could not. Rachel had been with her ex-girlfriend, she’d told Julia, for three years—a blink of an eye, really, but it loomed over Rachel like a mountain she was still stumbling down. Julia took out her own phone and scanned through emails, yawning, glancing up now and then to check the dark street for the good-natured ambling approach of the 86. When she heard her name, she tuned back into the one-sided conversation, feeling acutely foolish. ‘Julia, yeah,’ Rachel said, with a quick, warm look over her shoulder and a wink. ‘Yeah, it’s going great. We’re having lots of fun. Mostly we just fuck and eat.’ Then, defensively: ‘What? Fuck you, I wasn’t—you were the one who asked—’ Julia walked forward into the street and raised her hand for the tram. For a moment everything was the sound of brakes shrieking and the roar of trafc, but not before she heard Rachel say, voice crumbling low and tender, ‘No, I’m sorry. Hey, kid. Don’t be upset. Please don’t cry.’ As she climbed onto the tram, Rachel followed, loose-limbed and faintly annoyed. ‘I’m sorry.’ ‘It’s really fne,’ Julia said, and Rachel hesitated before sitting down across from her. Their knees knocked; Rachel’s faded jeans against Julia’s bare skin, the loose foral print skirt of her dress riding up. Rachel’s bright, unadorned face still held the vestiges of irritation with her ex, but her boot tapped slyly between Julia’s feet. They only ever went to Julia’s house, for obvious reasons. Rachel trailed a hand down walls that Julia and her sister had painted freshly only a year ago, fngered one of the long-stemmed fresh fowers in their vase, looking pleased. Outside the window the jacaranda trees knocked gently against glass, purple and gold in the street light. ‘It’s just such a nice place,’ Rachel said now, as she said inevitably at some point in every night, and Julia laughed and caught her hand, drew her into the bedroom. She let Rachel press her up against the wall, eager and mouthy. She ignored the impatient noises Rachel made, kissed her nice and slow until she was ready to take Rachel to her bed, fresh laundered sheets and Rachel shaking beneath her. ‘You’re so pretty,’ Rachel said, breathless. Rachel came loudly, that sweet note of surprise in her voice. There was something indulgent about how noisy she was during sex; Julia thought it might have something to do with the way there were no roommates to overhear them in Julia’s house. It made Julia laugh. She kissed Rachel, hand in her hair, holding her steady while she bucked and clamped her thighs around Julia’s hand. ‘You’re lovely,’ Julia said, laughing again, kissing Rachel’s cheek and the corner of her mouth. Rachel blinked hazily at her, curled into Julia’s body. She nestled in and was quiet except for her ragged breathing. Julia yawned. ‘God, I need a shower. Come on.’

VOICEWORKS • 67 • VERTICAL WINE TASTING • Mikaella Clements

‘Hang on,’ Rachel said, something strange in her voice, and then, ‘Ah, fuck, sorry. Look, I’m going to cry.’ She said it so matter-of-factly that it took Julia a minute to parse the words. As she said, ‘What?’ Rachel burst into loud, heaving tears, sobs that seemed torn out of her chest. ‘Sweetheart,’ Julia said, alarmed. She tried to hug Rachel closer and push her back by the shoulders to see her face at the same time. It didn’t work. Rachel shook her head and clutched at Julia’s back, digging her hands into Julia’s ribs. ‘I’m fne, I really am,’ she said, or tried to, within the violent wrack of an unnamed grief. She pressed her face into Julia’s neck, and Julia felt the moment of rabbity annoyance—she didn’t like it when Rachel touched her neck, and Rachel would never stop doing it—before she stroked Rachel’s back and held her close, rocking her slightly. ‘There, there,’ she found herself murmuring, a parody of comfort. ‘It’s all right. Let it all out and then we can fx it.’ She watched the radio clock on the bedside table. It didn’t take long: less than three minutes from Rachel’s warning to when she subsided into snifes and drew back, rubbing her hands over her pink-stained face and shaking her head. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘What happened?’ Julia asked. ‘Are you all right? Did I do something?’ ‘You’re fne, just fne,’ Rachel said. ‘It’s not...’ Julia hesitated. ‘Did your ex say something?’ ‘Shiv?’ Rachel looked honestly surprised. ‘Nah. I’m not upset. I don’t know, sometimes that just happens to me. The endorphins or something.’ ‘It’s not because anything is wrong?’ ‘Nah.’ Rachel looked quite normal now. She stood up, crossed the room and went into the ensuite bathroom. Julia pushed up on one elbow and watched Rachel blow her nose on a strip of toilet paper. Tissues sat untouched on her dresser. ‘I can never tell what brings it on. It’s fne.’ She came back to lean in the doorway, and stared at Julia, smiling in an almost awed way. ‘You look like you’re in a movie right now.’ Julia scofed. ‘No, you do,’ Rachel insisted. ‘With the sheet pulled up like that—you look like a French movie star.’ ‘I’m too fat to be a movie star,’ Julia said. ‘Oh, whatever.’ Rachel rolled her eyes and wandered back into the bathroom, picking up Julia’s hairbrush. ‘I’ve got a massive sex knot. Thanks a ton.’ The worst of it was that she wasn’t fat, not really, Julia thought. She would never have a fat stomach again, and her breasts were heavier than they had been all her life, but her legs were still strong and toned and her biceps slim. It was just that Rachel with her knobbly knees and elbows and her strange conical breasts made Julia see all the work that went into her own body—the hours on the treadmill, the pilates, the countless plates of fsh with steamed greens. Julia’s body had bowed to her with fury and reluctance, while Rachel shambled about, coltish and unaware. Julia didn’t know how middle-aged men with their beer bellies and their untamed body hair and their bald spots could bear it. In the bathroom, Rachel still snifed. When Julia looked over Rachel was

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leaning against the sink, running her fngers over her inner forearm, petting soothingly at herself.

That Friday they went to the pub together. At frst it was meant to be a party, one of Rachel’s friends’ twenty-second birthday. Julia had been noncommittal about it until Rachel fnally cornered her in the ofce one day, laughing and bouncing on her toes. ‘You can’t keep avoiding it! Come on, it’ll be fun.’ ‘I don’t know if parties are really my scene anymore,’ Julia had said. ‘We went to a party last week.’ ‘That was diferent,’ Julia said. ‘It had—’ Rachel made a silly face. ‘Grown ups?’ ‘Well.’ ‘I promise we’re all very well behaved,’ Rachel told her, mock serious. ‘You won’t need to call anyone’s parents.’ ‘I don’t want people worried I will.’ ‘They won’t,’ Rachel said. ‘They’ll like you a lot, just like me. I want to introduce you.’ ‘Rachel,’ Julia said, and sighed. ‘Well, if you’re really against it, I think there’s also a couple of my friends who are just going to the pub that night. It’ll be more low-key. We’re just going to hang out and have a few drinks.’ ‘Fine,’ Julia said, relieved. ‘That would be fne.’ Rachel looked around surreptitiously before hugging her tight; it was only later that Julia realised, not without a touch of admiration, how neatly Rachel had manoeuvred her. The pub was fne, anyway. A gaggle of girls in skinny jeans and hard, unforgiving bobs. They settled in, ordered their gin and tonics, and immediately started gossiping. They involved Julia, in bits and pieces. Occasionally Rachel leaned forward and ofered a story about her, an anecdote always meant to show Julia of. Julia had the sense that Rachel had forgotten where she was, what year it was. She didn’t think that was her being petty or jealous; she didn’t even feel particularly upset about it, just coldly sure, and more so when Rachel’s hand tightened on her thigh and then slipped away, up into the air, like a signal for trafc. Julia looked up to see a new girl hovering over the table. For one awful moment, she made eye contact with Julia. ‘Shiv,’ one of Rachel’s friends said, and there was shock and thrill in her voice. Julia resisted the urge to roll her eyes. ‘Hi,’ Shiv said. She was taller than Julia had imagined her, and her face was sharper. She looked at Julia and then away again; she smiled, awkward. It was embarrassing to watch. ‘I didn’t realise you guys were here.’ ‘Hey,’ one of Rachel’s friends said, and everyone was strangely silent. Shiv stood in the hush of it like an actor in the wings, about to take the stage. ‘I don’t think we’ve met,’ Julia said, holding out her hand. ‘Julia.’ ‘Shiv. Hi.’ They shook, and Julia tried to curb her frustration at this group of girls, quiet and watchful. ‘Nice to meet you,’ Shiv said.

VOICEWORKS • 69 • VERTICAL WINE TASTING • Mikaella Clements

‘What are you up to?’ Rachel asked, leaning forward, chin propped on her fst. She looked suddenly more relaxed, her whole body loose and easy. ‘Are you meeting—’ ‘Emma, yeah,’ Shiv said. ‘I’m early.’ ‘Buy you a drink,’ Rachel ofered, and excused herself from the table with a quick squeeze to Julia’s shoulder. ‘You want anything, Jules?’ ‘Another glass of the sauvignon,’ Julia said. ‘Thanks.’ She watched them at the bar. Shiv was taller than Rachel, which was hard to reconcile with the way Rachel talked about her, though perhaps it did make sense in terms of Rachel’s swagger, the way she threw herself around, her shoulders straight and her chest pushed forward like she was trying to take as much space up as she could. Julia remembered Rachel’s comment about tying Shiv up and wanted to laugh. Rachel was talking fast and gesturing like she would take someone’s eye out. Shiv watched her closely, tracking every movement. Julia stood up and went to join them by the bar. She put her hand on Rachel’s shoulder, handing back the touch, and Rachel looked up and grinned. ‘Was I taking too long?’ ‘You’re too short,’ Julia said. ‘They won’t notice you unless you pay attention.’ Shiv raised a hand and signalled the bartender. ‘Ah, man,’ Rachel told her, ‘You’re showing of.’ ‘I’m being helpful,’ Shiv corrected, and smiled at Julia like they were sharing a secret. Rachel turned and ordered, handed out the drinks when they came. She paid, giving Julia a strange look as she did so, almost guilty, probably worrying about how little she paid for things in their relationship. Julia palmed the back of Rachel’s head, stopping just short of rufing her hair, and Rachel fung her another quick look, pleased this time. ‘So you work with Rach,’ Shiv said, ‘right?’ ‘Yes,’ Julia said. ‘In a diferent department, though.’ Shiv nodded and asked what she did, and Julia explained it to her; realised with gentle surprise that Shiv seemed more mature than the rest of Rachel’s friends and that the creeping unease that had been stealing through her all evening was dissipating like steam. For the frst time she thought of Shiv and Rachel’s decision to stay friends not as something that pointed to how young Rachel was, how unable to let go of anything once important, but rather as something adult. They seemed adult, the way they talked to each other: close and friendly and not melodramatic. When Shiv’s friend arrived, Julia and Rachel drew themselves away, back to Rachel’s friends, easy as anything. ‘Rach,’ Shiv said, and Rachel turned back smoothly, like Shiv had twitched a leash in her hand, like her feet were gears slotted into the foor, like the movement was pre-programmed. ‘Are we going to get that—that cofee soon—’ ‘Yes,’ Rachel said. ‘Yes. I’d like that.’ They stayed for another two hours with Rachel’s friends, until Julia was tired and overly tipsy, a headache throbbing, and then she drew Rachel up and went to hail a cab outside. Rachel kissed Julia possessively, her hand on Julia’s thigh.

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‘That was nice,’ she said. Her voice was warm and careless in its ownership, dangerous like a king addressing his troops. ‘It was good to see Shiv. I’m glad you met her. She needed to meet you, if we were going to stay friends, and—she’s good, isn’t she?’ ‘She seems very nice,’ Julia said, resenting the subject, but Rachel nodded as fercely as though Julia had given a speech in Shiv’s favour. Her eyes were bright. She raised Julia’s hand to her mouth and kissed her palm. They went back to Julia’s house and had clumsy sex, half given up on—‘I’m too drunk,’ Rachel said, laughing, apologising, rubbing her palms roughly over her face—and then Julia pulled Rachel into her side. She liked Rachel’s penchant for cuddling. It was nice to wake up in the night and know someone was there. Tonight, though, Rachel was distracted, face lit up with something that was not a smile, something pure and hard inside her that Julia couldn’t touch. Julia thought about brushing her teeth, but she was too tired to stand up now. ‘I need to pee,’ Rachel said suddenly, and swung herself out of bed, fat feet hitting the foor with a thump. Julia rolled onto her side to watch her, the way Rachel stormed into the bathroom, waiting until the last minute for this, like she would wait until the last minute for everything. She left the door open, uncaring of Julia’s attention. She sat on the toilet with her underwear caught around her knees and fexed her toes on the foor, heels up like she was on tiptoes, and then she ran her hands down her own shins, idly testing the prickle. Her bones hadn’t settled yet. When she stood up to wash her hands, Julia could see her watching herself in the mirror, looking newly fascinated.

Mikaella Clements (24) is an Australian currently based in the UK. She has been published in The Toast, Witch Craft Magazine and The Establishment, among others.

VOICEWORKS • 71 • POETRY •

Gigi Hadid

By Gina Karlikof

Gina Karlikof (21) is a creative writing student at UTS. She performs as Kimchi Princi.

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All I can really think about is whether or not this is going to make me look hot and I mean hot.

I’d like to think that I’m too smart to think I look fat or to look like I give a fuck but the thing is when the wind presses this dress to my arse with my thumb to my phone

I can’t help but hope, ‘do midnight squats pay of?’

I delete the tweet and rub my eyes looking at Gigi looking at me, the screen curling into new places of the same old sunshine slapped onto her stomach in that Seafolly ad, shit, surely she’s dumb.

As if that’s enough to stop me from clicking ‘Buy Now’.

VOICEWORKS • 73 • NONFICTION •

BY THE HALF DOZEN

By Ellen Wengert

thE yEar i turnEd eight, I made my dripping chocolate mess when my own birthday cake. It was supposed friends started arriving for the party. to be a three-tier chocolate gateau I could hear them with their parents with strawberries and cream, but my in the living room being introduced grandmother set the oven temperature to my newborn sister, my very special too high and it all fell apart. The occasion having been hijacked fve blurb in the recipe book described it days earlier by Lydia’s overdue arrival. as an ‘elegant cake for very special Between the incessant crying and the occasions’, with a difculty rating nappy changes and the feeding at all of three cartoon chef hats. I tried to hours, no-one had remembered to glue the broken pieces back together organise party games or bake a cake or with icing, determined to replicate put together lolly bags. I actually felt the elegance in the picture, but sorry for my friends, having to attend couldn’t get the consistency right. such a crap party. Instead of pass-the- Not enough water and then too much. parcel, we watched the lingering adults I was still in the kitchen frantically pass Lydia around. When that got pressing sliced strawberries into the boring, we pulled cherry tomatoes of

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a vine in the backyard and pelted them sibling of the day. For hours we’d jump at each other. between the single beds in our shared I have it on good authority that my room, careful not to make contact with conception was unplanned. My parents the turbulent ocean below, carpeted were in their early twenties and had as it was and strewn with books and relocated to Canberra for government toys. At one point, there was a variation jobs after fnishing arts degrees. In of the game called ‘cars’ but it was addition to paid employment—Dad as never as fun. an archivist at the War Memorial and Walter idolised Issy and I and would Mum as a library assistant at one of do just about anything we told him the universities—they got me. I was to. Most of the time, we used him as a clingy, difcult baby and they were a pawn or a bargaining chip against ill-prepared for how much I cried and each other (majority rule) but our how little I slept. But they enjoyed dynamic shifted regularly and at other being parents, I think. Everything times we would gang up and tease him from that time was documented. All mercilessly. Although a fast learner, he of the early milestones were artfully struggled for a while with the alphabet captured on Super-8 footage: the frst and would write things backwards, time I rolled over, frst tantrum, frst which we found hilarious. He also made steps. Every early drawing was carefully a lot of random declarations, a personal catalogued in scrapbooks and stored favourite of which was, ‘Tongues away for posterity. are for licking lollipops!’ It came out Isabel was born two years after of nowhere one night at the dinner me, in Brisbane. There are photos of table and for months any mention of us together at the hospital, Issy in lollipops would set us of in sporadic a knitted cap, swaddled in blankets, fts of laughter. At his frst birthday and me with a bright pink ‘big sister’ party—as he was hoisted up and over ribbon proudly pinned to my jumper. the cake to blow out the candle in Mum and Dad made sure to divide their front of an assortment of guests and attention equally between us. Around a brand new video camera—Walter’s the same time they bought me a Baby pants fell down. We sent the VHS tape Born. I named her Cindy, after the in to Australia’s Funniest Home Videos but youngest of the Brady Bunch. never heard back. When Walter came along, I was Clare was born at home, delivered thrilled. A brother and a sister, one of in the front bedroom of our house each and the best of both. He doubled by an on-call midwife. I was six, and diversifed the casting pool for my Issy was four and Walter was two. elaborately crafted and tightly regulated Home births were a bit of a trend in games. We used to play this one called Mum’s friendship circle at the time. ‘boats’, which was really more of a I arrived home from school with my theatrical piece—an ongoing saga about grandmother earlier than expected, a woman at sea. I directed the entire right as the midwife carried a pile thing and always got to be the main of blood-soaked towels out of the character. The two other parts—servant room, which allayed any suspicions and sea monster, for example, or I might have later had about Clare— husband and child—were assigned not outrageously tanned in a family of on merit but according to my preferred freckles—being adopted. But other

VOICEWORKS • 75 • BY THE HALF DOZEN • Ellen Wengert

than morbid curiosity about the birth Walter down a fight of stairs and he itself, I was fairly ambivalent about her fell and split his chin open. Walter once arrival. It marked my ofcial transition hurled a large Tonka truck at Clare into the role of responsible eldest child. when she was just learning to walk. For the frst time, I had to do actual And Clare once whipped Lydia with chores. I dried the dishes after dinner a rope and timber swing that hung each night, cleaned the bathroom from a tree in the backyard, resulting and hung out freshly washed cloth in a row of stitches through Lydia’s nappies to dry. When Mum was busy, hairline. Because of the range in our I’d supervise the other two while they ages, serious altercations were usually built Lego spaceships or made magic limited to two or three participants and potions in the backyard out of water rarely involved us all. While Issy and I and dirt. It was a pretty boring period. I were at war over clothes, CDs and lip returned to school after a long weekend gloss, for example, Clare and Lydia were and—not wanting to admit I’d spent fghting non-verbally over Little Tikes the past three days bored at home after and Fisher Price toys. Mostly there was everyone else recounted family trips just a lot of competitiveness and yelling. to Dreamworld and Australia Zoo— We talked over one another all the time told the rest of my grade one class and argued about who was eating what, that I had in fact gone to Disneyland. who had exceeded their allocated time I was unsure of Disneyland’s actual on the computer, who was the rightful location but confdent it sounded more owner of which lowly possessions, impressive than anyone else’s weekend. and who should at any given point The teacher knowingly remarked that be in control of the TV remote. My it must have been tricky for my parents grandparents always left our house with to travel so far with the new baby and headaches, brought on, they claimed, that us older kids must have been a big by the near-constant undercurrent of help. Issy and Walter and I were always indiscriminate bickering. referred to as a collective entity. We We knew two other big families became ‘the big three’ and Clare—for growing up: the Gablers, who were all of eighteen months—was the baby. rich and had a huge house, and the With Lydia, we were fve. I’m still Treloars, who lived in the country and not really sure how it happened. There were homeschooled. Neither made for was no social or religious context for a particularly comforting comparison it and no family precedent. Mum has a but they were both quintets like us and younger brother and a much younger could relate, at least. Everyone else was sister. Dad grew up with two older always forcefully vocal in their surprise. sisters, and an older brother who died ‘Five kids!’ people would say. ‘Gee, young. I’ve asked them since how they your parents must have their hands full.’ wound up having so many kids and ‘Five kids!’ a classmate at school Mum’s default answer is ‘one after the once said. ‘That means your parents other’. It was a lot of people in not a lot have had s-e-x fve times. Gross.’ of space. We fought often but probably ‘Yeah, haven’t they heard of not as much as could be expected. condoms?’ said another. There were some notable injuries: I I had campaigned long and hard once threw a fst-sized rock at Issy’s to have us sent to diferent schools to head from a top bunk. Issy once chased avoid such interactions but my parents

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frmly believed we should have an morally, having to choose which sibling equal education. After class each day, (or two or three) to erase. Then one I’d reluctantly round up my siblings afternoon, my aunt brought over an and either wait with them under the ultrasound picture (her frst baby) and building for Mum or walk them the a pull-apart fruit loaf with lurid pink ffteen minutes home. As the eldest, icing. I was busy picking the sultanas and as a generally quiet, well-behaved out of my piece, not really listening to over-achiever, I set a benchmark the conversation, when someone asked for the others. I got to just be Ellen, about her due date. while they were Ellen’s sisters and ‘The last week of August,’ she said. brother. One other advantage of being ‘Ours is due around the same time,’ the eldest was getting frst dibs on said Mum. hobbies and interests. When I chose I started listening then. after-school drama classes, Girl Guides ‘Our what?’ and the violin, for example, it was ‘Mum’s pregnant,’ said Dad. easier just to sign Issy up for the same ‘She’s what?’ extracurricular activities. Much to my ‘Pregnant,’ said Mum. horror, Issy excelled at drama and ‘What? Are you serious?’ quickly moved up through the levels to ‘Ellen—’ they both said. the advanced group, while I was stuck I focused on the stupid fruit loaf waving my arms around week after through the hot angry tears and told week, pretending to be a tree with the Mum and Dad I hated them. Despised beginners. At Girl Guides, I proved to them, in fact. They promised it would be the superior knot-tier and fre- be the last baby and tried to explain builder but Issy made more friends that they were as surprised as I and I usually had to beg to join her in was. They also said I’d get my own the cool, popular girls’ cabin at camps. bedroom—fnally—if it was a boy. I was better at violin but it hardly Elizabeth was born six days after my mattered when she turned out to be cousin. We called her Betty as a bit of better at singing. My parents—tired of a joke at frst, but it stuck. In addition our feud and of continually reafrming to us ‘big three’ there were now three that we were equally talented— ‘little girls’. That stuck too. At some reluctantly agreed to adjudicate a sing- point during those frst few months, of. We queued the credits on our VHS I retrieved Cindy from a plastic tub of copy of Titanic and fipped a coin. I gave old toys in the back of my cupboard it my all and then smugly rewound and presented Betty with the doll. the tape for Issy. Her rendition of ‘My The intervening years had not been Heart Will Go On’ won by a landslide. kind; Cindy’s lips had turned a weird, Sometimes when I met new people, jaundiced yellow after being left too I lied and told them I only had three long in the car on a hot day, and her siblings. Sometimes two or one. It plastic limbs were badly deteriorating. was easier that way and eliminated When Mum saw Betty sucking on the embarrassment of being diferent. Cindy’s atrophied leg, she pried the Except that a couple of times I forgot Baby Born away and suggested it might which edited version of my family I’d be time to throw her out. I was by given to whom and got caught out in this stage almost twelve and far more the lie. It also felt a bit uncomfortable, interested in sleepovers and out-of-date

VOICEWORKS • 77 • BY THE HALF DOZEN • Ellen Wengert

Girlfriend magazines borrowed from the It’s hard to get the six of us together local library, but surrendering that doll these days. It only really happens at was a harrowing episode nonetheless. Christmas and on birthdays, although Over the ensuing years, our house our family has more of those each year seemed almost to expand and contract; than most. Our collective childhood was there were times we ft around each punctuated by some pretty memorable other with surplus space, and times birthday cakes and parties. Like the we drove each other, and our parents, gingerbread castle an aunt made for to total despair. But somehow we all Walter one year. It had turrets flled managed. A lot of things about me now with multicoloured popcorn and a can probably be attributed to having chocolate wafer drawbridge over a grown up as the eldest in a big family. blue jelly moat. Other birthday cakes I’m organised and independent, though were made to resemble a mermaid, a I don’t like being alone for extended swimming pool, a barnyard, an iPad, periods of time. I still talk and eat a car, a train, and various garishly quickly. I’d like to think I’m resilient. I decorated numerals. Then there can’t concentrate without background were the themed parties: cowboys, noise. I’m not very good at sharing. princesses, pirates and under-the-sea. I can still be bossy as hell. Despite, There are funny-in-retrospect stories at various times, sharing bedrooms about duplicate presents, mixed-up and extra-curricular activities, the dates and invitations sent out too late. others have all been able to carve out But it’s the misshapen chocolate cake individual identities too. Issy is an and the cherry tomato skirmish from archetypal free spirit, graceful and my eighth birthday that we laugh fercely creative; Walter is the smartest about the most. The story has become person I’ll probably ever know and a persistent in-joke, part of an inane one of the funniest too; Clare is still repertoire that keeps us at the dinner outrageously tanned, beautiful and table long after the plates are cleared determined, almost (but not quite) to a away. These are the times I’m most fault; and Lydia is generous and kind, glad that we’re six. That us ‘big three’ sharp-witted and wonderfully sarcastic. have the ‘little girls’ and that all of us Betty’s interests and strengths evolve have each other. I could never really all the time but at the moment, she’s choose a favourite. They annoy and obsessed with sport, music and politics. frustrate and amuse and uplift in equal She’s precociously insightful for an measure. But if forced to, I’d probably eleven-year-old and has a knack for pick Betty. I think we all would. poetry. And in some other ways, she’s a lot like me, the other bookend.

Ellen Wengert (22) lives in Brisbane. She recently completed a Bachelor of Arts and isn’t entirely sure what to do with it.

‘Slow Burn’ is by Julia Trybala (24), a Melbourne-based artist. Her work examines the everyday through assembling and mapping certain moments, memories, people and places.

78 • VOICEWORKS

• POETRY •

Apples

By Jocelyn Deane

In bed he would chew apples with his mouth open, noise collecting like bats in the cave of his strawberry sheets; an extra schlock sound, an overture to chewing

as if he were drowning on apples. His smile aspirated, the voice barely a recognition. Vocalisations were fngers maintaining the dribble of his face,

the infectiousness of eyes, suspecting he would have to speak to anyone other than him self. In the adjacent bunk someone muttered jumbled

Cantonese-English-Mandarin, with tonal accents on front plosive vowels, as if there were bees inside him or one vast staring one, its pliant spindling deep

legs on his chest, its face quivering. He covered his head with an iPad-illuminated blanket, spoke to Nepal (his sheets the bass register

of all speech), Skyping relatives, asking furtively —as if forbidden, prone as if a hostile listening—if anyone was hurt.

Jocelyn Deane (22) was born in London, before moving to Australia in 2001. They’ve written for Phantasmagoria, Australian Poetry, Seizure, Ogre Magazine, Moss Piglet and Ginosko Journal.

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ROADKILL

By Lauren Farquhar

charlottE accElEratEd doWn thE rural road, hitting ninety kilometres per hour as she passed the road sign marked sixty. As usual, she let her adrenaline drive her home. It was usually pitch black when she got out on these roads, with only her headlights to guide her, but the moon was peeking through the trees tonight. It had rained that afternoon. Now the storm had passed and the bushland hummed with the sounds of cicadas and mosquitoes. She passed a spot where the crooked gum trees formed the shape of a cat; this strange efect always made it seem like the bushland was fucking with her. She swerved around the next corner. There were two foxes playing in the middle of the road. The hi-beam headlights caught their wild stares, thrown out of the darkness as they froze mid-chase. She slammed on her brakes, her mind forced into gear. One fox darted back and the other yelped. She heard whimpering from underneath the car. She listened as her ABS brakes shuddered. Her hands shook and she tried to banish from her mind the image of a car on its roof. With the hazards on, she got out of her car. Blood was splattered against the driver’s side wheel, hubcap and mudguard. The crying was getting louder. As

VOICEWORKS • 83 • ROADKILL • Lauren Farquhar

she crouched down she could see the fox, a female, still lying under the back half of the car. Its front right leg was torn from its furry abdomen, caught under the wheel. Blood pooled around it. ‘Shit.’ Charlotte jumped in the driver’s seat and slowly rolled the car forward until the fox was accessible, shaking on the cold road. She ran to the back and popped the boot, grabbing a leash and towel from in amongst the junk. Grimacing, she slipped on a pair of leather gloves and pulled her jacket on over her shoulders. She approached the vixen with caution as it snarled at her. As it thrashed, she growled too. The fox clawed up onto its three legs and wobbled, dizzy. Charlotte pounced and tackled the creature. She managed to pin the remaining left front leg under the fox’s body while keeping its head locked under her arm. The fox stunk of grime and the meat of previous kills, and Charlotte gagged. She looped the leash and slung it around the remaining upper leg, squeezing hard and waiting for the blood fow to ease before knotting her makeshift tourniquet. The fox nipped at her jacket and Charlotte glared back. Foxes carried so many germs in their mouths. ‘Dirty monsters,’ her father used to describe them. ‘I’m trying to help.’ With particular difculty, she lifted the beaten fox onto the towel, wrapping its lithe body tightly enough so it couldn’t move. It tried to bite her, but it was getting more and more disoriented. Eventually, it gave up and simply looked at her, suspicious. What on earth was she doing? Charlotte got up and looked at the car then the fox. The poor thing might not survive the night. It had lost too much blood. But she couldn’t just leave it either. It would be all alone; its mate was nowhere to be seen. The next challenge involved getting the fox into the car. Cooing, she began to stroke the towel-wrapped vixen, which helped stop the shaking. What was her plan anyway? This was a feral fox. Tonight would probably end with her needing stitches and having to deal with a dead fox in her house. She pushed away those thoughts—she just needed it to trust her and calm down. ‘Ouch!’ Just as Charlotte started to slide her hands under the trembling body, the fox bit her arm. Luckily her sleeve took most of the hit, but it still fucking hurt. She’d need a tetanus shot now. She growled at it, grabbing the nape of its neck like an angry mother. It was pinned, panicked and in no position to stand its ground. Carefully, she lifted it and placed the bundle on the back seat, strapping the seatbelt around it. The creature was not going to go berserk in her car. Charlotte stopped. It was quiet but something was watching her. She heard rustling behind her, and panting. Behind a tree in a nearby yard she saw the glowing eyes of the male fox, staring at the car. She shuddered and hurried back into the driver’s seat and drove slowly up the fnal stretch of road to her house. At home, after parking under the creaky tin carport, Charlotte grabbed her father’s overturned wheelbarrow from over near the tractors and wheeled it to the car as quietly as possible, avoiding the rusting machinery, which was overgrown with shrubbery. She got to the car and lifted the fox out of the backseat. Wheeling the bloodied thing to the back door was nothing. Avoiding the piles of junk on the veranda had become second nature to her. Getting it into the house would be a little diferent, she thought. But then she spied the laundry basket.

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Gently, she carried the fox in the hardy basket, its skinny body breathing in and out so fast, still panicked. In the downstairs bathroom Charlotte dumped the creature into the shower recess. She quickly shut the door behind it. It jumped on its remaining legs to claw at the glass door, rattling it loudly. ‘Stop that,’ she hissed. Charlotte left the bathroom and grabbed a bottle of vodka from the dusty back of the pantry. She headed for the shed where she would fnd the old dog muzzle and more towels. She took bandages from the frst aid box and mincemeat from the outdoor fridge, where they kept the dog’s feed. The veranda was cluttered. Charlotte’s mother hadn’t really looked after the place since Dad’s accident. She hadn’t really looked after anything at all; she’d barely stepped outside. Again, the image of the car, overturned, entered her mind. There was a sound behind her. Growling. Charlotte paused, slowly turning to see the male fox on the overgrown grass of the closest paddock. Its eyes glowed, refecting the moonlight. It was maybe ten feet away. Charlotte froze. A light breeze ran through the trees and grass, and the fox bristled. Its fur was matted, its eyes remained focused on her. It looked manic. The fox stepped towards her, lowering itself to the ground as if it might pounce. She dashed to the door, leaping through and closing it just as the fox ran at her. It slammed against the dirty glass and scratched at it, furious. She backed away and hurried to the bathroom with her odd collection of tools and food, hoping the other fox would tire and leave them be. This, she knew, would be diferent to her past experiences, when they kept kelpies and the dogs fought or were hit by a car. Those dogs had trusted her. If she accidentally stepped on a paw, they forgave. They let her hold them, help them, because they were part of her family. This vixen was more dangerous than any animal she had dealt with on the farm. She’d have to keep quiet too—her mother needed all the sleep she could get. With what had happened, and all the fnancial stresses, she was close to breaking down. She’d freak if she knew what her daughter was up to. If Dad had still been here, he would have shot the animal on sight. ‘Bloody pests,’ he would have said while burying it. Charlotte’s throat caught. She looked to the fox and it snarled at her again. She snarled back. She placed the tin bowls in front of her, one flled with tap water and the other with mincemeat. At the smell of wet meat, the fox pricked its ears. Those dark, beady eyes were suddenly focussed on the bowl. Charlotte gulped and leant forward, opening the shower door a crack. The fox pushed its wet nose through, pulling itself closer to the bowl. Its eyes, watering with hunger, locked with Charlotte’s. As she opened the shower door, and placed the food bowl on the ground, the vixen backed itself into a corner. Slowly it looked down to the bowl and snifed, before plunging its snout into it, gulping the meat down. Blood dribbled onto its furry white chin and up over its nose. The tin scratched against the tiled foor. Charlotte prepared the muzzle with the vodka. She wasn’t taking any chances. Her father used to catch foxes after their chickens were attacked—climbing into the burrow, pulling the creature out by the scruf of its neck. There might have

VOICEWORKS • 85 • ROADKILL • Lauren Farquhar

been a few bites on his weathered arms, but the fox he held in them would be stif, paralysed. When foxes attacked their farm, whether it was to hunt chickens or wallabies, traps wouldn’t stop them. Instead of fnding a trapped fox, they would fnd a closed trap over a little severed foot. Her dad once spat with disgust at the creatures, gnawing at their own bones to escape. Not to mention the chicken massacres—a henhouse full of happy chooks found the next morning, necks torn open, blood drank but the fesh left to rot. ‘Foxes are nasty, vicious creatures,’ he had said, burying the last of the poor chooks. When Dad was around, a caught fox never survived the encounter. It had been hard to reconcile this brutal man with the one who cooed happily to his chickens, who nursed orphaned wallabies for WIRES. Charlotte shook her head. Focus. Back of the neck, frm grip. She had been saving the Stolichnaya for a friend’s party at university. She wasn’t even sure if she would tell her friends about tonight. It would be another weird story about her weird country life. She was the only one of the lot who lived in a rural area, probably the only one who had seen a fox before. The only one who drove on dangerous country roads. Her friends’ closest experiences of ‘rural life’ would be smoking weed in a feld on long weekends. The vixen licked its chops, cleaning itself. Charlotte approached with the muzzle. It whimpered and backed up, baring its teeth again. She pounced, grabbing the back of the vixen’s neck. Even through the gloves she could feel the fur was matted, coarse—nothing like a dog’s. She sat back, fox in arm, panting. She held it frmly in one hand and struggled to pop the muzzle over the rebellious snout. A few scratches later she had it on. Step one complete. Putting the fox’s body under her arm, she held its damaged leg with one hand and used the other to pour vodka over the wound. The sounds were unbearable: screeching as the vodka burned away any germs and infection. She hoped her mum would sleep through it at least. She cooed and tried to calm the fox down. Finally it went limp, and she could grab the bandages to wrap the wound. The fox was bleeding very little now, and she secured it with some tape. Still, Dad’s opinion sat at the back of her mind. ‘Bloody hell, girl. Foxes are pests, they’re feral, and they’re nasty bastards. You love the bush, Charlotte, why would you waste your time on a fox?’ She let the fox go and watched it hobble back into the shower recess. She got out another portion of meat, popped it in the bowl and grabbed the vixen once more. It twitched but understood. She quickly unbuckled the muzzle and threw it on the ground, slamming the door between her and the fox. It turned and tried rattling the door again, gentler this time. Outside the bathroom Charlotte returned the clothes basket to the laundry and the vodka to its cupboard, where she noticed the scotch was missing. ‘Not again,’ she muttered. She flled a glass with water and climbed the creaky stairs to the frst foor. Her mother’s bedroom door was ajar. She slipped inside, blinking in the darkness as her eyes adjusted. She stopped, her foot hovering above a dark mound on the foor—Ivy. The dark-furred mutt lay at the foot of her mother’s bed, sleeping soundly. She wasn’t

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surprised—her mum had taken to letting the dog inside. Formerly a farm dog, Ivy had settled into being pampered. She snored slightly; her back leg twitched. Sprawled across the sheets, with one leg hanging of the mattress in the cool air, lay her mum. So diferent to how she used to sleep—in a neat little bundle. Now she seemed uncomfortable in a bed that was too big for her without Dad. The bottle of scotch sat on the bedside table. Charlotte switched it out for the glass of water in her hand and kissed her mum on her forehead. Then she headed back to her other patient. She wasn’t sure how she’d deal with her mother, or the mess, in the morning. Mum wouldn’t be angry, but it would remind her of Dad. Charlotte winced. Though she doubted Mum would be awake until after midday. Hopefully she could get the mess cleared away by then. Mum didn’t have to know. As the weariness set in, Charlotte found it harder to push away that image of her dad’s car on its roof. His blood staining the weeds and wild grass on the side of the road. The faded speed sign knocked over in the dirt, the sharp bend in the road. A scratch at the window startled her. The sun was peeking through the blinds of the bathroom, and Charlotte wiped her eyes. She checked her wristwatch. Just about six in the morning, she’d slept for three hours maybe. She should’ve gone to bed. The scratching continued and a quiet whimper issued from outside the window. She looked at the vixen in the shower; its eyes had opened at the sound, it was instantly on its three feet, staring towards the window. Charlotte walked to the window and pulled the cord, bringing the blinds up. The male fox sat on the windowsill. Its fur stood on end when it saw the vixen inside. The female bashed against the glass of the shower door, crying. Charlotte jumped down to the shower and released the vixen into the hallway. Charlotte’s vixen found the laundry door in no time. Once the door was opened, it ran, limping but fast. Charlotte watched the pair meet in the paddock. They circled each other, the male inspecting the vixen’s missing foot and then turning back to Charlotte to snarl at her. The vixen let out a low growl and nipped its mate. The male dropped its gaze. Charlotte smiled for the frst time in months. Not that the fox cared. Its shoulders slumped and it turned back to the bushland. The vixen followed. The two animals leapt over her dad’s overgrown tractor and headed into the mess of scrub and trees. Charlotte watched until they were gone.

Lauren Farquhar (25) is a Sydney-based writer. Having turned twenty-fve she is currently distraught she can no longer submit to Voiceworks.

VOICEWORKS • 87 • POETRY •

Cusp

By Zhi Yi Cham

6:46 am: exhaustion- laced lashes fung open. reveal bloodshot

eyes: wakeful for too long strain with

delirium: horizon soaked in spilled freshly squeezed orange

juice: too quickly warm in summer. dawn sizzles ’gainst

silhouettes: dyed edges rise to meet

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white moon: dollop of cream—perfect serve upon warm scone halves for breakfast

close (involuntarily. unwillingly): blink of eye away to new day. she

lingers in her twentieth year, ambling on the line that would inevitably cut her from

youth: knife through cake. bleeding icing, dismembered sponge. clap,

cheer: sky clears to blue. she mourns at

breakfast. pour freshly squeezed orange juice. scone-sandwiched moon,

a devoured cake away to adulthood.

Zhi Yi Cham (22) occasionally dismantles the disarray in her mind on instagram.com/dsmntlg. She is an accidental oversharer.

VOICEWORKS • 89

• NONFICTION •

NO WEDDING CAKE FOR AN ILLEGAL ROMANCE

By Kim Lateef

no onE knEW—or rEally cared, or background. He persevered as a it seems—whether Akbar was from travelling hawker, selling anything Afghanistan, the North-West Frontier from books to pots throughout regional Province (now Pakistan), or some other WA; his unexpected fortune was British-Indian city. It was 1894 and he fnding solace in another outsider who, found only racism instead of fortune in like himself, drifted on the edge of Perth, Western Australia. Several years white society. later, he dodged permanent deportation Lallie Matbar, a young Aboriginal under the new Immigration Restriction Wongai woman, met Akbar when Act of 1901. Ofcials took this ‘White she would travel and camp with her Australia’ policy seriously, being too ‘Linden mob’ in the north-eastern busy selecting only British and white Goldfelds to evade relocation to European immigrants into the new the Moore River Native Settlement. federation to concern themselves with Defned as ‘half-caste’ under the recording Akbar’s reason for exemption Aborigines Act of 1905, one of the

‘Apples’ is by Lucy Hunter (20), an illustrator from Melbourne. She is passionate about visual storytelling and thrives of nature and the change in seasons.

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ways Lallie learned to render herself it ‘clean’ of Indigenous presence. In invisible was by rubbing her skin with reality, it was the local white men who ashes so she would not attract the contributed to the ‘moral pollution’ attention of the police. Around 1920, when they transmitted sexual diseases Akbar, who was popularly known as to Aboriginal women. Jack, upon striking up a friendship Marriage would ofer Lallie a safe with Lallie, revealed his Afghan name and comfortable life—Akbar was aware to her, and he in turn learned that her of the sexual exploitation of Aboriginal close relations knew her as Nilba. For women by white men and cameleers them, the exchange of their cultural names rather than the names assigned to them by white Australians created ‘Colonial law made it a connection that allowed insight into illegal for an Afghan or each other’s backgrounds. Akbar, non-Aboriginal man to armed with this understanding, began to notice that important Aboriginal marry an Aboriginal customs revolving around the role of woman..’ elders overlapped with his own Afghan codes of respect. Akbar soon generated enough in exchange for goods. In 1925, Akbar proft to open a small general store received the permission of elders in Mount Morgans, now a ghost town from the Linden mob to marry Lallie, that depended on the prosperity of based on his reputation as a ‘hard- the nearby gold mine. Situated 916 working man of a kind nature’.2 They kilometres east of Perth city, Akbar’s did not view all Muslim cameleers as services would have been in high honest and kind, but Akbar was the demand since he was located between exception. Akbar learned from his two bigger regional towns, Leonora and cultural exchanges with Lallie’s elders Laverton, separated from each other that the camel tracks—later, sealed by long, red dirt roads. But Akbar’s highways—were based on the ancient tendency to help Lallie’s elders by migratory pathways of Aboriginal ofering free transport in his motor custodians. In any case, Akbar was truck was met with disapproval from able to deepen his relationship with the local white residents—they viewed Lallie. The Linden mob—her people— the Aboriginal Wongai people who trusted him. However, once he began lived on the fringes as a source of to interact with the local Aboriginal ‘moral and physical pollution’.1 Akbar’s people, his own ethnicity drew the friendly interactions were drawing attention of local white police. Akbar’s them into the town centre, and one of skin colour—not his Islamic beliefs— the duties of local police was to keep became the problem.

1. Stephen J. Kunitz, Disease and Social Diversity: The European Impact on the Health of Non-Europeans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 51. 2. Victoria Reynolds, ‘Chit-Chat for Women’, The Advertiser, 20 November, 1928, sec. The Woman’s World, 10, National Library of Australia: Trove.

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Colonial law made it illegal for an like Akbar—would have ‘coloured’ Afghan or non-Aboriginal man to babies. Neville, basically, preferred that marry an Aboriginal woman without Lallie marry a white man so at least frst gaining the permission of Auber their mixed-race children would have Octavius Neville, the Chief Protector ‘less’ non-white blood. Neville didn’t of Aborigines in Western Australia. care if Akbar promised to care for Lallie The fact that Lallie’s elders gave their because, as Chief Protector, he could consent meant nothing. A.O. Neville forcefully remove her to a settlement was a public servant who believed that if he thought she was neglected—and Aboriginal people of full descent were apparently he thought so. He devised a near extinction, so thought he could plan in which local police would follow speed up this process by manipulating the trail of Akbar’s motor car to Lallie’s Aboriginal identity through the birth hiding place in the bush. A few local of mixed-race babies. He even planned white opponents who didn’t like Akbar the future of these babies as assimilated and his friendly interactions with the domestic workers in white households. Wongai people had heard rumours that Neville, in other words, wished to breed Akbar provided Lallie and her family out ‘Aboriginal blood’ in a perverse with food and supplies in the bush. example of pre-Hitler eugenics. In his After nineteen years of careful evasion, eyes, the only way to achieve his goal Lallie’s mother, Tjirrgulu, fnally was to prevent marriage between his witnessed the police drag her pregnant female wards and non-white men. daughter into a vehicle primed for the Neville’s interfering regime lasted from Mount Margaret Mission. 1915 to 1940, in which intricate ties of Neville mobilised marriage as family, culture and country were quietly a strategy for the assimilation of (only to his ears) and painfully snapped Aboriginal Australians. In his view, by the forced removal of children. Akbar, as an Afghan, was not endowed Akbar was obligated by his Islamic with the power to ‘rehabilitate beliefs to marry Lallie because she was and render productive’3 Lallie. In expecting his baby. Yet their marriage addition, Neville made it difcult for wasn’t legal under Australian law. Aboriginal women to stay safely outside Akbar’s lawyer in nearby Kalgoorlie the surveillance of the Aborigines advised him to petition Neville to prove Department because living with his good character. Lallie accompanied ‘coloured’ men was viewed as sexually Akbar as he collected signatures from immoral—Neville was all about white male residents of towns where ‘protecting’ these women, remember. he was respected as the owner of his Lallie was considered ‘protected’ when, Mount Morgans business. Neville on 13 October 1926, six days after she rejected three of Akbar’s petitions based gave birth prematurely to a stillborn on his hypothesis that a ‘half-caste’ son, she was abruptly removed from Aboriginal woman—like Lallie—who Mount Margaret Mission to Moore had children with a non-white man— River Native Settlement in a locked

3. Katherine Ellinghaus, ‘Absorbing the “Aboriginal Problem”: Controlling Interracial Marriage in Australia in the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries’, Aboriginal History 27 (2003): 206.

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police wagon. In Lallie’s government the law, she once again moved on the fle there is no record on the state periphery of white society until she was of her physical, mental or emotional reunited with the Linden mob. They health after her premature delivery, told Lallie that Akbar had left Mount the burial of her stillborn son, or the Morgans to drive towards Adelaide, long journey to Moore River away from since local white police had been Akbar, her mother and her family. harassing him to fnd out her location. Lallie’s grieving process would have Still, Lallie did not see herself as resulted in a lingering depression as neglected by her partner. In 1928, she she felt the full force of the Aborigines wrote, ‘being a half-caste outcast—for Act and Neville’s obsessive goal to which I am not blame—very few would destroy her eforts to create a future take interest in me or assist me’6 as with Akbar. What is included in her Akbar had done. ofcial government record is Neville’s Lallie walked the hundreds of miles contradictory description of Lallie as from Laverton through Kalgoorlie to ‘pleasant looking and well spoken’ Balladonia, locating Akbar in Eucla and ‘absolutely immoral and the after two months of travelling on foot victim of lustful men’.4 The fact that through barren desert. They fnally the Western Australian Aborigines took the law into their own hands Department kept a document on Lallie’s when, in 1928, they crossed into South movements shows the extent to which Australia to marry in the Adelaide the Government surveilled Aboriginal registry ofce. Akbar gladly paid thirty people, especially those who were pounds for a copy of their marriage interned at Moore River. certifcate. His determination to live in The settlement was like a prison. comfort with Lallie succeeded, for a few Lallie would later write: ‘we had to months at least, until their movements work hard at washing and scrubbing’, were tracked down by a detective from with a diet of ‘only bread, dripping and Perth. Both were to stand trial for black tea’.5 Barred from visiting Moore breaching the Aborigines Act—Akbar River, Akbar felt guilty for Lallie’s was charged with kidnapping Lallie removal and, after hearing whispers from Western Australia and Lallie for about his stillborn son through cohabiting with a non-white man. the Linden mob, he contemplated Nothing was noted about Lallie’s selling his store and leaving Western kidnapping from her people by white Australia if it would allow Neville to authorities or the stress it placed gaze more favourably upon Lallie’s upon her pregnancy. moral character. In 1927, after 365 Most Australian newspapers days of monotony, Lallie, after several publicised the Akbar–Matbar case attempts, fnally escaped from the expressing their support—in particular, settlement. Now deemed a fugitive by the South Australian media, which

4. Pamela Rajkowski, Linden Girl: A Story of Outlawed Lives (Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press, 1995), 151. 5. ‘Walked 500 Miles to Marry’, The News, 22 November, 1928, 26, National Library of Australia: Trove 6. Reynolds, ‘Chit-Chat for Women’, 10.

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interviewed the couple while they released on a bond of 500 pounds and awaited extradition. As proof of their permanently banned from living in WA domestic bliss, Akbar stated, ‘my with her people. Akbar argued against word she [Lallie] is a good cook,’7 the exile as he could fnd work easily with Lallie equally complimentary of in regional Western Australia, where Akbar’s culinary skills. She compared he had made connections through the luxury of a ‘fur trimmed coat, silk his movements. Neville’s refusal was motivated by a fear that Lallie’s ‘Lallie wrote, in 1928, presence would trigger rebellious behaviour among the Aboriginal “being a half-caste Wongai. Akbar stressed to the defence outcast—for which I am counsel the importance of the deep not to blame—very few bond between his wife and her people, claiming that Lallie would inevitably would take an interest leave him one day to reunite with in me or assist me” as them, not because of Akbar’s failure as Akbar had done.’ a provider, but due to homesickness. No-one would have assumed that Lallie and Akbar went to extreme stockings and tan shoes,’8 which Akbar measures just to live together with had provided her, with the rough khaki their children in suburban Adelaide. supplied to her at Moore River. And they certainly didn’t mention it Lallie later wrote: ‘I lawfully wedded to anyone. Lallie and Akbar had two a man of my choice with whom I am older daughters, Mona and Shirley, happy, without doing any harm to and two younger sons, Jimmy and anyone. I am sure I will receive true Johnny, and raised them as ‘little justice at last and there I will wait and Muslim children’ rather than ‘little have my Akbar forever.’9 coloured children’11 since they were ‘Little wonder that the white man’s afraid of their forced removal. Whilst law is often an enigma’ to ‘those Akbar was already voluntarily separated deemed non-white,’ summarised from his family overseas, it was hard Perth’s Mirror.10 for Lallie, who couldn’t visit her family Insufcient evidence meant that the across the border. Lallie couldn’t even trial did not go ahead and the pair were send presents to them because she released from custody. They were exiled was too scared of attracting Neville’s from Western Australia and sent back to attention through local gossip. Because South Australia (at their own expense) of her isolation, Lallie wasn’t even on the condition that Akbar would care aware when her mother died. Her deep and provide for his wife. Lallie was homesickness was soon exacerbated

7. ‘Not Allowed to Love!’, The Mirror, 13 October, 1928, 3, National Library of Australia: Trove. 8. Ibid. 9. Reynolds, ‘Chit-Chat for Women’, 10. 10. ‘Not Allowed to Love!’, 3. 11. ‘Mona Akbar Interview’, YouTube video, 2:02, 30 November, 2012.

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by Akbar’s increasingly conservative her—Lallie departed South Australia views on parenting, since it reminded explaining that Tjirrgulu’s spirit was her of living under the Aborigines Act. calling her to return home. Akbar So, after twenty years of marriage, made his fnal departure in 1950, and Lallie parted ways with Akbar, without was buried in Adelaide, whilst Lallie bitterness, in order to re-enter worked as a community leader to Western Australia and reunite with the improve the lives of her Linden mob; Linden mob. she was buried with much love, respect Western Australians during this time and ceremony by her descendants. believed that Indigenous Australian Even so, experiencing imprisonment, mothers separated from their children discrimination and exile was the huge under the Aborigines Act would forget price Lallie paid for happiness that, them in twenty-four hours. Not even for white Australians, was a basic in death did Lallie’s mother forget human right.

Kim Lateef (24) is from WA. She likes to uncover and write about hidden histories.

96 • VOICEWORKS • FICTION •

THESE HANDS

By Bethany Leak

‘you arE spEcial,’ shE said. ‘You need more than we can give you.’ These are the words that return to my mind on the bus home from school. It’s raining, and the windows are fogged and wet. I scribble in the misty damp with my fnger, remembering hers on the piano keys, the sound of her voice as she spoke. I like her voice. It reminds me of my mother’s, although Mum never played an instrument; by the time I found the old keyboard in the hard rubbish, she’d already died. She left in a white casket with Elliot at the head, Dad at the foot. I press my palm up against the glass and remember how these hands cradled an infant Jessie as we followed our mother out of the church. The cofn was so small. Elliot’s ute is in the driveway when I get home, water dripping from the mudguards. Snail tracks glisten on the wet concrete path to the front door. Inside the house, it’s very quiet. I fnd Elliot at the kitchen sink. He’s scrubbing glue from his hands with a nailbrush and lots of soap. ‘Hey.’ ‘Hi, Reed.’ He won’t look at me. ‘Where’s Jessie?’

VOICEWORKS • 97 • THESE HANDS • Bethany Leak

‘Bed. Picked her up early from school. She had another tantrum—didn’t like the colour of the paper they gave her or something. Ended up she had a full-on seizure.’ I take this information without feeling much of anything at all. Think of a song, or a piece of music that you once loved. The frst time you listened to it, you got goosebumps. You cried. It lifted your thoughts to a higher level than the textbooks and playgrounds and petty squabbles around you. By the ffteenth—or even the fftieth—time, those feelings are gone. ‘There’s something else,’ Elliot says. ‘What?’ He doesn’t say anything. The only sound is the wrinkling of water against the metal sides of the sink. He dries his hand on a tea towel. ‘The keyboard. You know how she goes nuts about leaving it every morning? The school psych called me up again. He says that’s bad.’ ‘But he said it was good that she was showing an interest,’ I protest. ‘He told us to encourage it.’ ‘Not anymore. Reckons it’s keeping her from focusing on getting along well in the classroom. Integration, or whatever. You know the jargon better than I do.’ Now he is fddling with the stove, snapping the fame on and of. The clicks of the lighter are distracting. ‘He wants us to get rid of it,’ Elliot says. All at once, I notice the grip of my damp dress on my skin. Cold. My legs give way and I sit down on the kitchen stool, clenching my hands between my knees. ‘The keyboard?’ ‘You don’t mind, do you, Reed?’ He turns to me now. He looks very tired. He digs into his overalls and the pack of cigarettes rattles as he fshes for it and pulls one out. His fngers are shaking. They’re long for a builder’s, long and elegant. I have never noticed before. ‘It’s just a stage, isn’t it?’ I say. ‘Her thing with the keyboard.’ ‘A stage. Everything’s a stage with her. She’s seven years old and she can’t read. Do you know what he said? He said if this doesn’t work, we’ll have to send her to a special school, and do you know how much that costs? She has to learn to cope without it.’ His words make me hesitate for a moment. ‘Elliot.’ ‘I’m going outside for a smoke.’ I grab him as he steps past me. ‘Elliot, there’s this college in Melbourne—an arts school. For people who are really good at music and things. My teacher, she— she said I should audition.’ He waits, resting one hand on the bench. ‘Doing what?’ ‘Piano.’ He looks down at the cigarette, puts it between his lips, removes it. I know he’s deciding how to answer. When he does, his voice is gentle. ‘Reed, that’s so far away. Even if you did get in, there’s no way you’d be able to go.’ ‘Oh, I know,’ I say. But I hadn’t thought that far. Standing up, I tuck my hands under my arms. ‘It doesn’t matter. Forget about it.’ ‘Where are you going?’ ‘To the garage.’ He goes out the front door, and I go out the back. I go into the garage. I go to the keyboard. I go to turn it on, but my fngers

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hesitate over the power button. All I do is look at it—at the cracks on the plastic frame, the keys like a smoker’s teeth, yellowing and punctuated with black, the smudge Jessie’s fngers have made on middle C. One, two, three. I press all eighty- eight keys, one after the other, counting. They make a clacking sound. When I reach the end, I go down again. That’s how Jessie plays it. I think back to the frst time, her smile when she saw it. Her fngers crept up the length of the piano in perfect chromatic order. She walked her hand down again and lingered on the low A. She still plays it the same way, every day. There is something at once awkward and eloquent in the way she holds her hand, one fnger pressed to the note while the others stick straight out like she has no knuckles to bend. A coping mechanism, the psychologist calls it: a way for her to make sense of the world. But everyone has those. It does not make Jessie the alien they want her to be. I hit the power button and the dashboard lights up. The keys are strong and fuid beneath my fngers. Jessie likes it when I play for her. She’ll cry when she sees it’s gone. I stop, and just stand listening to the silence. There’s a dim electric hum from the keyboard. Elliot says it must have gotten dust in it, but you can’t tell when you’re playing. The roof beams groan above me. We went to a wedding once, before Dad left, and he showed me how to run a wet fnger around the rim of the wine glass, so it would sing. Whenever I make music I think of that. I think of being back there with Dad and the clear note of the wine glass. The fywire screen bangs. Elliot ducks through the doorway, switching on the light. ‘Reed? Better put it in the ute while she’s asleep.’ Hastily I press the power button. ‘Sure.’ ‘Grab one end, will you?’ I’m going to. I see myself lifting it, carrying it out. My eye lights on one of Elliot’s mallets, hanging from two pegs on the wall. Without thinking I seize it and hurl it at the piano with all my strength. It bounces of the keys, snapping a half dozen free. They clink and bounce on the concrete. The mallet strikes the foor so sharply that my ears ring. ‘Reed, what the—’ I step by him and walk into the house. The sun fades out while I sit on my bed, staring at the ceiling. At last, I hear a door shutting, and go out. Elliot isn’t in the kitchen or the garage. I check his room, but that is empty too. With a chattering heart I jerk back the curtains and look out into the drive. In the light of a streetlamp I see that his ute is still there. The relief is so intense that for a moment I’m not sure if I’m standing or falling. My breath steadies. Elliot isn’t like my father. It’s then that I notice the door to Jessie’s room is slightly ajar. It’s the frst door in the hall, and I can see it from where I stand. Jessie never leaves it open. She wakes up so easily; light or noise or anything can disturb her. I go to close it, and see Elliot. He’s standing just beside her, one hand gripping the bedframe above her head. His silhouette is dark against the grey of the room. I can’t see his face, but he lifts his hand to his eyes, gripping either side of his temples as though he’s trying to squeeze his brain out. A shudder crosses his spine. He drops to his knees, holding his head in his hands.

VOICEWORKS • 99 • THESE HANDS • Bethany Leak

Specks of dust foat by me and drift into the darkened room. I want to leave, but I can’t. Something makes me stay. ‘Elliot?’ It’s Jessie. She’s whimpering, failing her limbs beneath the sheets. Elliot sits up and touches her face with his big hand. ‘Hey. It’s alright. Go to sleep.’ His voice quietens her. Reaching across, he tugs the blankets over her shoulder. Then he turns and looks directly at me. I wait while he gets up and comes out into the hall and pulls the door closed behind him. ‘I’m sorry about the piano,’ he says. ‘It’s a keyboard.’ ‘I’m sorry about the keyboard.’ ‘Did you get it in the tray?’ I think of him out there, without me. It’s hard to breathe. I feel as though someone is choking me. ‘I’m used to lifting heavy things,’ he says. Sitting down on the couch, he turns on the television, ficking through to the footy. ‘I forgot to check the mail.’ It’s a lie. ‘Get it tomorrow.’ ‘There might be something important,’ I say. ‘It won’t take long.’ He nods. Outside the air is heavy with mud and rotting leaves. Clouds mostly hide the moon. I don’t go to the mailbox. Even out here, I can’t seem to get oxygen. There’s the ute tray with the hulk of the keyboard. I won’t look at it. My skin is clammy. In the soft darkness I put my palm against the cool wall of the garage, and my fngers catch on the rough brick. The mortar is smooth. I feel each knuckle in my right hand—one, two, three, four, fve. There was this game, Knucklebones I think, everyone played it for a bit in primary school and it had these knobby pieces that the teacher said were sheep’s knuckles. One boy got frustrated with the game, and he smashed his fve by dropping a brick onto them. He carried the pieces around as souvenirs for weeks after. Little bits of shattered bone. Closing my eyes, I clench my right hand. ‘Reed?’ The screen door clatters behind me. Elliot’s grip catches my wrist and jerks me back, away from the wall. ‘Reed, what are you doing? What’s going on?’ I’m trembling all over. I don’t know what to say. He holds me, resting his back against the tray and swearing under his breath. ‘I thought you were getting the mail.’ He’s never really hugged me before. His overalls smell of concrete dust and glue and sweat. Dad smelled like that, before he smelled of beer. ‘I thought you were going to leave,’ I say. He lets out his breath. It blows loudly over my hair. The crickets in the gutter are chirping. After a moment he says, ‘All good now? The Pies were just about to have a shot at goal, and the game’s pretty tight.’ ‘All good.’ Stepping away, I rub my hands on my dress. His footsteps are light as he jogs back up the steps and into the house, leaving a block of yellow fooding across the threshold. Lingering in the night, I watch through the window as the television’s shifting screen illuminates the corners of the living room. I envy Elliot. I envy his ability to reduce his problems to the size

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of that screen, at least for a few hours. The sound of a roaring crowd flters out to me, and Elliot yells in triumph. That’ll wake Jessie up for sure. I sit down on the bottom step and wait. My back is to the light, my face in the darkness. Dad could make music on anything, even wine glasses, and he didn’t pass. He used to say it was one of those things you just have, or don’t. It’s not something you choose. So she was wrong, my teacher, when she said I was special. There are many others like me, people who just have it, who didn’t choose. I have only one family. ‘Reed?’ Elliot appears in the doorway. ‘Sorry. Jessie won’t go back to sleep. Wants you to come say goodnight frst.’ ‘Alright.’ She likes me best. I can get her to sleep no matter how upset she is. At the frst touch of my hand on hers, she relaxes. Her fst uncurls. I lay her hand in mine, fngers turned to the ceiling. Then I trace the lines of her palm, over and over, until the red marks from her nails fade and her hot skin cools. She watches me with her face half hidden in the pillow. ‘Don’t worry,’ I tell her. ‘Everything will be okay.’ Even though I have been telling her this since she was small, she still listens, and soon her eyes close. I count her breaths all the way to sixty just to be sure she is asleep before I leave. Elliot doesn’t know how I do it. But Jessie trusts me.

Bethany Leak (22) is in her fnal year of a Bachelor of Professional and Creative Writing at Deakin University.

‘It Took Me To Where I Needed To Be’ is by Gabby Loo (19), who goes by GLWORKS, Goob, Gloo. She is a Perth dweller, ultramarine lover and has a multitude of names.

VOICEWORKS • 101

• POETRY •

Sprouts

By Emily Crocker

Someone hacked the yawning heads of our rose bush last night. I hope they’re having a happy Valentine’s Day. I bought you these two potatoes— got ’em cheap even with the sprouts just starting to pierce through. The grocer must’ve missed the best bit

Emily Crocker (20) is a poet/student from Western Sydney. She now spends most of her time in Wollongong, reading things not relevant to her degree. @EmMCrocker.

VOICEWORKS • 103 BEHIND THE CURTAIN

‘What inspired your work?’

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Fiction Mikaella Clements Vertical Wine Tasting—p. 65 Eda Gunaydin A lot of writing about couples with a Meat —p. 9 large discrepancy in ages explores the generation gap via an understanding ‘Meat’ is about the women I watched of diference, but I wanted to write doing backbreaking labour, waged about two women who were, in many and unwaged, every day, growing ways, very similar. It's a love story, or up. Turkish working-class women a couple of love stories, depending on sometimes summon bootstraps out who you’re barracking for. of nowhere, and pull themselves, and others, up with them. What better Lauren Farquhar time to write this than during the renaissance of the halal snack pack? Road Kill—p. 83 ‘Road Kill’ is a story about a girl who Kelly Palmer hits a fox with her car and, against Anthrax—p. 29 her better judgement, nurses it back to health. I had the idea after nearly Whenever there was a blackout, Mum running over two foxes myself, and lit candles around the apartment and afterwards I just kept thinking, ‘What played charades with my brother and would I have done if I had?’ me. Every day her world was ending, but we didn’t understand what she Bethany Leak was trying to say. ‘Anthrax’ is about a woman whose children won’t play with These Hands—p. 97 her anymore. In ‘These Hands’, the protagonist, Reed, is caught between her love for Jonathan O’Brien music and the need to care for her —and anyway, we promised younger epileptic sister. Drawing on my own experience as the third-eldest you a story, didn’t we——p. 49 child in a family of nine, I tried to I like telling stories so much that explore these conficting desires and sometimes I interrupt people. This is a fnd a potential resolution. kinda douchey thing to do, and I know that, so writing this story was a way for me to vomit that negative behaviour onto the page. They say writing can make you a better person but I still don’t know if that’s true.

VOICEWORKS • 105 ••

Hugo Branley Poetry A More Modern Torso—p. 47 I was struck by Rilke’s notion of beauty. For him, even a broken statue Mindy Gill could be whole, fertile and pregnant Orang asing—p. 16 with meaning for life. We now orient our notion of beauty around the living, I used to travel to Malaysia with my but I wonder whether we can still see in parents every year to visit family. them what Rilke saw in that statue. Although I’ve always felt at home in Johor Bahru, with my dad’s Punjabi Chloe Mayne side of the family, I’ve always felt uncomfortably foreign with my mum’s Tectonic—p. 63 Chinese side in Klang. This poem This piece was whittled together negotiates my fractured relationship from behind a mosquito net in rural with the city, and this side of my Cambodia—listening to the roar of cultural heritage. insects through a hole in the wall, watching Twin Peaks reruns on a tiny Louise Jacques screen, dreaming of a distant lover. It’s infused with monsoonal tempests, Prix Fixe—p. 26 burnished with temple music over There’s a sensuality about menus treetops and fooding river-bellies. that I’ve always admired. In a way, they are as carefully constructed as a Gina Karlikof poem. ‘Prix Fixe’ unpacks those dainty hours spent on all those details that Gigi Hadid—p. 72 lead up to the moment you press your This poem is for anyone who’s found fork into cake, to winkle out that gem- themselves on the page of the person like mouthful. they’re seeing’s ex-girlfriend’s ex- boyfriend’s bandmate’s sister who is Holly Friedlander Liddicoat a model for a new T-shirt kickstarter. It’s Almost Time (now, this time, And you’re wondering if that shirt will here, in Leipzig)—p. 36 make you any hotter. This piece has been in the works for Jocelyn Deane a long time—as this poem, as short stories, as anything. It was birthed Apples—p. 82 listening to Aphex Twin’s ‘Aisatsana’. I wrote this while sharing an apartment Disintegration, degeneration, decay: with seven other people, the sleeping how do we make sense of it? area consisting of set-up bunkbeds. It leant to a sense of claustrophobia, not simply because of space, but because of exposure to each other’s language, taking on—yet trying to reject—each other’s inner lives. I imagined if all languages were like this: empathic processes.

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Zhi Yi Cham Cusp—p. 88 Nonfction (cont.) I had taken the 3:50 am bus from Canberra to Sydney and had caught the Bartholomew Pawlik sunrise in the mesh of my haze. Racing The Surprising Psychology Of to catch a fight home to Adelaide Food—p. 41 after my frst grad job interview got me thinking about transitioning into ‘The Surprising Psychology of Food’ is adulthood and the ‘ceremonies’ we an endeavour to share my passion for perform to mark milestones. psychology, and an attempt to show that it can be fun and intriguing, all the Emily Crocker while helping us achieve Socrates’ vision of the examined life. The synthesis of Sprouts—p. 103 psychology and literature is a melding of ‘Sprouts’ is sorry it forgot about my two great love afairs. Valentine’s Day, but really wants to celebrate every day, and was hoping Nathan Mifsud you’d want to just stay in tonight and make hash browns and snuggle. Bajitar Paradise—p. 57 ‘Sprouts’ doesn’t care much for cake The abundance of prickly pear in but can appreciate that it’s the thought Malta led me to fondly recall my that counts. nannu’s farm. Upon learning about the remarkable rise and fall of the plant in Australia, I had to share this fascinating nexus of botany, colonialism and migration.

Ellen Wengert Nonfction By The Half Dozen—p. 74 Growing up in a big family, I refereed frequent food-related altercations, Alex Grifn hung out countless loads of washing, A Brief History And Short Future and sufered through one particularly Of The Imaginary Sharehouse average birthday party. Mum always —p. 19 insisted it would at least make for good writing material, and I guess she I’m pretty obsessed with studying the was right. history of emotions, and I guess as the housing landscape in our urban areas seems to be changing pretty rapidly around us, I wanted to try and unpack why the feeling and the idea of the sharehouse has come to be so important to so many young people.

VOICEWORKS • 107 ••

Nonfction (cont.) Visual Art (cont.)

Kim Lateef Lee Lai No Wedding Cake For An Illegal Friday—p. 15 Romance—p. 91 Eric and Allie are a fctional couple that ‘No Wedding Cake for an Illegal keep cropping up throughout my work Romance’ follows Lallie, an Aboriginal in little vignettes of conversation. They Wongai woman, and Akbar, an Afghan have ended up as a sort of vessel for Muslim man, in their struggle to my recurring need to express particular legally marry during the mid-twenties things in my comics: highly domestic in Western Australia. I feel that their intimacy, subjects revolving around hidden story is important and needs food, and the gentle ins-and-outs of a to be recognised within mainstream pair of queer people of colour in love. Australian history. Danyon Burge The Cake Ahead—p. 28

This drawing is of an older woman looking up towards a giant, hallucinatory cake. This divine dessert Visual Art is what she has wanted her entire life, but still it eludes her. This work was made to illustrate the dazzling Emma Hough Hobbs metaphysical object of desire that can never be obtained. The Swimming Pool Cake—p. 1 ‘The Swimming Pool Cake’ is an honest Ania Gareeva celebration of those parents who took the time to make the holy queen of all Birthday Party Matches—p. 56 children’s birthday decoration cakes, I love illustration and cultural symbols. and the memories forever cemented in Living in Japan, I have been exposed the hearts of children lucky enough to to a myriad of new everyday objects indulge in its jelly goodness. that I now associate with my life here, and one of these is the momo (peach) Brigit Lambert matchbox. I am fascinated by its contemporary yet traditional graphics. Banana Cake—p. 8 This work shows the ritual of making a list of ingredients for a cake, seeing what’s in the pantry and what needs to be picked up from the shops. Baking is a passion of mine, which is what motivated me to make this work.

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Lucy Hunter Apples—p. 90 Comics This illustration focuses on the beauty and maternal embrace of the simple act of baking, found between mother Harry McLean and daughter. Carretera Austral (Route 7) Gabby Loo —p. 38 It Took Me To Where I Needed This is a story of a bus crash that I To Be—p. 102 was in when I was travelling in South America in 2011. I fnd the story This piece ambiguously alludes to the interesting because, despite it being an indulgence of multifarious cakes— extremely dramatic event, it didn’t have hallucinogenic or just intoxicatingly many obvious repercussions (except for delicious. It is infuenced by comics one unfortunate passenger). and collage, depicting a singular moment when the ofering a sweet Julia Trybala confection is fulflled. Slow Burn—p. 79 Anwyn Hocking The comic ‘Slow Burn’ documents 112 introspective feelings towards toxic PsychideliCake—p. relationships. It is a work about This artwork was inspired by the process and progression in fnding strange—sometimes uncomfortable— balance within one’s personal, social memories associated with cake. The and work life. time in prep you were forced to kiss your crush because the knife came out of the cake dirty. The time you stood on a cake. The single time you baked a cake. And the one time you created an artwork with the theme cake.

VOICEWORKS • 109 About Voiceworks

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VOICEWORKS • 111

You’ve lost it. Tell me what it looked like. Shaken or stirred? Sashimi-raw or well-tempered, like steel? Don't worry, we'll fnd it again. I can feel it getting on me. Cut it out. Pinch it, hit it, strike it. Now touch it. The whole system starts to shake and shudder. Steady. Try picturing the audience in their underwear, it’ll help. Someone blocks your view. She has it. Probably a Gryfndor. Could she spare you some? You call her Nellie in a voice that sounds like my grandma. It’s a test. My eyes lock on yours. Do you feel my synapses fring, crackling, fzzing like freworks? Neurotransmitters, receptors tumble from a textbook. If you’re a bundle, I’m a wreck. We run outside into the freezing night but fnd it all shot to pieces. That was our last one. Signalling. Signalling. Signalling. Do I dare ask you to dance? Your mouth opens and I yank it wider still, peering inside for the ending we lost long, long ago.

—Voiceworks #105 ‘Nerve’ (Spring 2016)

‘PsychideliCake’ is by Anwyn Elise (21), a human, artist, photographer and architecture student based in Melbourne. Voiceworks • Issue 104 ‘Cake’ • Winter 2016

Hugo Branley • Danyon Burge • Zhi Yi Cham • Mikaella Clements • Emily Crocker • Jocelyn Deane • Lauren Farquhar • Holly Friedlander Liddicoat • Ania Gareeva • Mindy Gill • Alex Grifn • Eda Gunaydin • Anwyn Hocking • Emma Hough Hobbs • Lucy Hunter • Louise Jacques • Gina Karlikof • Lee Lai • Brigit Lambert • Kim Lateef • Bethany Leak • Gabby Loo • Chloe Mayne • Harry McLean • Nathan Mifsud • Jonathan O’Brien • Kelly Palmer • Bartholomew Pawlik • Julia Trybala • Ellen Wengert