Telephone and Address Book

—This essay won The (inaugural) Local Word Prize in 2023 and can be found on the Geelong Regional Libraries Website Telephone & Address Book After my grandfather’s death, I attend a working bee to pack up the contents of the house that he and my grandmother built...

My first book is being published by Upswell

Last week, Terri-ann White, the publisher behind Upswell Publishing, announced the list of 17 books she will be publishing in 2024. I am thrilled to announce that my first book, Vessel: The Shape of Absent Bodies was included—it sits in impressive company. Here is a...

Reading, recently.

What I’ve been reading Eula Biss, ‘Time and distance overcome’ Eula Biss’s short essay on the history and impact of the telephone on America begins simply enough with the premise that it was not particularly welcomed nor deemed as necessary by many people when it was...

A year of reading

Last book mail of the year, from Upswell. It’s the last day of the year. Reading has been an endlessly healing practice for me this year in the face of complicated and difficult family circumstances. Here are the books that I have read. This doesn’t...

White lines

A whiff of mildew in the bottom of my dirty clothes basket travels me to the memory of the old out-buildings at the back of my childhood house in Wycheproof. There was a laundry and another two rooms adjoining. The rooms are distinct and yet also hazy at the edges of...

‘At Sea’

‘At Sea’ He dives. Can hold his breath a long time. Thatha has passed to him this knowledge long ago. Strange boats in the harbour, water undulating, currents colder by edges, these steel flanks    he has no words for   their size, the...

Review of Simon Tedeschi’s Fugitive

Fugitive is a rare lyrical joy. Though a glance inside its covers, with its narrow columns of fragmentary observations, broken by hand-drawn infinity symbols might frighten off a reader un-used to such conventions, it would be a loss to them to walk away without...

Review of Al Campbell’s The Keepers

Al Campbell’s The Keepers is a book about possibilities, imagination, and most profoundly, love. It opens with a scrapbook entry about the death of an autistic child who has escaped from respite care. Imminent death is a constant possibility, and Jay, the mother of...