There are two op shops in Gilgan. They sell one black dress.

I wear Chloe’s pink gumboots when shovelling wombat shit at Daryl Cunningham’s place. It’s cube-shaped, their shit. Stops it rolling away. They use it to communicate with other wombats, mark their territory.

Dad said Paradise was named after some old tourist who wandered in on one of the only sunny days of the year and couldn’t believe the sight.

In the quarter-hour before midnight, smoke is all that separates us. It carpets the ceiling, stitches together to form a woolly bridge where we meet as equals. Mouth to mouth, coin to pocket.

The ice sculptor had long black hair and an aristocratic profile and his name was Enrico. He sat with his legs crossed, resting his arm over my sister’s arm, as though his was very delicate and needed to use hers for a bed.

It was never fully dark in their room, but this morning it was almost bright. Rob checked his phone.

Ghosts come to roost in our new home. Aunts and uncles, yiyis and kaufus, a medley of half-remembered faces and ancestors I’ve never seen. They flock on the balcony and screech against the glass doors. They crawl through the floorboards like cockroaches and root through the trash, looking for things to eat.

The OH&S officer’s name is Lucy, though she looks like a Karyn to me. This is the sort of epiphany I have after an hour of listening to her tell us, over and again, that knowing your fire exits will save your life. We’re all sitting in Sunshine bookstore’s staffroom, where Clare, the sometimes-manager, has set up a whiteboard and a bunch of chairs; she’s in her mid-twenties, just a few years older than me, and I have this funny feeling she wants to ask Lucy, where are the fire exits, exactly?

I wake this morning with Andy Gibb’s “Thicker than Water” playing a personal broadcast in my head. Fifty-odd years since I last heard the damn thing, and maybe I only ever heard it a couple of times back then anyway, and yet it rings clear and distinguished as a pulsar’s hammering — every note, every corny line. I never even liked the Gibb brothers.

One hot and dusty summer day, while strolling to a kite shop, Ali requested me to write a letter for him, addressed to Nelofer — the narrow-nosed shy girl with dusky eyes, whose family had recently moved a few doors down from Ali’s, in the fatigued neighbourhood of Mariabad by the foot of the mountain, in Quetta city.

Leo was alone. He had always wanted to be alone and now he was. No pestering acquaint- ances, no nagging relatives, no poky neighbors, no boss. Maybe just a little bit more alone than he wanted to be (he was twelve months an orphan, and his girl friend had just married someone else), but what […]

Sometimes, when I wake, I cannot stand the thought of living off the fragile fruits of our labour — all the things that wither and die in the palms of our hands and at the bottom of our stomachs.

When Jens found Lucy Teller squatting in the dandelions, he had been planning to tell her he was her father.

I am sitting on a deckchair. It is so humid even the air feels moist on your skin. It doesn’t take long before the waves become heavier and the ocean is howling. I am on a cruise to K’gari island. I am not a swimmer. I fear deep water.

“You can take this off now,” Tegan says, leaning over and tugging at Blue’s bow tie. She’s sitting cross-legged and she falls against him, one knee flipping up beneath her purple taffeta dress. “It’s so hot still, how can you even breathe.”

The Rotuman culture is rich in community, land, the spiritual and the physical. Various factors from colonialism to Christianity have left generational legacies that clash with Indigenous knowledges. Often such clashes leave cultural practices, like that of the Rotuman tattoo, on peripheries of a history. In between survival in a Western-modern world and the need […]