Voiceworks New fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Comics & Visual Art from Young Australians
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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.