CONTRIBUTORS

Margaret Bradstock

Margaret Bradstock has eight published collections of poetry, including The Pomelo Tree (winner of the Wesley Michel Wright Prize) and Barnacle Rock (winner of the Woollahra Festival Award, 2014). Editor of Antipodes (2011) and Caring for Country (2017), Margaret won the Banjo Paterson Poetry Award in 2014, 2015 and 2017. Her latest collection, from Puncher & Wattmann, is Brief Garden (2019).

Stillness

“There is no road, the road is made by walking.” -Antonio Machado. There is always a war somewhere, a party going on, or a fireworks display elsewhere in the cosmos, the strange busyness of humanity, jackhammering away at silence. In …

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Winter Crow

(for J.C) Lockdown, an empty beach pockmarked with yesterday’s footprints, now sculpted by morning tides coarse sand, the coldest of grain. Driftwood lingers, and a solitary crow eying the movement of waves, undeterred by silence, isolation transience, its own chill …

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Waiting for the Byron Train

Waiting on the southbound platform in still humid air, for the long journey home, half-listening to buskers, bands blasting out from a nearby pub, you keep a close eye on checked-in luggage, wheeled out in a trolley, now unattended the …

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Margaret Bradstock Reviews Phyllis Perlstone’s The Bruise of Knowing

The Bruise of Knowing is Phyllis Perlstone’s third collection of poetry from Puncher & Wattmann, and arguably her best to date. It tells the story of Sir John Monash, highlighting themes of ambition, power and warfare.

Posted in BOOK REVIEWS | Tagged ,

The Navigators

There are many seas, organ-pipe rocks. Sometimes we drift for months, and wake to the dog-watch of night, on our lips the bitter taste of land. Our anchored ship perched on the ocean’s skin, we hear the hull’s creak, keening …

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Sun Tong Lee and Company, Gulgong, 1872

A Chinaman with strange and delicious sweets that melted in our mouths, and rum toys and Chinese dolls for the children. − Henry Lawson, Christmas in the Goldfields Sun Tong Lee, Storekeeper and Importer has large shipments to arrive from …

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Skywatchers

As we climb the dim-lit verges of Observatory Hill, once Windmill Hill bicycle lamps whirl past like fireflies, orbiting in the dark city kids kick-boxing or exercising in green space, lights blinking on the Bridge. We set up telescopes. The …

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Broken Ocean

“What was missing was the cries of seabirds that surrounded the boat on previous voyages …” – Ivan Macfadyen, yachtsman. In the past we’d seen birds following the boat resting on our mast like sentinels or wheeling in the distance …

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