‘The doll’ – Allanah Hunt

‘The doll’ is about the history one object can hold and a young child’s struggle to hold on to his family through the memories they’ve left behind, while suffering one traumatic loss after another.

Allanah Hunt is a Barkindji woman finishing her Creative Writing PhD at Anglia Ruskin University. She is an Editor Intern through the black&write! program. She is a winner of Griffith Review’s Novella Project VII, received first place in the 2019 Nakata Brophy Prize and won the 2018 Boundless mentorship.

This story may be read as an allegory for the struggle to sustain dignity and personal integrity in the face of hostile forces: nature and powerful corporations that sometimes work together to hammer the human spirit to their will.

Mike Scallan teaches secondary school English and Modern History in North Perth. His work has appeared in Open: Journal of Arts & Letters, thebezine and New Philosopher. He dabbles in painting & drawing, sculpture, wood carving, cultivating Bonsai and gardening. To sustain optimism he takes pleasure in coffee, smoking a pipe and the odd cigar.

‘Verdict on a winter afternoon’ is a fictionalised account of the aftermath of the conviction of a doctor in rural India, whose work focused on supporting communities displaced by mining and ravaged by insurgency and counter-insurgency operations, for the crime of ‘sedition’.

Dr Arjun Rajkhowa works in tertiary education in Melbourne. His research interests include public health; media, culture and society; human rights; and policy. He has volunteered in the community sector in Melbourne for several years. He can be contacted on Twitter at @ArjunRajkhowa.

In a brief phone conversation, a woman seeking a lifeline for her troubled child fills the pauses with vengeful fantasies as reality and despair hit home.

Julie Maclean’s poetry, short fiction and reviews have appeared in The Age, The Best Australian Poetry (UQP), Cordite Review, Island, Overland, Poetry (Chicago) and Southerly, among others. Her full collection When I saw Jimi was shortlisted for the Crashaw Prize (Salt) and won the Geoff Stevens Poetry Prize, UK. She lives on the Surf Coast, Victoria. juliemacleanwriter.com

A company psychologist explains the alarming business model of a company whose products are all fatal.

Andrew Lindsay has published two novels, The Breadmaker’s Carnival and The Slapping Man. He made the artists’ book Difficult Majesty with Anthony Pelchen, and wrote and performed Mermaids In The Well And The Devil’s On My Shoulder with Kavisha Mazzella. Andrew teaches physical theatre at AFTT in Sydney, and plays tenor saxophone with Blind Man Driving. He has been a recipient of the Peter Blazey Fellowship, and winner of the Extempore National Jazz Writing Competition.

In her new job, Eve has lots of choices to make, and today things might not go to plan.

Laura Elvery is the author of Trick of the Light (UQP, 2018) and the forthcoming short fiction collection, Ordinary Matter (2020). Laura is a proud union member. She lives in Brisbane.

An after-school special for the kids who cut class and stole lipstick.

Kathy Pham is a Vietnamese-Canadian writer from Calgary, Alberta. She is currently living and narrativising in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Her fiction has been published in fresh.ink, Ricepaper Magazine, and Cagibi. You can find her at kathypham.ca.

Charon, ferryman of the dead, confronts changes in the Underworld after Elon Musk arrives and develops a bizarre friendship with Hades.

Scott Limbrick is a writer and comedian based in Melbourne. He recently completed a Master of Screenwriting at the VCA and wrote and performed Waiting for Combo with Caitlyn Staples in the Melbourne Fringe Festival. His work has appeared in Comedy Central UK, Junkee, Vice, Meanjin, Voiceworks, MTV, The New Statesman and others.

‘Monopoly’ – Ella Jeffery

‘Monopoly’ examines housing insecurity, and asks how we might find, make or keep a sense of home while contending with unpredictable landlords, shoddy rental properties, an increasingly unstable and impenetrable housing market, and a global climate on the cusp of evicting us all.

Ella Jeffery’s first collection of poems, Dead Bolt, won the Puncher & Wattmann Prize for a First Book of Poetry in 2019 and will be published in 2020. Her work has appeared in Meanjin, Southerly, Island, Griffith Review and Best Australian Poems, among others. Find her online at ellajeffery.com or @JefferyElla

To dissolve the ego one must coagulate the self.

Guillermo R Bátiz is Mexican composer, artist and translator living in Sydney, Australia. He has played multiple international avant-garde festivals such as MUTEK, Plataforma and Interface, alongside musicians like Murcof, Sigur Rós, Telefon Tel Aviv, Manrico Montero and Justice. His project, ‘Plant Symphony’, composed using the bio-emissions of plants has been exhibited widely. Guillermo writes recurrently as part of his creative process. After many years trying to break into his field in Australia, he now works as a chef.

‘Permanent Resident’ was written in August 2019 while visiting my family during the (then) largest protest in the Hong Kong’s history, in an effort to document some of the anxieties, vulnerabilities and personal stories of the Hong Kong protests, as a Hong Kong Permanent Resident.

Siobhan Hodge has a PhD in English literature. She won the 2017 Kalang Eco-Poetry Award and 2015 Patricia Hackett Award. She has had poetry published in a range of places, including Westerly, Southerly, Cordite and Overland. Her chapbook, Justice for Romeo, is available through Cordite Books.

Navigating the affects of the diaspora in Australia and the experience of not belonging anywhere, including the prescribed heritage homeland.

Bella Singal sells her labour in architecture, while also writing, designing and illustrating for other publications including a zine she co-founded, Vomitus Dialogus.

The poem ‘Adeni tea time-warps my father’ is not only about a long-reigning tea recipe, but about a lost culture, what it means to be a father, and how swiftly one can fall backwards into old memories.

Threa Almontaser is a Yemeni-American writer, translator, and multimedia artist from New York City. She is a MFA graduate from North Carolina State University and the recipient of scholarships from the Tin House Writers’ Workshop, The Kerouac House in Orlando, among others. Nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best New Poets, her work is published in or forthcoming from Penguin Random House, The Offing, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. Thea is currently teaching English to immigrants and refugees and working on several projects, including a debut poetry collection and her first novel. For more, please visit threawrites.com.

When writing ‘Everything will be okay for your landlord’, I was thinking a lot about working-class resilience and how the pervasiveness of so-called capitalist realism informs the pulverisation of selfhood, resignation, and obedience among workers and, ultimately, a forced individualism – submission without the act of submission.

Dan Hogan is a primary school teacher and writer from San Remo. They also run DIY literary organisation Subbed In.

‘Striking (Green &) Gold’ forms part of a broader investigation into Australian postcodes, with a focus on the alternative or obscured national narratives they may contain; this poem uses erasure to subvert and reimagine a variety of source material.

Dave Drayton was an amateur banjo player, founding member of the Atterton Academy, Kanganoulipian, and the author of E, UIO, A: a feghoot (Container), A pet per ably-faced kid (Stale Objects dePress), P(oe)Ms (Rabbit), Haiturograms (Stale Objects dePress) and Poetic Pentagons (Spacecraft Press).

‘All the way with O’Shea’ & ‘The Revengers’ – Adam Adelpour

‘All the way with O’Shea’ commemorates the 1969 Clarrie O’Shea strike that defied and defeated the ‘penal powers’ – anti-union laws used to prevent strikes.

‘The revengers’ is about a team of superheroes discovering that workers can fight for themselves.

Adam Adelpour is a cartoonist, artist, activist and member of Solidarity. He has a Masters of Fine Arts from Sydney College of the Arts and lives and works in Sydney.

Bee-ing united works.

Elky Martin is an animator, cartoonist and mixed-media artist based in Melbourne. Find online at elkymartin.com and Instagram @elkymartin.

Inspired by a combination of recent Rural Fire Service training and lacklustre federal government policies.

Paul Huntingford was born 1963, Sydney. Worked as a sound/picture editor in Australian Film/TV industry since 1981 till present. Came first in art every year at school. Sporadic social commentary cartoon efforts since the age of 14. More recent video animations for YouTube channel Fuxtel. Under-published and living with partner in Mongarlowe, NSW.

This piece explores the imbalance of power, the invisibility of workers who can be treated unfairly, and the courage required to act and ‘turn out the lights’ if justice is to prevail.

Fiona Lynch’s poetry is published in Ireland and Australia. She has recently painted watercolours to accompany her poems. Fiona writes magical realism and loves making up stories with her grandchildren. She is interested in the Fair Australia Prize because her professional life has been characterised by a commitment to social justice.

‘The X that means both death and hope’ – Ariadne Starling

This essay is woven from observations at three Melbourne protests for refugees, unions, and climate action, attending to their common thread: the urgency of death powering the beacon of hope.

Ariadne Starling is an award-winning writer, editor, and critic from Melbourne working in literary essays, sex writing, and queer literature, currently completing a Literature PhD. She has published in Macquarie Matrix, Colloquy, Transcultural Studies, and Cordite. Her writing is at AriadneStarling.com and she tweets at @AriadneStarling.

‘Sanity Sleuth’ depicts one woman’s struggle to unravel the mystery of her mother’s mental health, against a background of poverty and petulance.

Rebecca Douglas is an award-winning Adelaide-based writer whose work has been published by The Sydney Morning Herald, Overland, Verandah journal, Tincture, Visible Ink, The Big Issue, ABC The Drum and various other lovely places.

This essay experiments with the profound ways that graffiti ‘poetically’ tests how we read (and respond to) colonial violence in Australia’s youth prison systems.

Adelle Sefton-Rowston lectures at Charles Darwin University and specialises in the essay form to analyse literature and culture. She teaches creative writing to women in Darwin Correctional Centre and is president of the NT Writers’ Centre. Adelle is one of the founding editors of new NT literary journal Borderlands Magazine, and publishes widely across various genres. She lives on Larrakia country.

‘Reasonable adjustments’ examines the vague phrase ‘reasonable adjustments’ in the Disability Discrimination Act 1992, and how it has become a tool used to discriminate against disabled people seeking employment.

Fiona Murphy is a Deaf poet and essayist. Her work has been appeared in Griffith Review, the Big Issue and Kill Your Darlings, among others. She’s currently working on a collection of essays about Deafness.

This essay, reflecting on lessons of the climate movement in Australia, takes a big-picture, optimistic approach to the work we need to do for justice in face of the immediate climate crisis.

Amy Thomas is teacher, writer and academic. Amy’s co-authored study of media responses to Aboriginal initiatives for self-determination, ‘Does the media fail Aboriginal political aspirations? 45 years of news media reporting of key political moments’, is out in 2020 with Aboriginal Studies Press. Amy has been the recipient of an NT Literary Award, a UTS Vice-Chancellor’s teaching award, and the 2018 UTS Shopfront Community Fellowship.

With home ownership being a distant fantasy for most Australians and the rental market growing ever more demoralising and gruelling, this essay takes a look at graveyards, both as a potential housing solution and as a curt reminder that money doesn’t just divide us in life.

Elizabeth Flux is a writer and editor based in Melbourne, Australia. Her fiction and nonfiction work has been widely published. She was a judge for the 2019 Award for an Unpublished Manuscript for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards and is a past recipient of a Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellowship.

A profile of Gay Hawksworth, the quietly determined woman who co-founded what is now Queensland’s biggest union, the Queensland Nurses and Midwives Union, and who, in 2002, led the largest nursing strike in Queensland’s history.

Chris Brophy is a librarian, researcher and writer who lives and works on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland. She has a Graduate Diploma of Creative Media (Creative Writing) from RMIT University in Melbourne and is a current member of The Services Union.

In ‘Retail therapist’, I reflect on the pleasures and indignities of customer service, the idea of the shopgirl in literature and life, and what it means to be defined by a job in a world of casualised work.

Freya Howarth is a bookseller, editor and writer. She works at the digital magazine Aeon and her book reviews have been published by Kill Your Darlings. She studied philosophy and human ecology and is interested in literature, translation and the intersection between science and the arts.

Navigating the affects of the diaspora in Australia and the experience of not belonging anywhere, including the prescribed heritage homeland.

Bella Singal sells her labour in architecture, while also writing, designing and illustrating for other publications including a zine she co-founded, Vomitus Dialogus.

Neoliberalism, the subsequent dismantling of unions, and the global domination of the corporates, has given rise to many counter-movements of which the ‘Sans-Dents’ is only one but indicative that the battle lines are now clearly drawn; the prose poem VIVE LA SANS- DENTS is my response to this phenomenon.

Stephen Oliver is an Australasian poet and author of 19 volumes of poetry. Prose and poems published regularly in Antipodes: A Global Journal of Australian/New Zealand Literature. Poems translated into German, Spanish, Chinese, and Russian. His latest poetry collection is titled LUXEMBOURG (Greywacke Press, Canberra, 2018).

‘Posted’ explores the erosion of social contracts as a result of the growth of online commerce and the gig-economy.

Shivaji Das is the author of three travelogues and photography books. He is the founder of Global Migrant Festival and Migrant and Refugee Poetry Contests and is the Managing Director – APAC for Frost & Sullivan, a research and consulting company. Shivaji was born in India but is currently residing in Singapore.

An isolated woman struggles to find her place within a society that doesn’t value her feminine superpower.

Shahnoor Nina Gregory a mix of Irish, Polish and Russian, was born in Wales to war photographer parents. She studied and worked in the arts in the UK and Poland before moving to Australia setting up a hula hoop business and marketing agency. Shahnoor is currently raising young children and writing novels.

An after-school special for the kids who cut class and stole lipstick.

Kathy Pham is a Vietnamese-Canadian writer from Calgary, Alberta. She is currently living and narrativising in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Her fiction has been published in fresh.ink, Ricepaper Magazine, and Cagibi. You can find her at kathypham.ca.

A group of immigrant labourers find strength in themselves and their fellow workers to confront their crooked bosses with the support of a union.

Trained as a scientist, graduated as a mathematician, but a full-time professional entertainer most of her adult life, Cora Tate’s repeated attempts to escape the entertainment industry brought work as a librarian, physics teacher, syndicated newspaper columnist and city planner. Cora writes and struggles to learn dzongkha in Bhutan and Queensland.

‘Verdict on a winter afternoon’ is a fictionalised account of the aftermath of the conviction of a doctor in rural India, whose work focused on supporting communities displaced by mining and ravaged by insurgency and counter-insurgency operations, for the crime of ‘sedition’.

Dr Arjun Rajkhowa works in tertiary education in Melbourne. His research interests include public health; media, culture and society; human rights; and policy. He has volunteered in the community sector in Melbourne for several years. He can be contacted on Twitter at @ArjunRajkhowa.

‘Little Matchstick’ – Sarah Pattinson (fiction)

‘Little Matchstick’ is about a girl who is a bit different and isn’t wanted by her family, so jumps at the chance to join another family instead.

Sarah Pattinson is a Year 7 student at Presbyterian Ladies’ College, Sydney. She enjoys reading and writing stories.

‘The Gaia Project’ is about a workers’ strike in the middle of nowhere, and the nobility of resistance against an all-powerful enemy.

Evan Meneses is 17 and goes to Adelaide High. In his spare time, he does a lot of activism (for example, the September 20 strike in Adelaide this year). He’s currently trudging his way through his first novel, and some of his hobbies include stand-up comedy and acting. He’s been writing since he was seven.

A short recounting of the 1913 New Zealand harbour strikes juxtaposed with my personal experiences of striking more than a century afterward.

Joseph Tiso is an 18-year-old student working in Wellington who is very interested in history and different forms of media entertainment, particularly animation. He hopes to combine the two after becoming qualified to do so. His favourite colour is red (preferably combined with black).

‘Courier smalltalk’ – Harry Reid (poetry)

This is a poem about working just a little bit harder than an out-of-office autoreply.

Harry Reid is a poet from Melbourne. They are a co-director of sick leave, and their work can be found in Overland, The Lifted Brow, Cordite Poetry Review and elsewhere.

‘Market Research Politics’ uses specific anecdotes of market research fieldwork (e.g., facilities checks, mystery shopping) to explore the isolating social and racial dilemmas fieldworkers-of-colour face.

Frances An is a Vietnamese-Cantonese-Australian writer who graduated from the Bachelor of Psychology (Honours). She completed an empirical research project on moral self-perception.

Frustrated with energy policy and inaction on the climate crisis, this piece reflects on the institutions holding us back from caring, regenerative futures.

Alana West is a PhD candidate with the UTS Climate Justice Research Centre. Growing up in the Hunter Valley & active in the climate movement for the past decade, she is slightly obsessed with energy and probably needs to think about something else. Twitter: @energyyells

In appreciating the prominence and unfolding dynamism of the Student Strikes for Climate Action*, this essay raises some of the challenges in supporting political action for our high school students, looking towards possibilities for more inclusive, creative and just frameworks of understanding.

Moya Richardson is a secondary school teacher, working and living on Wurundjeri Land.

‘Verdict on a winter afternoon’ is a fictionalised account of the aftermath of the conviction of a doctor in rural India, whose work focused on supporting communities displaced by mining and ravaged by insurgency and counter-insurgency operations, for the crime of ‘sedition’.

Dr Arjun Rajkhowa works in tertiary education in Melbourne. His research interests include public health; media, culture and society; human rights; and policy. He has volunteered in the community sector in Melbourne for several years. He can be contacted on Twitter at @ArjunRajkhowa.

‘Freelancers of the World Unite’ is a call to action to workers in the modern digital economy, which asks: how do we advocate for our rights when we’re all our own boss?

Mike Greaney is an animator, filmmaker and writer based in Melbourne. In 2019 he won a Green Room award for his AV design on the theatre production Blackie Blackie Brown. He likes wizards and socialism.

Tia Kass is a Walkley-shortlisted illustrator and street artist. His work has been published in SBS, Right Now, and Overland. @tia_kass

‘My foreign speech’ – Johan Rivas (poetry)

Ordinaries words in the middle of a workday.

Johan Rivas was born in Caracas, Venezuela 1977. Living in Bendigo, Australia since 2015. Community Services Worker, poet, amateur photographer. Apprentice father and social person. Experiences as teacher, unionists, politician, social activist and humans rights advocate. Being a ‘nerd’ is his favourite hobbies.

Bee-ing united works.

Elky Martin is an animator, cartoonist and mixed-media artist based in Melbourne. Find online at elkymartin.com and Instagram @elkymartin.

Tia Kass is a Walkley-shortlisted illustrator and street artist. His work has been published in SBS, Right Now, and Overland. @tia_kass

‘Reasonable adjustments’ – Fiona Murphy

‘Reasonable adjustments’ examines the vague phrase ‘reasonable adjustments’ in the Disability Discrimination Act 1992, and how it has become a tool used to discriminate against disabled people seeking employment.

Fiona Murphy is a Deaf poet and essayist. Her work has been appeared in Griffith Review, the Big Issue and Kill Your Darlings, among others. She’s currently working on a collection of essays about Deafness.

‘Sanity Sleuth’ depicts one woman’s struggle to unravel the mystery of her mother’s mental health, against a background of poverty and petulance.

Rebecca Douglas is an award-winning Adelaide-based writer whose work has been published by The Sydney Morning Herald, Overland, Verandah journal, Tincture, Visible Ink, The Big Issue, ABC The Drum and various other lovely places.

‘Newcastle’ – Caitlin Doyle-Markwick (fiction)

1979. Love amongst the riot.

Caitlin Doyle-Markwick is an activist, writer and performer from Sydney, by way of Newcastle. Her writing has appeared in publications like Overland, Antipodes, Mascara Literary Review and Otoliths. She was a 2018-19 resident playwright at the Old 505 Theatre, where her latest play, As She Lay, will premier in 2020. Caitlin is a member of Solidarity and the Refugee Action Coalition.

‘Skeleton staff’ was prompted by recently seeing the tough working conditions of the nurses at my local hospital and also reading about the great 1986 nurses’ strike in Victoria.

Miroslav Sandev is a poet working in Sydney. His poems have appeared in a range of publications including Meanjin, Cordite, Rabbit, Southerly, Otoliths, Westerly, Snorkel, Red Room Poetry and others. His work was also included in the anthology Stars Like Sand: Australian Speculative Poetry. He’s currently working on his first full-length collection.

This essay, reflecting on lessons of the climate movement in Australia, takes a big-picture, optimistic approach to the work we need to do for justice in face of the immediate climate crisis.

Amy Thomas is teacher, writer and academic. Amy’s co-authored study of media responses to Aboriginal initiatives for self-determination, ‘Does the media fail Aboriginal political aspirations? 45 years of news media reporting of key political moments’, is out in 2020 with Aboriginal Studies Press. Amy has been the recipient of an NT Literary Award, a UTS Vice-Chancellor’s teaching award, and the 2018 UTS Shopfront Community Fellowship.

The idea for this piece came about as I was considering the different meanings of the word ‘strike’ and what visual metaphors could be effective in illustrating the power of collective action.

Can Yalcinkaya is a Turkish-Australian academic, cartoonist and musician. His research and comics mainly focus on questions relating to migration, class, and gender, through analyses of pop culture texts. He also plays the drums in Hazeen, an anti-racist Muslim death metal band.