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Writers Prize 2015 Finalist Essays Robyn Annear Nick Gadd Kate Ryan David Sornig Maria Tumarkin IN ASSOCIATION WITH melbourneprize.org A message from the Executive Director of the Melbourne Prize Trust The Writers Prize 2015 is a new award offered this year to continue the tenth anniversary celebrations of the annual Melbourne Prize. It is offered together with the Melbourne Prize for Literature 2015, Best Writing Award 2015 and the Civic Choice Award 2015, which combined, is one of the most valuable literary awards in Australia. This eBook, which has been produced with the generous support of Griffith Review, presents the top five essays in the Writers Prize, which are new works by published Victorian authors. The five have been selected by this year’s judges: Mark Rubbo OAM of Readings, Wheeler Centre Director Michael Williams, Melbourne Writers Festival CEO Lisa Dempster and writer Craig Sherborn. The Writers Prize is valued at $20,000 and is supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund, in association with the Malcolm Robertson Foundation. The five finalists received $2,000 each. Please visit www.melbourneprize.org for further information, and for the final announcement of the winners of the Melbourne Prize for Literature and Awards. To showcase the Melbourne Prize for Literature 2015, and to continue public engagement with Victoria’s abundant literary talent, the twenty finalists across all categories are exhibited at Federation Square between 9 and 23 November. 4 The public will have an opportunity to vote for the finalists in each category, including the Writers Prize, to win the $6,000 Civic Choice Award. This can be done both online at www.melbourneprize.org and in the free exhibition catalogue. Those who vote in the Civic Choice Award, supported by Readings and Hardie Grant Books, will go into the running to win an overnight stay at Sofitel Melbourne On Collins. The Melbourne Prize for Literature and Awards support Melbourne’s status as an international UNESCO City of Literature. The designation recognises the importance of literature to the city and the State, and the central role that writers have played, and continue to play, in the cultural life of our community. With the support of all our partners and patrons this year, the Melbourne Prize Trust is delighted to provide opportunities for writers to demonstrate the importance of literature in a vibrant and creative commu- nity. We are proud to have the Victorian Government as a partner through its City of Literature initiative and the support of the City of Melbourne 2015 Arts Grants Program. We would like to thank the literary sector and the many organisations, publications and websites that are immensely supportive in raising awareness of our program. The Melbourne Prize Trust, established in 2004, is a not-for-profit cultural organisation providing financial support, career development and exhibition opportunities for Victorian writers, musicians and sculptors, via the annual Melbourne Prize. Providing significant opportunities for three important cultural sectors, the annual Melbourne Prize runs in a three-year cycle, which includes the Melbourne Prize for Urban Sculpture (2014), the Melbourne Prize for Literature (2015) and the Melbourne Prize for Music (2016). We would like to thank Griffith Review for their generous support of this eBook. Simon Warrender Executive Director & Founder Melbourne Prize Trust CONTENTS 7 Places without poetry ROBYN ANNEAR 35 The unconscious of the city NICK GADD 64 Psychotherapy for normal people KATE RYAN 91 Jubilee: A hymn for Elsie Williams on Dudley Flats DAVID SORNIG 147 No skin MARIA TUMARKIN griffithreview.com ESSAY Places without poetry Robyn Annear IT IS A fact that among those people of European ancestry, one in six consid- ers coriander to taste like soap. Roughly the same percentage will tell you that jazz sounds like shit. If genomics can explain a distaste for coriander, why not for syncopation? To the jazz averse, Bennetts Lane has never been anything special, just one of 217 rights-of-way that atomise the city grid, and a dead end at that. The closure in June of its eponymous jazz club has consigned the lane to anonymity. But wait. Bennetts Lane still harbours a rarity: power pole 75843, one of the few wooden poles left in the Melbourne CBD. Another, its immediate neighbour, 85676, is encased in metal to head-height, while 75843 is bare wood, crying out for the laying on of hands. Albert Camus, when first in Paris, felt oppressed by the weight of that city’s literary and historical associations. ‘What the heart craves, at certain moments,’ he wrote, ‘is places without poetry.’1 Why, even in Melbourne the press of cultural appropriation – laneways, literature – can seem stifling to a sensitive soul. The kind of non-haunted spot craved by Camus is not far, however. An absurdist need only snuff out their Gauloises and top up their Myki: buses for Doncaster Shoppingtown (Route 201) can be hailed in Lonsdale Street, a two-minute slouch from Bennetts Lane. 8 Melbourne Writers Prize 2015 That wooden pole is a descendant, if not an actual relic, of the branchy telegraph poles that thicketed one side of every Melbourne street for long enough that ‘telegraph pole’ became the generic name for any post holding wires aloft. By the time Frank Wilmot wrote his modernist ode, ‘To a Telegraph Pole’, in the late ’20s, the poles carried mostly telephone lines and, in the CBD, even those were being routed underground. Telegraph poles, then, were painted white, the better to see and skirt them in the comparatively unlit city at night. ‘To a Telegraph Pole’ begins with the evocation of a brash and unmis- takeable Melbourne setting (‘The lanes are full of young men swallowing beer… The swelling and failing moan of the street trams’) before a shift into hardwood innuendo cues the dissolve: I saw you in your slender whiteness there; I put my hand upon your painted side; You quivered in a sudden mountain air And I was back to where your friends abide. The brown ferns sway, And your long rustling fingers of soft green Plash in the light and give the light away Perfumed and tinted to small things I’ve seen That seldom touch pure day. Frank Wilmot wrote as ‘Furnley Maurice’, a pen-name he’d created in 1905 by splicing Ferntree Gully and Beaumaris, the mountain and coastal limits of his hometown. The fern gullies of the Dandenongs and Yarra Ranges had long been a favourite resort of the Melbourne intelligentsia, not just as an antidote to city living but as shrines to the sublime. Already, more than twenty years before he communed in verse with a telegraph pole, ‘these splen- did hills’ were a part of who Wilmot was, who he’d made himself. But before he was Furnley Maurice, Frank Wilmot wrote as himself. He sent his first poem to the Bulletin when he was eleven. It was rejected, as was his every submission to that journal until he donned his pseudonym. Furnley Maurice owed his advent to the Bulletin’s implacable rejections. That Robyn ANNEAR: Places without poetry 9 journal’s editor, AG Stephens, had a hate on Wilmot for giving a book of his a bad review, back when Wilmot was practically a child. Wilmot was sixteen when his first published poem appeared in Tocsin, a weekly leftist paper. That same year, 1897, he was a regular contributor to the liter- ary journal Lux, of which his elder sister, Ada, was joint editor; a year later, the pair issued a journal of their own, the short-lived Iago. When he turned twenty, Wilmot bought a treadle printing press from a friend, for the sum of £1, on which he produced the Microbe out of a shed in his East Brunswick backyard. It ran for eight issues and its title page read: The Microbe: A Journalette. Which is Issued for Amusement and Sold for Threepence. Contributions are solicited on all literary and interesting subjects. There is no danger of any contributor being paid. Wilmot’s own Microbe Press published his first book of poems, Some Verses, in 1903. Among the faults enumerated by an anonymous reviewer in the Melbourne Argus were ‘crudeness’, ‘puerility’, ‘halting rhythms’ and ‘grotesque strivings after originality’. A stanza from the poem ‘Annunciation’ puts a match to a chain of paper dolls and sets them dancing as they burn: A girl has glanced and a girl has smiled, And a girl has spoken low; And dreams are rioting, and wild The sluggard moments grow. As much as to say: Behold! the transformative power of a furtive erection. The Argus critic singled out the refrain of ‘Annunciation’ (‘Something is coming over me’) as capturing ‘that curious naiveté which is [Wilmot’s] strong point’, adding: Had we dictatorial powers, we should condemn Mr Wilmot to five years of silence, in which to learn the proper handling of his tools. For this is a work of distinct promise; the author has a metrical inventiveness…and we think he has ideas. 10 Melbourne Writers Prize 2015 True enough, Wilmot held his own, idea-wise, in the company of thinkers and radicals like Bernard O’Dowd, Vance and Nettie Palmer, Robert Croll and Louis Esson. When the war came, he would stand against conscription and vociferate in verse, ‘How can we hate forever, having proved / All men are bright and brave and somewhere loved?’ He was fined for refusing, as an anti-vaccinationist, to submit his children to the needle. Most often though, and certainly in public, Wilmot, when asked to share his views, would reply with a self-deprecating chuckle. (Everyone remarked on that chuckle, taking it as a sign of insightfulness and humility.

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