Rosewood Green Award – Open Age Local Poets
Easter at the Coast by David Gagen (First Prize)
We begin the day
Huddled along the shore
Waiting for the Resurrection.
Bodies bruised
We plunge through Perigean waves
Wet with suffering
From the ocean’s pull.
Air tight in veins
We drown for a moment
A bug in a jar,
A frog in formaldehyde,
Before the deepest breath,
Again,
And we rise to the surface
The sun in our eyes
Wild with wonder.
Later,
A mountain’s green
Hovers high over Maleny
Its shadow inches
Across the town,
People verandahed
In the hinterland
Of quiet years.
We will sleep tonight
Under Eumundi stars
And dream a storm,
We’ll touch the wound,
See the empty cave,
And then tomorrow
The traffic.
Where is Maggie Thatcher? by Gill Jewell (Second Prize)
Where is Maggie Thatcher?
Too stretched, this conversation,
spanning childhood till now.
Patterns of treachery and trajectory
ingrained in each sentence and sentiment.
She shuffles with a Zimmer frame,
annoyed that, unlike flesh and blood,
it refuses to bend to her iron will
doing only what it was meant to;
assist her.
The skeleton wheels her slowly,
deliberately to a destination somewhere
concealed or misplaced in delivery.
Through relentless journeying its
all but forgotten.
Where are the minutes of the meetings?
She had governed with such precision.
Why is the tea tray empty of scones ?
The queen will be disappointed
as will her ministers.
Confounded showering, she did not order!
Nor the impudent pup
clawing at her dressing gown,
now lathering her leathery back.
Don’t they know!
She will be late for the first sitting
of the house of commons
while strapped to this bed waiting
for a lunch she didn’t want.
God, the Russians were kinder.
No one to converse with,
No Polly or unionist: most gone in any case.
But remembered, still in the recesses
of a once agile mind that rendered
Scargil to a dribbling geriatric.
She giggles her own private joke ….
Those miners thought they’d stop my nation!
In their dreams! She turns in her sleep.
Their bleeding protests moved her, not.
Jobs crushed by her pen.
And where is mummy, will father come latter?
She is next to perform, will she
curtsey to no one; an empty hall where
no one is home.
Is that you my darling, my Dennis?
She knows at least this for certain.
that the dust bins have been taken out.
He knows what to do,
that she can’t.
She fumbles with a buzzer, cries out in pain,
remembering their song.
A voice sings clearly and sweetly.
Sweet melody remembered
but not the words.
How now could pills be forced into this mouth,
jaw clenched tight.
If only such authoritative tones could still
render the approaching medic helpless
She would bellow
“NO!”
But all that is coughed up are fragments
of the nursery long gone
“How Now Brown Cow”
When Gods Rules the Waves by David Gagen (Third Prize)
The grainy film captures the moment.
He disappears from view
As the wave arcs over him,
Inside its belly he waits.
Time stands still, and it is 1974 again.
Before Kelly & Occhie, Joel & Mick,
He was there,
Emerging from the barrel,
Knees bent, body low,
His right hand points at the wall,
Fingers flick the foam,
And he is free.
The speed and the cut-back,
Savage and deep,
A spear through the wave,
He pushes against the sea,
Always at Kirra,
And Burleigh,
And Bells.
The camera captures him so young,
The aviator glasses shutting out
The terrestrial world,
Always on the verge of something big,
Of some immense victory,
Before the Fall.
He was a ghost,
Appearing suddenly with the swell,
His language was the sea and the ocean’s flow,
His poem, the ride across the face,
A victory over the giant undertow.
Those waves would always roll in
For him.
And then like a phantom
He was gone.
The psychedelic haze,
Stole him from the sea.
He tried to outrun them all,
The chase on land,
so much harder
Than the tidal surge.
They put sparks in his head,
Sent him home for life after surfing.
He was lost from time,
These last years,
And as if to mock us all
The sand blocks up the beach,
And stops the waves,
The famous Kirra break
No more.
Now he is MP, the legend,
But as the film flickers to an end,
I see him stride from the ocean,
Reborn,
He runs through the throng,
A final victory over the waves,
And the restless sand,
There is a smile on his face, so perfect,
A time when Gods ruled the waves,
Always at Kirra,
And Burleigh,
And Bells.
Behind a Perspex Screen by Leonie Parker (Highly Commended)
They built a screen of perspex in their gallery of art,
a place where such as I can still belong.
A monument to yesterday, though I still have a part
to play, much like an old familiar song.
I’m dirty, dark and dusty with a legacy of death.
Conversely I’m the power of the light.
A fossil of Gondwanaland, a nation’s first drawn breath,
worshipped as the victor of the night.
My sycophants surround me and I give them leave to play,
my bounty is the riches they desire.
I fill their greedy coffers but there’ll be a price to pay,
environmental debt to fuel my fire.
I gave birth to a city and I served that city well,
though some will only see the scars I leave.
I helped her grow and prosper, but a glimpse of purest hell
saw my infant city learn to grieve.
I watched her heal and strengthen, now a jewel in the crown,
respected by her peers in the main,
becoming quite the lady, shaking off her dusty gown.
My influence on her begins to wane.
My days may soon be numbered; I can feel the winds of change.
My sycophants are fewer than before.
The sun and wind negotiate an energy exchange,
cleaner than the dusty days of yore.
But I have earned my place here deep within my city’s heart,
though place where most will pass me by, unseen.
A diamond in the rough befits a gallery of art
… a wall of coal behind a perspex screen.
War on Terror by Brett Dionysius (Highly Commended)
They have lived through America’s longest war.
We analyse Wilfred Owen. Obscene as cancer they
mumble checking Facebook. Aleppo is on their
feed, a dead mother sitting upright holding her
dead baby next to her dead toddler: all dusted in
concrete flour. Grey ash faces as if in mourning.
They do not cry at the end of Gallipoli anymore.
They do not understand that rape is a war crime.
Teaching English is mostly just teaching history.
The Vietnam War is as abstract as disease before
vaccinations. They lack context like some bones
lack calcium. They form opinions haphazardly.
Acne breaks out like a bitter conflict over oil.
The Muslim students pray quietly out of sight.
2017 Overall Winner & recipient of the Babies of Walloon bronze statuette
Norman Foote Among the Pumpkins by Vanessa Page (Overall Winner)
She tears each day along careful perforations, to the anniversary of his death.
Today, it is April. The air is muddied with heat, and from her kitchen
window, Glebe Road has slowed to a Saturday afternoon trickle.
She’s cleaving a knife through a Queensland blue’s rippled form
until it aches open: the buttery-gold flesh tumbling into cubes for the pot.
Smoothed out on the bench before her, the map of sequences that carry her on.
Thirteen years ago, Norman Foote crouched in the fields at Peak Crossing,
among the pumpkins: giant orbs dropped as if by something other-worldly,
the lean, mottled bodies of the working dogs, weaving around him.
Captured in a candid moment, before the distant peaks of the Teviot Ranges,
on the paddock-flat, in the piercing gaze of summer, weeks before sailing out.
At Newtown, the boiling water steams, lifts the photograph’s sellotaped edge.
She often pictures him, between fitful wake and sleep, looking out at the
distant tips of the pyramids from Heliopolis. Those great, other-worldly wonders,
chevrons cut into the sky – the sands lit by glow, as golden as Rockdale Farm fields
the dusk slowly advancing: bringing its cummerbund of delicate colours,
as around him, soldiers shuttle between tents with industry.
The sounds of him coughing and hacking, rising steeply into the night.
At home, streets and days stretch on.
Timber and tin blocks fade out to scrub. A herd of cows lumber slowly to the west.
His mother’s pot bubbles over again on the hob.
Chairperson’s School Award
by Springfield Central State High School, Springfield Central, QLD (Winning School)
Picture Ipswich Theme Awards
Norman Foote Among the Pumpkins by Vanessa Page (First Prize)
She tears each day along careful perforations, to the anniversary of his death.
Today, it is April. The air is muddied with heat, and from her kitchen
window, Glebe Road has slowed to a Saturday afternoon trickle.
She’s cleaving a knife through a Queensland blue’s rippled form
until it aches open: the buttery-gold flesh tumbling into cubes for the pot.
Smoothed out on the bench before her, the map of sequences that carry her on.
Thirteen years ago, Norman Foote crouched in the fields at Peak Crossing,
among the pumpkins: giant orbs dropped as if by something other-worldly,
the lean, mottled bodies of the working dogs, weaving around him.
Captured in a candid moment, before the distant peaks of the Teviot Ranges,
on the paddock-flat, in the piercing gaze of summer, weeks before sailing out.
At Newtown, the boiling water steams, lifts the photograph’s sellotaped edge.
She often pictures him, between fitful wake and sleep, looking out at the
distant tips of the pyramids from Heliopolis. Those great, other-worldly wonders,
chevrons cut into the sky – the sands lit by glow, as golden as Rockdale Farm fields
the dusk slowly advancing: bringing its cummerbund of delicate colours,
as around him, soldiers shuttle between tents with industry.
The sounds of him coughing and hacking, rising steeply into the night.
At home, streets and days stretch on.
Timber and tin blocks fade out to scrub. A herd of cows lumber slowly to the west.
His mother’s pot bubbles over again on the hob.
Circa 1928 by P.S Cottier (Second Prize)
The world more solid than now –
metal chest reflecting instrument.
No melting. No unnecessary warming,
just the shine of medals and the chest
swelling like his euphonium.
Everything is so neat,
four-four beat is presumed.
But we can’t hear the music,
the booming and elephant tread
as they stomped down Brisbane Street.
Perhaps the cups have caught it,
and we can sip old tunes like wine?
So solid, yet somehow shy,
an emotion culled
from our jungle of selfies.
The brass is held gently as a rose
under than broad, metallic chest.
Both firm, and blushing,
in this brief brush with the studio lens.
An Ode to the F-111 by Leonie Parker (Third Prize)
As a greying old pacifist hippie,
who like most had a penchant to roam,
I had found myself living in Ippie.
I was new to the place you called home.
I remember the first time I saw you.
How I gasped as you lit up the sky.
Just another who’d come to adore you
and believe that you never could die.
From a youth that was awkward and stinging
you would rise like a phoenix in flight
and with thunderous power go winging,
afire to conquer the night.
A millennium memory lingers
of you stealing the show at ‘The Games’
while I watched, opened mouthed behind fingers,
as you swooped in and captured the flames.
You were born of another conception,
a machine made for stealth and for war,
not the popular peaceful perception
of delighting the crowds when you roar.
But that is how you’ll be remembered,
an epitaph richly deserved.
Whether cut up for scrap or dismembered
your history page is reserved.
For the years tend to treat us unkindly,
one and all, you were never immune.
You flew on, all unwittingly, blindly,
in a world that was changing its tune.
Now I look to the skies above Ippie
when I hear that old thunder on high.
Your replacements are clever and zippy
but it’s you that I miss passing by.
Double Take by Bernadette Whisson (Highly Commended)
Alkoomi,
the place we chose:
looks like a sibling
to another home,
family identity unpretentious,
self-contained, dutiful,
of its time, law abiding.
Behind the walls of
everyday living
in this bungalow
post-war is
so much compromise
and striving,
the renovating of rooms and ideas:
3 bedrooms
1 bathroom
dining lounge
kitchen steps
down to the laundry.
And when it was bought,
the sales rep couldn’t believe
it was Dad’s first house
after years of education rentals.
“I’ve lived simply,” he answered
her amazement.
Only in the front yard,
the prayer book palm,
its dark form mysterious as
Edvard Munch’s “The Scream”,
differs from my father’s
Golden Revolution
thrusting its sturdy self
exultantly
into the sky above
the meek roof tiles
and light weatherboard
as if
defying
modesty.
Outside the Lines by Joe Dolce (Highly Commended)
Two nursing sisters, posing arm in arm,
For the monochrome uncommon candid,
Most colourfully dressed (we imagine),
Agnes, in bright harem pants, turban, plume,
Catherine, a flapper, with fanned headdress.
An impromptu party, or off-work from
The Ipswich Hospital for the Insane.
One wonders, though, what patients, peering through
High institutional glass, must have made
Of their normally white-frocked caregivers,
Colouring, quite a bit, outside-the-lines,
Here, yet allowed free, from lock and key.
Chair’s Encouragement Awards
Past by Alyssa Tang (5-17 Yrs. Winner)
You know when roads are clear
and time runs by like a dog being called
i never thought you’d never be here
perhaps i didn’t think at all
the light posts stretch like elastic
and the rain drums a beat on the windows
we haven’t seen them in weeks
months
years.
and your seemingly innocent sleep
when you wake up to nothing
brings us to your side
and no longer can we hide
we hear stories. poems, photos, lives, about you
and i hardly knew you
your son is in high school now
your daughter has a dora backpack
i remember holding her as a baby
ignorance (to time) is bliss
yellow and white roses are chosen
and petals are given to everyone
my petal was white and like lace
it glided between my fingers like plastic
i didn’t see your face
until i walked up to your casket
they say someone who is dead looks like they’re asleep
they’re wrong
you looked caked in make up
you looked green
you looked dead
i placed my petal on your chest
and gently said, “see you later, man”
before drifting off without knowing what to do next
my aunty says hello. i haven’t seen her in 5 years
you’ve grown, she says
i know, i reply
my grandma hugs me like no tomorrow
and keeps insisting to kiss my cheeks
pretending like she didn’t ruin our family
like she didn’t fail her son
lastly, i see my older cousin
someone who is so old now
he has three kids
one in his arms like he were a gym
i don’t hug him. i don’t say anything more than a hello.
when we leave
my feet felt numb in the heels i wore
don’t be a stranger, my mother calls out
we don’t want to be, they reply
my mum isn’t being truthful though, she couldn’t care less
and neither could i
Birds Can Heal Through Water by Robert Chapman (Open Age)
Jon looks up
From his coffee cup
In time to see
A wagtail
Land on a nearby sign.
Not lies,
Only the truth
In his eyes
As he say,
“Birds can heal through water.”
Then –
He’s off again
In connected disconnection
Talking of….
The shocks
The knocks
The electrocution
The voices
The choices
The lights
The frights
The feet that beat the day
Into the clouds
And the warm coat
That fills the impacting mind
With outer body perceptions,
And shuts out the notes
Of the guitar
That is a constant companion.
I grow impatient
I know,
For dopamine and serotonin
Are a wily foe.
If he was our son
Or daughter
You’d gladly pray
That birds could heal through water.
Joy Chambers & Reg Grundy Award – Open Age Other Poetry
Flying to Ipswich in the Company of Saint Jackie Howe by Roger Vickery (First Prize)
I promised you an adequate poem,
Ipswich. But the one I unwrapped
in my cattle class seat was sub-grade:
too many dags & grass seed doubts.
I’m no gun shearer.
My only chance of clearing the terminal with a tally
within a bull’s roar of decent is to stay
bent over this pad, working my blades,
dabbing tar on misplaced cuts, praying
Jackie Howe, unbeaten hand shearing
champion of the world, patron saint
of shearers, pressers & roustabouts
(soft pawed classers can look after
themselves) will lend a hand to fill
my pressurized shed with the music
of tumbling golden fleece:·
I was raised on a soldier settler block:
stony paddocks, artesian bore, furnace
summers your Ipswich potters could
use for outdoor kilns. Enough covers
of occasional Mandrake green to keep
our flock of Corriedales fed until
world prices & interest rates ganged
up with shearers’ wages to throat us
like a wild dog pack. On sale day Dad
took down his father’s hand shears
& leaned low over our pet ewe
to give & receive the final blows.
This new poem lambed an hour ago
ago when a flock of fresh-loomed
clouds mobbed around our wing,
floating, a spun white still life, as if…
a giant presser in the grip of a sky-shed
sulk over a breach of award conditions
had flung his fleece far & wide
& thumped away to complain
to his union rep. Who should I thank
for this vision & the eleventh hour
clip lifted from its back? I’d like
to think it was a bequest from
Saint Jackie Howe that’s been biding
its time, waiting for a double shot
of deadline juice & some quiet
in my cattle class head to catch again
the music of hooves & dogs
&
get em in! get em in!
clattering down a ramp.
Jackie Howe (1861-1920) set shearing records with blades (hand shears) that stood for over 50 years until the introduction of machine shears. His weekly tally of 1437 sheep in 44 hours 30 minutes remains unbeaten.
He was a strong unionist & the first worker to wear the navy blue singlet which bears his name to this day.
Pressers pack wool into bales. Classers classify categories of wool. A blow is a single sweeping cut through a sheep’s fleece.
From the Wreck: Adam Lindsay Gordon 1833-1870 by Jeff Guess (Second Prize)
Part One – A Birth
i.
What strange and nameless burden leaps in the womb
and head butts at the soft wet dark feeding already on her phobias and fears.
Better by far to stay in bed with cries and whimpers-
and not to name the garish day
the bush and hard white light
than to be always wanting to get back and back
and back as this so surely will
by poems and aborted voyages.
But having got this far – too far,
starting all of this without any permission
nothing now could be stopped.
ii.
His left hand a clenched musket ball of anger
his right – hung open like the broken wing
of a bird, mawkish with melancholy.
Having forsworn Virgil and Homer
his parents remain as bookends to his plight.
iii.
Jane has kept back his silver pen and more:
dry-eyed he sails
with only half his heart for Adelaide.
The boat like a bucking horse shoves Gravesend
bumping back across the little waves.
He folds a few late August wildflowers
hastily picked into his journal:
and presses it closed upon the past.
iv.
This little town
where he earns a brief contentment
but will never live.
His soul’s in England
‘When I come back’ leaks always from his pen
and he writes often after his heart
with the poetry in his fists and saddle.
v.
In Penola the priest gives him
a copy of the Horace ‘Odes’.
Quickly it burns a hole in his pocket
while his tongue catches fire on the words.
He locks himself within the pages,
closes the battered cover
over his shyness and reserve.
vi.
He wakes now from dream to dream.
Outside of that doubt and despair
parry with him for sense and sanity.
He knows he has little chance of winning.
Sundays he runs down to the sea
weary and sick of the odds
he feels are stacked against him
and swims with the muse.
Spends his evenings by the light
of a sludge lamp transcribing the poems.
vii.
Maggie quilts their marriage bed
with patience and respect
but never hearts and flowers.
His is the cautious gift of gold
a rein and bridle but never poems.
viii.
He lies after the fashion of Swinburne at Ventnor
but here on the cliffs of Cape Northumberland
where the storming reef off Carpenter Rocks
pounded the Admella to pieces in ’59
and waits, watches, listens for the poem
that will make his name to be washed in.
ix.
Four crowded years offences left
he can neither take as they come nor jump:
a hideous fall from Necromancer
while gentle Annie dies in fevered pain.
What’s gone and what’s to come
a disastrous steeplechase he’d flung to fate
now unseats him at each and every barrier.
Part Two – A DEATH
Suicide on Brighton Beach
A Melbourne winter’s day distills the final sadness.
It could not have turned out differently
and nothing now could be stopped.
At the end of an old argument with himself over
fatigue and desolation; England and going back.
Waking later while a clock on the mantelpiece
ticked away more than the dark and morning light
was a slow complicated equation
he would never solve.
Listens only to sounds Maggie makes
tumbling in troubled dreams.
Only at the inquest, she remembers
a pipe-smoke kiss.
All of his old wounds ache
but pain would be the excuse, not the reason.
But who can ever be sure of that?
If he had been asked he might have said
‘The key is in the Odes’ producing a battered
pocket Horace from his coat.
Now with a hunter’s step and his old service gun
creeps from the silent house
in a new but blunted dawn
along thick tea-tree scrub that lined the sand.
Mr. Prendergast at the Marine Hotel where he calls
is still abed, but no one now can bring him back.
Suddenly his shadow throws a comic-thin long legged thing:
while out across the still and empty page of sea
the huge soft-red explosion of the sun.
Later Mr Allen looking for his cow along the beach
first found his hat, the Horace, a clay pipe
and the few coins he left behind.
Endurance by Damen O’Brien (Third Place)
I can do nothing gentle inside today,
and stamp outside to open the glass doors.
Spiders pin-wheel around me in a
frangipani fall, drifting to the deck.
I had jigged open the stuck door and loosed
the lardered inmates of a potter wasp’s nest.
The mud-pack package cracked and
fractured in the hinge and grated to dust.
Nine curled spider seeds poured out
and I felt a frisson of disgust and fear.
The dirty cigar of a dauber wasp’s next is
built with an insect’s patient devotion.
All the kinds of patience there must be:
finite and fickle. Before the children, we thought
we were patient, but no more than these
secret creatures slipping into the walls
of our lives: the salty gecko, gaunt as a breath,
pressed patiently between two panes of glass,
translucent pulse slowing in its chest;
the ash fan of a brittle moth, stowed behind
a closed screen; or the blind vampirism
of a mud wasp grub creeping in the husk of
a stunned spider. These days we balance
on the hair of our restraint, and have the stoicism
of parents waiting for their children to be old enough.
All the delicate kinds of patience in the world.
I’ve badgered all the glass doors open, and
the wind bangs some of these closed again.
A pilgrimage of ants enters through a rough
drill hole shaved through the open edge of the door,
looking for shelter from the rising clouds.
The boys start up again somewhere in the house,
mouths working on the juice of the moment,
as innocent as any new thing is, as sharp
as a ranked phalanx of paper wasps watching me
with the suspicion of parents from a bullock’s heart
nest, high in the eaves above the front door.
As I stand amongst the violated remnants of
a spider’s crypt, I shiver at something more
than the drop of pressure. We always thought
that we were patient before we had children,
but perhaps we should have wanted to be kind.
Here in the plugged chinks of the aftermath
as an afternoon storm climbs into certainty,
I am only the cruel and stubborn patience of a wasp
in the spinifex tumbling of a garden spider’s grave.
Along the Red Dirt Road: Drought Country Sequence by Mark Miller (Highly Commended)
1
Wildlife Crossing
pinpoints of light through
the bullet holes.
2
Heatwave
the horizon’s haze
of locust nymphs.
3
Dry creek bed
a stray calf s head
loud with flies.
4
Gum-tree bark
the dreamtime art
of scribbly moths.
5
Drought
rising out of the dam water
the old disc plough.
6
Mid-stride
pausing to taste the wind
a dingo pup.
7
Raucous cockatoos
the farmer’s gaze turns
to the horizon.
8
Ongoing drought
the stillness
of the rope swing.
9
Small-town bar
an old farmer yarns with a mate
who isn’t there.
10
Blood-red moon
all day across the valley
the wail of sirens.
11
Fire ban
overhead a goshawk fans
the thermal currents.
12
Back road at dusk
seeing a kangaroo
in every shadow.
13
Lone tree
by the roadside
a plywood cross.
14
Homestead fence
splayed and bloodied
the wings of a wedged-tail eagle.
15
Auctioneer’s spiel
the farm widow’s
furrowed brow.
16
Nightfall
a man throws roadkill
into the tray of a truck.
17
Foreclosure
hidden by the brim of his hat
the farmer’ s eyes.
18
Another drought year
along the red dirt road
another hearse.
Appraisal by Damen O’Brien (Highly Commended)
He had an interesting turn of phrase, sometimes.
The kind of man it takes a long time to
work out whether he is joking or he is serious.
But he had a careful hand with a forklift
and knew his way around a Shipper’s Letter of Instruction.
He could be a mean drunk, I’ve been told
but avoided the booze, and didn’t bring problems to work.
He had been a meatpacker and a butcher’s apprentice
when he was younger, and had learnt to stand all day
in the icy red numbness of the cold room,
peeling the seam of muscle with razor slices,
learning to hew the knot of dressed meat without
turning the willful edge against the bone, and
steadying the anatomy of cold cuts with one steel glove.
He reckoned he was surgical in his day, with a sculptor’s eye.
‘Be careful’, he’d tell us without expression,
‘I know how to cut up a man and dispose of him’.
Then he’d laugh and clap us on the back,
but perhaps he took our measure with his hands.
Pumpkins and Firewood by Mran-Maree Laing (Highly Commended)
Old Tom Heywood twenty years dead
your house mere bramble, a regular thicket
of honeysuckle, and below, the shallow river
murmurs without cease over the pebbles,
rolling them endlessly with its liquid
tongue with you no longer there to listen
planted, like some autochthonic being.
Your bullwhip broke the sound barrier
whip crack like gunshot
over the river to call the neighbours:
not that you ever had much to say
nor many words to say it with.
Out of school at eight to work off-sider
on your pop’s bullock train
dragging logs from the recalcitrant
bush. Bachelor Tom, loneman Tom
you didn’t seem to mind:
You had your forge, your land,
your vegetables, your bullock train
with the one fine-boned jersey
placed in pin position —
yoked to the high-haunched bulls
her slender neck slipped neatly
into the hand-carved yoke and then
you slipped in the key
and with two granny knots
locked her into your place.
I still have your bullwhip
hanging on the wall
black with your sweat:
the fine leather plait
the stone-hard waxed knot at the end,
not for punishment
never for punishment —
you’d say, eyes set like polished
ironbark in bloodwood.
But what I remember most
is when that short-haired woman
came from the city
and bathed nude in the river
her bare legs spread to dry
on the river bank
and how you arrived
the very next day
at her tent door and knocked,
hat in hand.
Behind you — you were already old
— was a bullock yoked to a barrow
of pumpkins and firewood
— already axed — you knew the trade:
you offered her these things
that wood and those pumpkins, grown by your own
leathered hands, cut by your own gamey arms
in exchange for sex
and how she stared back at you
mealy mouthed Tom
with her red lips open wide and her empty hands
trailing by her side.
An Even Greater Fear by David Campbell (Highly Commended)
The beast devoured the dead at dawn, my son,
a scavenger now lost in silver dreams
that hide the horror of the night,
when all that you have ever been and done
became as nothing in a hell that seems
to burn anew now morning’s light
betrays us one by one.
Their eyes will not meet mine, they look away
in silence at the home they cannot see —
the olive groves that once defined
Aleppo’s wealth, the laughter of each day,
the children plucking fruit from tree to tree —
but you have gone, so they are blind,
and have no words to say.
You never knew, my son, the years of toil
before our groves were victims of the war,
destroyed to force us from our land,
deprive us of the gift of life, the oil
that nurtured all of those who’d gone before,
yet now no more than desert sand
that mocks our ravaged soil.
A thousand years have heard the ancient tales
your father’s kin could tell to trace their line
from Saladin, yet none remain
where any fleeting chance of ceasefire fails,
nor does the future promise any sign
that peace will be allowed to reign,
for only death prevails.
And yet the suffering that brought us here
is fading mist among the olive trees
when sunrise heats Aleppo’s dawn,
for now I know an even greater fear,
a terror spawned by evil times like these
when all that I can do is mourn
the one I hold most dear.
Where are you now, my son? Do you embrace
your father and your brothers with a smile
in some enchanted paradise,
a mystical, quite perfect, holy place
where man’s brutality cannot defile
your innocence? Is that the price
I pay to run this race?
Too late, Australian sailors come. Their eyes
stare down at us, so curious, as though
we’re specimens trapped under glass,
their faces grim, yet etched with faint surprise
that we are still afloat, while here below
we see they will not let us pass,
and hope, defeated, dies.
The Museum by Mran-Maree Laing (Highly Commended)
The museum is a paint-peeled wooden church with coloured windows
boarded up, carted to the edge of town
on the tray of a flat-back truck. I drop
two gold dollars in the battered
donation box and wander. Faded photos
tacked to a corkboard —
bush; a ribbon of dirt fringed
with wooden huts; the hardwood faces of settlers;
a flooded river flanked with flooded gums, sepia school kids wrenched across
on ropes slung from trunk to trunk.
Uncle Al’s baby shoes—no larger than the span
of my palm—decay, leather thread unraveling,
in a smudged glass cabinet. A two-handled saw takes pride
among the tools of the cedar-cutters’ trade; wooden handles worn
smooth as now the bones of those who once wielded them; saw-toothed blade
still glinting keen. Beside the blade, the bare-chests of two sepia men strain
with the back and forwards, back and forwards of felling hardwood, of carving a town
from the trunks of trees. The curator — face dry as a river bed in drought — recounts
how the local mill produced six and a half k’s of plywood for
the panels of the main concert hall at Sydney Opera House, all the chairs too,
and how, once the work was done, all the blokes took a bus
and sat silent in the silent hall, wondering
at what they’d helped build, and then
took the bus home again.
Archives of the Feet by Jena Woodhouse (Highly Commended)
My feet are like my grandmother’s –
slender, delicately formed; the intricately
branching bones of ancestry, her family tree,
well shod in leather lace-up pumps
with elevated heels, enhancing the perception
that has stayed with me: my grandmother
was ladylike and dignified.
I did not share her narrow face and frame,
wasp waist and sloping shoulders,
nor was I endowed with her long torso
or her queenly bearing; only slender,
shapely feet, like those destined to bear her far
from her milieu of Sydney’s harbour,
northward to the Queensland border:
jungle foothills of Mount Warning,
wilderness beyond Point Danger.
In Capricorn, her fan of golden straw
would hover like a gnat;
muslin handkerchiefs and smelling-salts
were ever within reach.
I look down, and recall the sculpted
elegance of ankles, feet,
inherited from some remote forebear
whose name is lost to dust;
my father’s mother’s sea-green eyes
whose lenses could not camouflage
the gnawing ache of lapsed connections,
her Hebraic sorrow.
Faces in the Sea by Ashfield, Sydney, NSW (Highly Commended)
Stand in the bow, the night ferry, look down
at the white lips of suicides, at whirlpools
of tossed skulls, grinning, staring back,
skeletons that dance the whispering dark.
Our ship ploughs them under, churns hard water
into foam. Their chains and shackles rattle
against the hull. In our wake, risen voices,
drowned sailors shimmered into mist, glisten
in the starlit fairgrounds of death. The sea
makes a softer boneyard, smothers its missing choirs
where no bodies are ever found, hurls ships
of the living into cemeteries of drift and waves.
Metro Hotel Ipswich International Award – Open Age Bush Poetry
The Cynic Route by Kate O’Neil (First Prize)
When we remember Grandpa we start to reminisce
about ideas he thought were fair, opinions he’d dismiss.
He said that truth is hard to find whatever the dispute
so if you’re thinking honestly you take ‘the cynic route’.
So while he sat and listened to the evening news reports,
he’d punctuate the stream of words with histrionic snorts.
He’d mutter if some evidence was sounding very thin,
‘What rubbish! Do they really think that we’ll be taken in?’
And if he heard it advertised that this or that was ‘free’
‘Go on! Now pull the other one’ he’d say to our TV.
You’d hear him say ‘Bah humbug’ when Christmas time was near
and jingle bells were jangling in his poor offended ear,
while frantic advertising kept the dollars whizzing round
as people searched the shops for gadgets certain to astound.
‘Can anyone suggest a gift that’s right for Aunty Joan?
And can we find a toy that ‘Little Johnny’ doesn’t own?
Tinsel, lights and baubles prompted nothing but a frown;
the season’s crop of Santas perched on thrones all over town
were treated to the ‘hmmmph’ of Grandpa’s legendary scorn
and perhaps a muttered mention of ‘Oh glorious Christmas porn.’
He said that altruism was illusory at best
and called it ‘human conscience seeking temporary rest’.
Perhaps he tried to make himself exempt from such a claim
for I know his acts of kindness had a much more caring aim
and when he said the highest praise of women or of men
was simply being honoured as a ‘solid citizen’
he may have had in mind the claim we all-too-often hear –
that elevating people tends to make them less sincere—
that power corrupts and greed kicks in for more and more control,
and what was once a human is then nothing but a role.
So no surprise that politicians earned the most contempt;
Labour, liberal, red, blue, green – no party was exempt.
‘Bastards can’t keep bastards honest: that’s as plain as day;
You need to put the cynic’s check on everything they say.
You need to look behind their words, to always wonder ‘why?’
Is such suspicion justified? Would politicians lie?’
Expressed like that it sounds just like the classic cynic’s view
but though he scoffed at sentiment he’d give what praise was due
to kindnesses bestowed on him. He’d even recognise
that lurking in some human forms was sainthood in disguise.
We realised (but never said) he barked but didn’t bite;
The old curmudgeon had his style – he claimed it as a right.
He didn’t like bureaucracy, he didn’t like to queue
(but found the line would disappear if he began to moo.)
Pity help the vineyard that produced inferior red
or restaurants that failed to offer complimentary bread,
but while he said his chosen path was called ‘the cynic route’,
we thought this Grandpa pantomime was something of a hoot.
We noticed that he couldn’t quite obliterate his smile,
and knew the route he really took was called ‘the extra mile’.
Up in the Devils Lair by Terry Piggott (Second Prize)
Where the stony creeks meander and the schist clad hills rise high,
You can feel your heart beat faster as you near where nuggets lie.
Yet this country can be treacherous for those who don’t take care,
Death has long since cast its shadow here up in the devil’s lair.
There’s a lonely grave that greets you where the ghost gums line the creeks
And it’s here he’d sought his fortune once amid these crumbling peaks.
There’s a worn out pick and shovel there and boulders still lay strewn
And you hear the dingo’s howling with the rising of the moon.
On a termite ridden tree trunk is a rusty frying pan,
Where his mates had scratched the name once of this long forgotten man.
But the words have disappeared now, so there’s just a stone lined grave,
That’s a poignant last reminder of a mate they could not save.
Far out in this wilderness his friends could only hope and wait,
Praying for a miracle to somehow save a dying mate.
Though by then their hearts were hardened to the perils faced outback –
Death no longer was a stranger to those men who blazed the track.
When you look down at his grave, you think of how it was that day
And you wonder at the heartache of a mother far away.
Then you think about a sweetheart and the life they’d hoped to share
And you feel a tinge of sadness here up in the devil’s lair.
Time has silenced all the voices now of those who’d been his mate
And there’s little still remembered of the way he met his fate.
With no comrades left to mourn him an no lover to shed tears,
He has rested here forgotten for one hundred dreary years.
Yet this country holds him to its breast and guards his resting place,
While the changing seasons come and go at their unhurried pace.
When the summer storms arrive each year to swell the creek once more,
You can hear the boulders crashing and the raging river roar.
There’s a waterhole that fills here after cyclones have passed through
And it seems he may have camped there to enjoy the peaceful view.
As the nighttime shadows gathered and the sun began to sink,
He could watch the country stir again as creatures came to drink.
There’s a haunting feel about this place when stars are shining bright
And you sense you’re not alone, although there’s not a soul in sight.
As the night time breezes stir the leaves they whisper as they go
And you’d swear you hear his voice at time around this old gold show.
As you daydream by your campfire at the closing of each day,
You imagine he’s there with you pointing out where nuggets lay.
For it’s easy to believe now that his spirit roams here still
And he guards these creeks and gullies from his grave up on the hill.
There’s a nagging urge to come here, though I never stay for long;
Yet, I find it hard to leave at times – the lure of gold is strong.
It’s remote and inhospitable when summer’s in the air,
But again that sense of sadness as you leave the Devils’ lair.
The Lady of the Lakes by Terry Piggott (Third Prize)
Around the outback campfires there’s a yarn l’d often heard
about the ‘lady of the lakes’, although the facts were blurred.
Her beauty is exceptional; or so the story goes
but whether she is real or not- well no one really knows?
Just like a ghost she may appear, then suddenly she’s gone
and so these stories tend to grow each time that they’re passed on.
Her face is like an angels and her hair shines burnished gold,
a mystic nymph who roams the lakes; or so I had been told.
Some say she seeks out prospectors, when life has been unkind
those lonely souls who look for gold but never seem to find.
To others she is searching for a sweetheart from the past
and doomed to roam the great salt lakes until he’s found at last.
It’s said her voice is sometimes heard when stars are shining bright,
sad songs they say sung far away, drift faintly through the night.
These sightings are quite rare I’m told, and few have seen her face
and those who have are hard to find, and harder still to trace.
The outback’s full of yarns of course and most you can’t believe
although -I thought I saw her once- one balmy summer’s eve.
I may have been mistaken; yet I’m confident I’m right
for though near dark I glimpsed her there across the lake that night.
I’d never taken notice of beliefs that some may share.
yet something seemed to tell me, I was not alone out there.
I dozed off by my campfire then the way I often do;
perhaps I had been dreaming – dreamt what happened next was true?
I’d swear I sensed her soft lips as they gently brushed my cheek
and heard her fading footsteps heading off towards the creek.
I woke up with a start then; still convinced that she was near
and watched the bushes moving where I saw her disappear.
Perhaps I’d been mistaken for the one she’d long searched for;
a sweetheart who had perished in the gold rush years before.
Or was it all imagined; just a dream that seems so real
my mind remains a captive to emotions that I feel?
I’ve camped back there now many times, though haven’t seen her since
and most who hear my story I’m unlikely to convince
Yet every time I’m near the lakes I look around in vain
and wonder if our paths will cross somewhere out there again
Though as the years pass slowly by the doubts begin to grow
how can I be so sure then when I have no proof to show?
Yet in my mind there still resides clear memories of this
and even though it’s forty years I cherish still her kiss
The Night The Kids Cooked Dinner by Caroline Tuohey (Highly Commended)
The children in the rural town Lower Upper Dresher,
had joined the craze of cooking shows where cooks cooked under pressure.
They all sat glued three nights a week to television screens
and if they missed an episode, were prone to nasty scenes.
They’d taken up the challenge to improve their daily diet,
but grocery shopping with their mums was heading for a riot.
Their parents all seemed quite content to stick to same old styles;
they very rarely wandered down the continental aisles.
The kids had all decided that the cooking shows were right –
that food should be exciting and artistically ‘a sight’.
And things became hysterical the night Sam’s mum cooked pasta,
with sauce that came in bottles, as Sam’s mum said ‘it was faster’.
But Sam no longer wished to eat spaghetti bolognaise.
Instead he wanted new spring lamb infused with minted glaze.
He told his Mum potatoes were no longer smooth and mashed;
they should be served unpeeled with lumps – potatoes now are smashed.
And Michael and Robina were appalled with KFC
that their Dad brought home as takeaway for Friday’s casual tea.
“It wouldn’t be,” they said perturbed, “too hard to buy a chop;
they sell them marinated down in Finley’s butcher shop.”
While down at Harrigan’s Hotel the chef was going blotto,
when Master Joe suggested cooking salmon roe risotto.
Chef Willy wasn’t too impressed – Joe questioning his grub.
“My chicken parmigiana is a staple in this pub.”
But Joe was fairly adamant and asked him mum to change
the chicken to a salmon (and it needs to be free-range).
His mum explained the menu was decided by Chef Willy
and to stop this fancy cooking rot – “the whole thing’s getting silly.”
So Joe and all the other kids decided they would score
their parents’ meals all out of ten – most getting three or four.
They figured that some comments would assist their folks to see,
no longer were they tolerating mediocrity.
The parents were appalled of course, when meals were given zeros,
while all those darn contestants on the show were hailed as heroes.
The children sensed their parents were all close to nearly breaking –
that they understood they needed to improve what that were making;
until a parent phoned around and called a secret meeting,
to try and sort the bedlam over what their kids were eating.
And Mary-Jane convinced them that she had a sure-fire winner.
“We’ll all give in,” she said quite calm, “just let the kids cook dinner.”
The parents at the table sat in silence for a while,
then one by one were nodding and a few began to smile.
They started to imagine they’d have time to read a book,
instead of being busy in the role of family cook.
And so that night the parents gave their kids the welcome news:
“You’re all the chefs tomorrow night – it’s up to you to choose.”
The kids all gave a mighty shout – “we’ll show you how it’s done,”
then raced towards their kitchens, looking forward to lots of fun.
The next day was a Saturday – they measured, mixed and stirred
at stovetops and the benches where much muttering was heard.
By six o’clock they’d finished and their meals had all been plated,
but each and every one of them was tired and not elated.
In Sam’s house, both the Willis’ were wondering what to do
with little Sammy’s cheeses that were mouldy, old and blue.
Insisting Sam should try it first, they waited while he ate
a cracker smeared with rancid cheese, some pate and a date.
But Sam’s young taste buds didn’t like his gourmet nibbly platter.
“I think,” he said, “I’d rather have a saveloy in batter.”
Sam’s parents kindly got their kid a sausage fried in oil,
both knowing that his craze for fancy food was off the boil.
While down the road, Robina had some doubts about her pudd –
it wasn’t looking like a trifle usually would.
She hadn’t missed a step at all – she’d done as they’d instructed.
But some desserts just don’t taste right when they are deconstructed.
Robina knew her trifle would be judged ‘not good enough,’
when served on several silly plates, in little piles of stuff.
Her Mum and Dad suggested that she plop it in a bowl –
that a tasty, messy, mixed-up pudd was trifle’s only goal.
And down at Harrigan’s Hotel young Joe was in a pickle,
as his salmon-roe risotto dish was proving rather fickle.
To stir a pan of fishy rice for nearly forty minutes,
was really rather boring and was giving Joe the irrits.
Eventually Chef Willy – who could stand the smell no more,
suggested Joe should help him make a dish he’d like for sure.
And that night all the customers said Joe’s meal was a charmer,
as Joe served up his special dish – Chef Willy’s parmigiana.
And Mary-Jane was lauded as the parent of the year –
their children viewed those cooking shows with something close to fear.
The kids were now content with being decent, simple cooks,
as cooking fancy food is not as easy as it looks.
A Racing Tale by Jim Kent (Highly Commended)
Another Mountain Cup was past, another picnic day,
the race was won, the setting sun cast shadows ‘cross the way.
Though horses, jockeys, people too, departing from the track
a few remained to “chew the wind” as was their way outback, – to reminisce of other times, the meets of other years
to which they’d been or wished they’d seen, the many joys and tears
of racing cups and handicaps, of flats and jumps and steeples,, of horses known and riders bold and other racing peoples..
He leaned across the running rail to gaze into the past. and saw again the riding men and horses running fast, though ghostly in the setting sun just spectres in the haze, the horses great and laughing men belonged to other days. A stranger there they thought of him, a lonely sort of bloke,
they sensed his ilk with racing silk and listened when he spoke. “I’ve been around the tracks,” he said, “to meetings far and wide , to see great races won and lost, to watch great jockeys ride.”
“The Melbourne Cup I’ve seen of course, the better known of all. and races great in ev’ry state ,and all I can recall —
but l.ve not forget the greatest seen, the one remembered more the Mountain Cup in ‘thirty-nine, the last before the war.
No handicap two miler then, around a railed in track,
a ten mile race at cracking pace to Baldy Rock and back, the handicap the Whipstick scrub beyond the flat outbound,
the hillside steep and gullies deep, the rough and broken ground.”
“The riders in the race that year, I see their faces clear, Danny Ryan and Pat O’Brien and Clancy Silvatere.
The Tobin Boys, the two of them, and Curly Jack McRae, Bobby Moore and Slim McNee, the drover Tommy Bray. The final rider of the ten, the ringer Darby White,
a cranky coot, a young galoot, a noisy blatherskite.
The better rider there his claim, he’d win the race, his boast, no rider there, no horse yet born, could beat him to the post.”
“A bantam Rooster crowing loud, a boastful little man, no sportsman he who couldn’t see himself an also ran.
He would not share their toast to luck, ‘luck doesn’t count’, said he,
‘the better man will win this race, the better man is me!'”
“Ten horses at the starting line, the riders holding reign,
the starter’s gun began the run-, and cheered across the plain the racing horses crowding close, no space at all between
from first to last and closely match’d and none was racing green. Into the stinging whipstick scrub still wet from recent rain,
the way was rough, the going tough, of blood and sweat and pain,
across the broken, slipp’ry ground and racing side by side
the brave young men to saddle born, ’twas grant to see them ride.”
“Still tightly bunched they reached The Rock and horses turned around, more ridges steep and gullies deep, and rough and broken ground. Darby White there took the lead where hazards at their worst,
to be in front his one desire, he had to be the first.
A gully deep and slipp’ry wet with water running brown,
the horses slipped and heels were clipped, Darby White was down. The Tobin boys stopped at once and helped him to remount,
but he could not win the race of course, too far behind to count”.
“Who won the race it matters not, the purse was on the bar,
the prize was shared by those who dared with whisky and Three Star. ‘Come Darby White, ‘ they said to him, ‘and drink to Mountain Men, and that we may live another year to ride the race ag’en.’
‘No, I’ll not drink with men who cheat, to beat the better man’, So Darby cried with foolish pride -‘so foul the race you ran, you crowded me into a fall, the Tobins held me sway,
the only way that you could win, to beat me home today!”‘
“I’ll not drink with you, ‘he said, ‘or toast the Mountain race, the way it’s run, the way it’s won, is nothing but disgrace…’ He cursed them then, an angry man, and spat into the dirt,
and walked away, he did not care, the pain they felt, the hurt.”
“He drifted to the city tracks, in with the City push, training horses, riding courses, longing for the bush.
He’d not go back, his foolish pride, the pride before the fall and working still those city tracks he heard the bugle’s call.
In Greece and Crete, on desert sand, in jungles near our shore, he heard men cry and saw men die in the bloody hell of war, and brotherhood in battle, how men fought and lived and died, humbled him to recognize his selfish foolish pride…”
“If the Gods of War allowed him life, he made the promise then, when war was done, the battle won, he’d seek those mountain men, his purse alone upon the bar he’d admit his own disgrace,
sorry for his foolish words when lost the mountain race.
Returning though the local folk sadly showed the way
to a tomb of stone that stood alone, of granite grim and grey,
a monument to those who fought and who’d paid a bitter price, their names were there, each with a cross, the supreme sacrifice . “
“The Tobin boys together died, their ship at sea destroyed, in a bloody fight against the might the enemy deployed, Clancy Silvatere a soldier’s grave in distant desert sand, with Bobby Moore and Slim McNee, all dying for their land. For a mate young Danny Ryan gave his life in Crete,
and Curly Jack on Kokoda track death before defeat. Tommy Bray a medal won, also a jungle grave,
and Pat O’Brien amongst the dead, amid the fallen brave.”
“Don’t let the sun set on your wrath, his father often said, Come the dawn and with the mom a man could well be dead, The sun set on his wrath that day, the pain will never cease, death arrived before the dawn, before he made his peace . “
“Tis sixty years or almost so but night and day since then,
they’ve haunted him and taunted him, the ghostly mountain men. Never days without respite or nights without the pain,
if only he could turn back time and ride the race again-“
anguish in his weary eyes – ” a moral to my tale,
don’t be absurd with act and word if to win the race you fail,
too great the cost, the anger ,wrath – and I know that I am right, I was there, I rode that race – my name is Darby White!”
The Flags That Fly at Castlebrook by Noel Stallard (Highly Commended)
It’s good to be reminded of those people who have been
Significant in giving us a lifestyle that’s serene.
Our parents and our pioneers made sacrifices so
We can enjoy this type of life that we have come to know.
And foremost of those forebears, who gave life so we could live,
Were service personnel in wars where Death did not forgive.
The Christmas Cub reminds us when a saviour came to save.
And Easter holds the hope we have for life beyond the grave.
Australia Day’s another day to take time to deploy
Our thoughts for those who sacrificed, so we can now enjoy
Prosperity, security, a life removed from wars;
And this because brave men and women fought to save our shores.
The RSL at Castlebrook on each Australia Day,
Has organised with Bunnings that this retailer outlay,
Six hundred Aussie Flags that flap so proudly on the graves,
Of gallant men and women; and each Aussie Flag that waves,
Will hear the breeze at Castlebrook that sighs, “Remember me.”
“We’ll not forget,” each flag flaps back, “you kept our country free.”
Our Aussie Flag’s our ensign, with its Southern Cross and star;
There is no more distinctive sign that symbols who we are.
How fitting then we use this flag on one day of the year.
To honour and acknowledge those whose memory we hold dear.
Those service personnel who fought in mud, in sand, in snow;
And left a debt of gratitude, that we will always owe.
The blue within the Aussie Flag reminds us of our sea,
Defended by our sailors so to keep our coast line free.
The Southern Cross stood high above Kakoda’s bloody track,
Where diggers fought both night and day to drive invaders back.
The British Union on our flag recalls our pilots’ role,
Defending Mother England ‘gainst a German air control.
These fields of flags that fly up on the hill at Castlebrook
Are visual reminders, for whoever choose to look,
Of tribute and of gratitude to personnel who served,
And go some way to paying the respect that they deserved,
The twenty sixth of January should become the date,
Australians deck all cenotaphs with flags that say, “Thanks Mate!”
Bandy Bill by Jim Kent (Highly Commended)
I sit tonight by firelight with a heavy aching head,
the message reached me just today, old Bandy Bill is dead;
he died alone in a nursing home where time had passed him by,
no family, Bill, his mates were gone, and no one left to cry.
Old and grey and seemed that way when I was but a lad,
when living by the mountain track and farming with my dad,
Old Bandy passed us twice each day, with timber for the mill,
to walk beside the man and team to boys was quite a thrill.
For Bill you see was bullocky, a teamster from the past,
and of the old time working teams his was the very last,
hauling timber from the mountain, Stringy Bark and Beech,
Mountain Ash and Iron Bark that others couldn’t reach.
A span of ten he called them men, his working bullock team,
they seemed so huge when we were boys, their nostrils blowing steam
as snorting with exertion hauling mighty mountain logs
they struggled from the forest, straining harness, squeaky dogs.
Sandy’s yells, the bullock bells the sounds we loved to hear,
his cracking whip the echoes woke but rarely raising fear,
his bullocks knew what they must do, no need to taste the lash,
each bullock was a special beast, the big, the bold, the brash.
In the lead old Tumbleweed and paired with Cranky Lil,
each was named and knew their name when called by Bandy Bill.
There was Blackie, Joker, Samson, – Fly and Billy Blue,
Randy always pulling hard, The Boss and Cobbler too.
Bill’s language blue so sadly true was dinkum bullocky,
it was mostly showmanship for all to hear and see
a teamster of the yesteryear with trace and chain and rope.-
if said the words old Bandy used my mouth was washed with soap.
A cranky coot, an old galoot, or so my father said,
‘He’ll lead you up a tree,” his claim,” and leave you there for dead!”
We never knew the reason why and neither man would say,
why each ignored the other when the teamster passed our way.
Though warned beware we didn’t care, Old Bill remained a mate,
our mentor from the mountain side up to the sawmill gate,
as he hauled each mountain log we were his company,
and each of us a boyhood dream to be a bullocky.
Bill would tell I remember well such tales of derring-do,
wild and gory tales they were and Bandy swore them true;
tall stories now I know they were, but we as youngsters then
believed the tales old Bandy told of Bunyips, beasts and men.
A legend still old Bandy Bill, in tales of yesteryear,
the deeds he done the fights he won, a man who knew no fear;
his team came through the worst of times when days were grim and black,
Nature’s wrath and men’s intent could never hold him back.
The fifties flood and seas of mud, the fires of forty-two,
Bandy Bill and bullock team always coming through,
succor for the needy town and local hotel beer,
the teamster never failing in fetching hope and cheer.
The mill was shut, no timber cut, no mountain logs to haul,
but Bill and team still in demand when tourists came to call;
with cracking whip and snorting beasts he was a showman still,
they came from near and far to see Bullocky Bandy Bill.
He died alone in a nursing home well passed his hundred years,
no one there to share the pain, to wipe away the tears;
a lonely grave on mountain side, a simple wood cross,
by the tracks the bullocks made when Bandy Bill was boss.
The whipbird’s crack brings mem’ries back of bullocky and team,
in days of old when we were boys just old enough to dream,
hauling logs by mountain track, they say his ghost’s there still,
it’s not the whipbird’s call we hear, but the whip of Bandy Bill.
Real Time Dream Time by Kevin Pye (Highly Commended)
Today I sit in wonderment, to look upon a scene—
Imagination rises up and hours don’t intervene.
I sense I am a stranger here, yet somehow I’m in touch,
At arm’s length from an era past, that matters still so much.
The lichen patterned rocks look down on fields beyond their base
To where old tribal songs and chants once echoed round this place.
It’s here that Mother Nature’s shrouds secrete the stage enhanced
And native flora has reclaimed the theatre where feet danced.
A quiet and eerie spirit floats upon the zephyred breeze
And spectres of the Mougee clan come softly through the trees.
I see the Elders gathering, in skins of Possum fur—
These dream time figures coalesce—my eyes begin to blur.
The status of fine feathers worn with hunting spears held high,
Adorn the ochre bodied scene, as warriors pass by.
I visualise this meeting place where tribes from overlands
Will trade their wares next morning light, near rocks with painted hands.
The Piccaninnies chatter now, in play around the rocks
Until the spangled banner, calls its time upon their clocks.
It’s time to take my leave also from painted hands blown white
And take with me respectful sense of this secluded site.
The rhythm of the clapsticks’ beat and bare feet pounding dust,
I’ve seen within this mind of mine, at this site held in trust.
I’ve climbed beyond the river bed and passed the flat surrounds
To where the sandstone guardian, protects the Dreamtime grounds.
Plywood Crosses by Graeme Johnson (Highly Commended)
Prologue: In August 2014 the Australian War Memorial turned on the “Roll of Honour” Soundscape project. Primary School students from across Australia had recorded the name & age (at death) of the 62,000 Australians who died during WW1. These voice recordings form a moving backdrop for museum visitors as they walk through the ‘Cloisters’ Commemorative area of the museum.
As part of the 4 year long Anzac Centenary celebrations the “Commemorative Crosses” project will also see 100,000 plywood crosses (inscribed with messages written by Australian schoolchildren) sent to be placed on the graves of all Australian servicemen & women who have given their lives for their country (from the Boer & Sudan wars up until present day conflicts). These crosses will be sent to countries such as Turkey , Belgium, Malaysia, Singapore, Greece, South Africa & the Middle East.
My footfall in that hallowed hall reverberated meek and small,
as step by step the marbled floor I trod.
As icy wind chilled polished stone I knew that I was not alone.
I walked with men who’d gone to meet their God.
A speckled spray of poppies red.
Soft petals for the men who bled.
These cloisters in memorial where soldiers formed their final squad.
Some 60,000 names to pass embossed upon the burnished brass.
A ‘Roll of Honour’ pressed against the wall.
An alphabet of surnames stretched , this catalogue of manhood etched, in countless rows repeating to appal.
Their battle won they rest in peace.
In glory sought they found release,
on battlefields of WW1 in serving man they gave their all.
These pondered thoughts they filled my head. From ‘a’ to ‘g’ to ‘z’ I read,
as voices whispered falling to my ear.
What were these names that I now heard? This softly spoken uttered word?
Articulate and vocalised so clear.
They seemed with me to resonate.
A soldiers name and day and date.
Was this a veiled epiphany of omnipresent tomes I hear?
These names a century unheard from loam of foreign soils interred,
are eulogised. Read to a steady beat.
As children from our primary schools record upon a tape deck’s spools ,
a liturgy of age and rank replete.
Some 40 different names per day ,
are uttered proudly in array.
For 4 long years their monikers in homage honoured will repeat.
In tribute too a message sent on plywood crosses to augment,
their full respect and open gratitude.
A message to a ‘digger’ brave to rest upon a wartime grave.
These youngsters pledged a nation’s platitude.
With shaky hand and texta pen.
With pencils sharp they wrote to men.
They spoke in their naivety and asked about their fortitude .
“Did you go home from war each night if you were nervous or in fright,
to sleep all snug and warm in your own bed?”
Mused Wendy Watts from Winmalee on Randolph Cleaver’s destiny.
Enlisting with the volunteers he sped.
“To our last shilling and last man.
Support the monarchy our plan”. * 1
In servitude to British Lords the news that Hughes and Fisher spread. * 2
“When bullets hit you did they hurt? Did blood seep through your tattered shirt?
And did you wash it out at end of day?”
Thought Cooper Briggs from Croppa Creek.
Was Herbert Affleck’s future bleak?
How would his manhood hold in the affray?
“Australians stand beside our own”.
“Some 50,000 more we’ll loan”.* 3
To send as re-enforcements, politicians’ conscience to defray.
“So when they killed you were you dead? Did scary thoughts race through your head?
Did it take long or was it really quick?”
Said Sally Jones from lnverell to Gordon Cooper he who fell,
where blood like treacle flowed there rich and thick.
Conscription and its justice failed,
and nationhood it fair prevailed.
Where jaunty slogans advertised and peer group pressure did the trick.
“Dad said you fought war in a ditch as back and forth the fight did pitch.
Did you play hiding games inside the trench?”
Asked Ivan Smith from lronbark of Sydney Burvett for a lark.
“Did hankies block your nose from all the stench?”
Where flanked retreating infantry,
were fodder for futility.
As high upon the plateau flat of Sari Bair the guns did quench.
“How did you see above the trench? Did you stand up upon a bench?
If you were short how did you clamber out?”
Young Wilbur Wight from Wattle Flat asked Herbert Curnow for a chat.
Did he survive the Ottoman’s next rout?
Did he (dismounted) charge ‘The Nek’? * 4
An action that was circumspect.
As ‘Mehmets’ slew the ‘Johnnies’ in a fervor that was quite devout. * 5
Spoke Neville Barnes from Nowendoo to Leslie Biddle as he slew,
exacting out his ‘pound of flesh’ for fee.
Enduring ‘Sausages & Mash’. * 6
The Somme of France where he did clash.
As Anzac 1 & 2 sent forth 5,000 men to deaths decree.
“If you did stick him with a knife, did he yell out to lose his life?
Is he in heaven now or down in hell?”
Scrawled Simon Stark from Wangee Park for Colden Pockley in remark,
as he succumbed to shrapnel and to shell.
Fromelle gave up the Western Front,
as 5th Division took the brunt.
Where columns march ground to a halt advancements ardour there to quell.
“Was conflict just from 9 to 5? And did you walk or did you drive,
to join the ‘Call to Arms ‘ hostility?”
Wrote Tommy Thule from Timbuctoo on Norman Elsworth’s ‘Waterloo’,
as he lay stacked like cordwood to foresee ,
the white flag raised to call a truce.
Was its intent humane or ruse?The burial contingents rose and shook hands though they disagree.
“So was it like a holiday? A bit of work? A bit of play?
Did you send postcards on your weekend rest?”
Sent Vincent Vane from Vardy’s Road to Robert Flockart as he strode,
at Moquet- Farm a thousand yards abreast. * 7
But casualties they multiplied,
as they were shelled from every side.
The First Division ‘Aussie’ troops were sacrificed at their behest.
“Was it just like a running race when those young ‘turkeys’ you did chase,
through ‘No-Man’s Land’ to send them on their way?”
Penned Freddy Flint from Faulconbridge to Thomas Rushworth on the ridge,
at Bullecourt was thrust into the fray. * 8
At Hindenberg they pressed the line, * 9
defences there to re-define.
But thousands taken prisoner were captured in this wild melee.
“Was it a good adventure then to join your fellow countrymen,
a foreign country’s culture to enjoy?”
Scratched Ahmed Khazi as he stood to Bernard Harford in the ‘Wood’,
at Polygon as part of the convoy. * 10
A win wrought from protracted pain.
The 4th Divisions hefty gain.
A series of successful raids against the strongholds they deploy.
“Did living in this slaughter send your addled mind around the bend? Did you have headache pills to ease the pain?”
Quizzed Ruby Rose from Rukenvale to Cyril Fussell who did wail,
at Broonseinde where breathing was in vain. * 11
Some 4.5 per minute died,
by one whole day there multiplied.
A total of 6,000 souls in carnage fell to this campaign.
“Did you have I-Pods or T.V? Enjoyment you could guarantee?
Something to do that was a bit of fun?”
Hoped Danny Dale of Darrigo. Is Albert Bracher’s progress slow,
at Hamel where objectives had been won? * 12
A battle integrated plan,
saw tanks and aircraft assist man.
The ‘Doughboys ‘ and the ‘Diggers’ fought in unison to beat the ‘Hun’. * 13
“Without a map did you get lost? Your fingers bitten by the frost? Were there directions posted on the track?”
Scribed Kenny Clarke from Kurrajong to Clarence Wallach so headstrong,
as trudging, grabbed a smoke from out his pack.
They confiscated guns and tanks.
Advanced 6k’s in scattered ranks.
Fought 6 long months without a break and rested now in bivouac.
“If you were injured did they send your broken body home to mend?
Did they throw you a ‘ticker-tape’ parade?”
Told Micheal Moore of Morningside of Percy Statton’s humble pride,
whose tunic wore a VC’s accolade.
The armistice was signed complete.
A man danced on a Melbourne street.
Capitulation would ensure a feeling that hope would pervade.
“I know that you do not know me. I live because you set me free”.
Was what I wrote upon my plywood cross.
An opportunity arose to grace a cross with my own prose.
A benefactor of good karma’s ‘joss’.
“With sacrifice more deeply sewn,
than any other earth we own”.
The words of journalist Charles Bean in his summation of our loss.
Glossary
- “To our last shilling” etc. A quote attributed to Andrew Fisher shortly before he was elected Prime Minister. A. Fisher 17/9/14-27/10/15.
- Hughes: William Morris Hughes. Prime Minister 27/10/15-19/2/23.
- “Australians stand beside our own”: A quote attributed to Andrew Fisher
“Some 50,000 more we’ll loan”: A quote attributed to William Hughes - ‘The Nek’: On the 7/8/15 Dismounted Light Horsemen charged Turkish trenches in a futile attempt to gain ground. They were repelled by heav·y machine gun & rifle fire.
- ‘Mehmets’ ‘Johnnies’: Taken from the 1934 poem by Kemal Ataturk. ‘Mehmets’ are the Turkish soldiers. ‘Johnnies’ are the Allies (specifically the Anglo soldiers).
- ‘Sausages & Mash’: ‘Sausage Valley’ was a shallow valley in the Somme region of France co called because of the proliferation of German observation balloons known as ‘sausages’. A nearby valley was coined ‘Mash Valley’.
- Moquet Farm: A tactical position in the Battle of Pozieres (July 23-Sept 3 1916).
- Bullecourt: The 151 & 2nd Battles of Bullecourt were held in April & May 1917.
- Hindenburg: From 1/3/17-31/3/17 German troops retreated to the heavily fortified Hindenburg Line.
- Polygon Wood: Battle of Polygon Wood Sept 26th 1917.
- Broonseinde: Battle of Broonseinde 4th October 1917.
- Hamel: On July 4th 1918 General Monash oversaw a joint attack by aircraft , artillery, tanks & infantry. It was over in 93 mins. The Australian Corp advanced the line by 2 klm over a 6.5 klm front.
- ‘Doughboys’ ‘Diggers’: Doughboys was a nickname for the American troops . Diggers was a nickname for the Australian troops. The battle at Hamel was the first time that Australian & American forces had fought side by side.
Ipswich City Council Award – 16-17 Years
Zipper by Sonya Frossine (First Prize)
She arrived in a suitcase
Neater than the third shot of whiskey
Curled up in a carved-out corner
Arms folded like laundry
Ironed flat, dried by the pressure
The tea-leaves hanging from her hair
Were uninterested in the semantics, the oxygen masks
After the flight over forty-four fallacies
She left a trail of beach-burdened fingertips in her wake
Reddened like ripe, raw cherries
Half-bitten and left to burst
Like spores filled with blood
They would, at a moment’s hurriedly scribbled notice
Burn and drown like candle wicks in wax
Alight, the zig-zag of lost lovers
Formed a constellation through a handprint of countries
They were the residue, really
Of a juggernaut thundering through
Built from a body, somehow unthinking, unwishing
Surely never, ever stopping
Someone small enough to slip into the stomach of a suitcase
Worldly enough to wait with the watches
Marking of a Printed Title by Sidney Boen (Second Prize)
No sounds, no songs
Shall pass these lips.
My face a sheet of white,
To whorls of letters,
Jetted ink black,
Run across its surface
Like tiny stamped soldiers
Hidden amongst consonants
And clauses —
A platoon of individualistic meaning.
Silhouetted to fit,
The crevices of one’s own understanding.
Lament for Bruadair by Clare O’Sullivan (Third Prize)
See derfor vil jeg hellere være Svinehyrde paa 1
Amagerbro og være forstaaet af Svinene, end
være Digter og være misforstaaet af Menneskene
I
Allow me to introduce as docent Mim should do 2
this pallid bathroom man whom I birthed
some eighty seasons ago, on clean sheets
and in the utmost sterility to be assured
He smelled of eucalyptus (the black and gold variety) 3
a trait that doubtless carried into
His flowering despite the apparent
blackening of his faculties, indeed
You have seen it I am sure you lived it
This broken frame who standing before
A glass in shivering delusion did exclaim
“OH!
how the foggy mirror
cries
for me!”
Stained the blurry image
with tear tracks of clarity
Stepped back a little, to lucid, view-
his pentagram anatomy
To piece apart, to piece
together the bars to see
the pale face of man
who reaches now for the canister
Upon the porcelain sink and
Applies his daily creams
and takes what was prescribed
and utters infrequently
O sun, to tell thee how I hate thy beams 4
And retreats unto his blanket to
bathe himself in blue frames from
the comedy of errors the tabloids say 5
may or may not
give him cancer.
II
Awaking from comatose now reborn
A tachycardiac, he played tapes of
Foetal worlds on fast forward- the
lurid shades of abcs inducing nausea
for all that were involved (especially involuntarily)
The zoetropic acid test of memory 6
a roulette of images cast upon the screen
whose blackness now found itself
Reanimated in his pin prick pupils
that saw a thousand dancing sisters
and all the meals set down before him he
saw a thousand rotund fingers slapping
chicken thighs on laminate
(Behold! Plato’s man!) 7
Seasoned with the spit and spite
of some gibe and jarring discourse
that headphoned infants doth ignore
As vacant faces seat themselves
on the “eclectic” chairs straight from
The pages of the last domestic monthly
And idle there
painted into silverware
Static but for the occasional scrape
Static but for the
Drip Drip
Drop
You watched the insect bodies pile up
Under the light of a sixty watt god that
struck them dead as they rose to kiss him
The meek sons of Bellerophon burnt and mangled 8
in a Turkish bowl upon the table runner
“She’ll be coming tomorrow
the bitch
I hardly know what
we’re going to do with all her
junk she keeps we ought to
Refuse her, they ought to have
kept her in for longer. I suppose
she’ll need a mattress I’ll go
fetch it from the attic at some point
In the morning.”
(and on the pile heaped)
Prodding pumpkin you wondered
why the lonely old witch you
shared a cup with shrank away
and told you that blood was thicker
than water when she nearly bled to death
on the pin of her mother’s brooch
“Horseman pass by” she rasped 9
Then withered.
III
Walking down Alameda to play 10
limbo with electric twine you
Stopped in the underground
To meet Phalaris whom ushered 11
you unto the station restroom
Toothless bar one ebony nugget
He retrieved ambrosia from behind his ball sacks
Hvad er en Digter? 12
You stared into the hollowing eyes
with your own, clear but watered
and nodded amiably
and so underwent the cling wrap exchange
To shuffle out the stall
like Grindr otters, the both of you 13
tripped out and buggered on the yellowing tiles
Lying prone, you traced your tongue
along the grout and cracks
and other mildewed interstices
Just as you did, in that bygone night
Her ivory back
And recoiled just the same
To the howls of hipsters in the outer hall
And they’ll be 14
plaaaaaaaaaycing
fingers through the
notches in your spine
and when all is
breaking-
Finally it came and when you had
idled long enough you
Cleaned it up with baby-wipes
No more pale girl now no more pale bony girl no more girl no more
piano key ribs against your groin just nothing just
you alone with your phone and your fingers and the memory of
Your mother feeding you Kellogg’s every morning 15
It didn’t work at all. It didn’t work. It didn’t.
None of the kitchen dawns wiled away
with your ears ground against the bench
did stir you from your firm impertinence
Staring at assorted fridge magnets,
One in floral border, a little rusted but remains to this day
you read it last visit, it read-
“THIS TOO SHALL PASS”
and in your oily vehemence completed-
“like a kidney stone”
Bitterly spat under a half-breath, all those
nights spent fat and naked- the sweat
melting flesh into synthetic leather
All the jagged profanities scratched
into the backs of bus seats
All amounted to nothing but
the phlegm on the pavement now
Icterine before you, before the pigeons
gathered about your swollen feet
(Watch the one-winged little lamb there)
Limping where you laid your head
in decaying freesia this evening 16
fifteen years heretofore, now gone
your legs itching stubble, bleeding
like wheat after the harvest.
Annotations and References:
- quotation from Either/Or by Soren Kierkegaard
Translation: “I would rather be a swineherd at Amagerbro and be understood by the swine, than be a poet and misunderstood by humans “ - Mim was a figure in norse mythology renowned for his profound wisdom, after being decapitated in the Æsir-Vanir war, Odin found the head and after speaking charms over it was able to carry it around with him for use as as personal advice and counsel.
- referring to black and gold branded disinfectant
- from “Paradise Lost” by John Milton
- reference to Elliott Smith’s song- “Miss Misery” (as well as the Shakespearean reference originally contained)
- reference to the “Electric Kool-aid Acid Test” and the LSD parties conducted by Ken Kesey, often involving strobe lighting and flickering projections.
- Quote from Diogenes. After Plato gave the definition of man as a “featherless biped”, Diogenes was said to have walked into Plato’s academy holding a plucked chicken and cried “Behold! Plato’s man!” Soon after, “with broad flat nails” was added to the original definition.
- Bellerophen- Hero of Greek mythology who attempted to fly up to Mount Olympus, the realm of the gods, upon the back of Pegasus only to be struck down by Zeus
- “Horseman pass by”- last line from the poem “Under Ben Bulben” by WB Yeats, also is engraved on his tombstone
- Reference to Elliott Smith song “Alameda” about a self-obsessed heroin addict
- Phalaris was a Greek tyrant renown for his torture device called the “brazen bull”- a bull-shaped furnace that was said to have turned the screams of the victims burning alive inside into music
- quotation from Either/Or by Soren Kierkegaard- full passage translation: “ What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music.”— also makes reference to the brazen bull myth. Used here as if the translation is actually a query whether to undergo the drug deal- symbolises lack of communication and understanding as well as subtly commenting on the way modern artists tend to turn to drug abuse- the Elliott Smith references supporting this allusion.
- Grindr- an application used for the purpose of casual homosexual intercourse, “otter” is slang for a gay man of a certain physique between muscular and skinny
- lines from Neutral Milk Hotel’s “Two-headed boy”- a song about the holocaust and starvation. The album the song is from has gained notoriety for being a favourite among hipsters.
- Kellogg’s was originally founded for the purpose of creating a cereal to prevent masturbation in adults and children. It was believed that an extremely bland diet would reduce sex drive.
- freesia is known to symbolise innocence
Commuter’s Requiem by Luke Bradshaw Poier (Highly Commended)
Rain has done its part when no one is looking.
Approving.
A good Samaritan washing the street.
I step into 5 a.m. purgatory.
Oil wedded to bitumen elopes with the
sole of my shoes.
Leather blues.
Walk.
Down the dark pavement, river of pitch,
through low light, a house. Number 21.
23.
25.
And more
all roov’d pebbles, arranged in lines and lanes
sand grains with picket fences face a concrete beach.
A crab escapes his hole to sea pilgrimage
and moonbeams drip, splash onto
molasses waves.
Together we scrabble among the sand pebbles
among the redbrick pebbles
window-framed pebbles
Walk to the seashore.
Then wait.
Listen for the bus engine’s pucker.
It’s late.
I grow deaf at dawn’s cacophony. Damn birds,
be
gone.
And then it arrives. Eventually. Late again.
Driver’s ridiculous smile.
Nod, nod at his apology for making me wait. Too late.
Look down. My watch a metronome, sinless, precise.
The driver’s radio sparkles to life.
Vietnam. Again.
Words from silence
effervesce.
Saigon can fall. Be damned, all. So long as the bus is on time
tomorrow.
Silence. Brakes squeal.
Disembark and disappear.
A million black suits, surging, rippling tide.
A river of pitch, between
steel-glass blades on city streets
like leaves of grass.
Latin on the lintel, reputable:
~Klein, Emerson, Longman~
Partners in Law
Mount the steps. Look down.
Damp coat and leather shoes. My smile imprisoned in the glass.
Respectable,
I open the door. Commuter’s requiem.
And begin.
The Man from Serayu River, an adaption of Banjo Patterson’s poem ‘The Man from Snowy River’ by Emily Bradley (Highly Commended)
There was movement on the streets, for the word had passed around
One more boat from the Serayu before dusk away,
Ten people across and five people wide,
These greyed boards weighed down, centimeter perfect tessellation.
Two red canisters bleeding petrol, five rusted canteens,
A worn out motor, no bigger than the smallest child.
This tired battalion weathered from a war of will,
A final coup de main for a land girt by sea.
So he enlisted – promised boundless plains to share,
Facing the Indian breach with compass confidence.
The Captain orders forth, and on walk his companions,
In the shadow of the Southern cross.
These uniforms see tanned pastures,
But the bruised blues persist.
A grainy image in their left breast pocket,
Of her golden soil awaiting.
This tank faces roads rougher than you can imagine,
Night and sea blurred to cosmic confusion,
And the man from Serayu River never shifted in his seat –
For through eternal artillery this hull won’t surrender.
It’s no man’s land out here, where stars are long extinguished,
No constellation can solace the weeping wooden soldier;
The ebb and flow of untamed current,
Teasing optimistic estimations.
And down by limestone laments, where lone eucalyptus stand ground,
Their watchful gaze sees tired troops approach,
For the first time all is quiet, no shells washed ashore.
The feeble fighters gently drift to armistice
And where around the river mouth the peppermint shade welcomes,
The land will turn against again; our battle is not over.
This battalion a household topic, front page black and white,
But this Victoria Cross is wooden.
Outro Requiem by Isabel Longbottom (Highly Commended)
Part I – Poesies
The furtive winter evening breeze
Stirs headlines and the withered leaves
That line the gutters.
A red scarf flutters in your knotted fist,
And down the hill the Church bell rings
Eight o’clock.
Among indistinct hands and insistent feet,
In the old quarry the flowergirl sings:
“What say you, itinerant salesman?
Will you while away an hour or two,
In the house at the edge of the park (after dark),
By the lightning-tree, split in two?”
“I picked daisies because the violets withered,
But even October is too cruel a month
To yield up thorns in a wicker basket.
Now I remember Saint Valentine’s day,
When the autumn thrush sang in lifeless tone
And my good bright dog capered away.
I am the absinthe girl, toute seule but not alone.”
In the room lurked candelabra and oak-panelled walls,
When metallic salts cast leadlight shadows
Across a Trimalchian spread;
And unctuous gold dripped sinuously between
Damson plums and pomegranate seeds.
Scattered platters of Corinthian bronze glowed
Amidst vials and decanters, overflowed
With a profusion of synaesthetic fragrance.
(And this was only the prelude to the feast.)
Blue-green flickers burnished polished stone,
From behind the garden and Golgotha,
And from the false steward, crying for his daughter.
While I who arbitrated the Peace of Nicias,
I at Aegospotami who took refuge with Evagoras,
During the time of false and lying gods –
I will show you the past in a pinch of salt;
The present in a breath of smoke, carried on the mistral
Through the valley of the shadow of death;
And the future in a curl of fog, drifting
Between brimstone smokestacks, swirling
Over stuttering streets, twisting
Between door and lintel.
Creeping, but never disturbing
An alley paved with bones.
But once in a café in Strasbourg,
You and Epeius, after tea and cakes and ice,
Sat in the shade of the Sycamore tree.
But the Earth was a dank and humid dungeon,
And sentinels were posted along the Elysian green,
To hide the thief and catch the queen,
(She who escaped the inferno to be home in time for tea)
And her bag of bones and vengeful eye,
With cheerful countenance beneath a red morning sky.
Part II – No longer my brother
All around you are familiar faces,
Peeking sidelong, speaking into cupped hands,
Familiar feet wearing the carpet thin
Like the woven threads of our piteous destinies.
Gazes pin you to the tasselled upholstery,
Calliopean voices echo from friezes,
Feather-soft and embittered, stroking taffeta and silk.
And the beggars feed their rats,
Feed them painted opulence on stuccoed balconies
And hors d’œuvres reflected in polished brass.
Channelling our excesses through swollen pocketbooks,
Almost entirely deceived beneath our gilded masks,
Our several eyes, redacting, gaze censoriously.
While we do unto others the horse starves,
Lurching and staggering through grey stones,
And the black flag planted in your yard
Unfurls
Through ponderous evening, reaching
Twisted tendrils under the door, turning
The key once only at the sound of the old bell.
Do not ask for whom it tolls.
Then thrasonical morning wakes
To an empty clatter, a putrid smell,
And a rooster crowing thrice.
“Well all I’m sayin’ is, it ain’t as if I didn’t warn him.
And don’t you come blamin’ me neither, I’ve had about enough o’ that.
Oh, so now you want a lump of ice. Well, I’ll give you somethin’ o’ that an’ more:
ALL ABOARD FOR MILE END.
Just you listen when someone’s speakin’, and maybe next time it won’t go this far.
I’ve told you once, if I’ve told you a thousand times –
And I ain’t one as goes beatin’ ’round the bush –
ALL ABOARD FOR MILE END.
And just ’cause you’re coals and coke the both o’ you
Don’t go thinkin’ I’ll sport the blunt, ’cause I won’t.
You shouldn’t ought to ha’ got cut and carried if you can’t support yourselves.
And just you warn Danny, too, ‘afore he goes and does the same.”
But now we sit on the banks of the river,
Weeping, for we remember Babylon.
In our veins the same blood flows,
Burning like poison, shining through our skin –
And it behoves thee, smile.
His lidless eyes flickered at the knock upon the door,
As the raven croaked once and not once more,
But the more he saw the less he spoke,
And his coat was made of good roast beef.
So shall we all be, though we may depart with greater poise.
We bury the dead where they’re found, and the rest is noise.
Have you heard of the girl who breathes flowers? by Lauren Rawlings (Highly Commended)
Have you heard of the girl
Whose fingertips are always frozen
To compensate
For the warmth of her heart?
The girl whose world is made of poetry
When she picks her words so
Meticulously
Crafted from the blossoms
Of her sequestered meadow
As she strives to unearth
Nothing less than
The perfect bouquet.
With the perfect selection
Of flowers
From the dangerously
Delicate
Colourful carpet
That thrives even after
Being trodden on
And left sodden
When the moon cries
Tears made of
Poison.
From afar
Her perfume may taste of
The tranquility
Of the crisp frosty crunch
Of fallen leaves
On a frigid
But gentle
Misty morning.
But up close, her redolence
Is more reminiscent
Of petrichor
After a downpour,
Or the lull in
A billowing thunderstorm
As it surrenders
Just for her.
Just for a moment.
Leaving her pellucid
But decorated
With remnants of raindrops
Like fingerprints
Or footprints
Stamped in the mud
Dampened after the rain.
Have you seen the girl
Who lives with dirt
Tucked underneath
her perfect fingernails?
Petals incessantly
Falling from her sleeves
Under which she hides
The mystery
Of where her seeds are planted
And how she can perpetually
Be so
Floriferous.
The secrets lie
In the soil
In her meadow that may not be
As perennial
As it seems to be from above,
And perhaps the reason
She plucks her words
So particularly
Is because sometimes,
After the fall of toxic teardrops,
She might not have much
To choose from.
So if you ever hear of the girl
Whose eyes are open
Even
When they’re shut,
With seeds sewn
Even
Into the roots of her eyelashes,
Know that if you get close enough
And she welcomes you to see
The crumbled petals
From tempered tufts of tulips
Of the ephemeral pastures
Where her bouquets of words grew
She must see
Your heart made of
Honey
And a crackling fire
Burning in the palm of your hand
With a lust
For lively thunderstorms,
Just waiting
To warm her
Frozen fingertips
And welcome her
Home.
Mum by Rahim Mohammadi (Highly Commended)
I’ll find ways to keep you, mum
They say you’ve gone insane
You’ve always been my shining sun
But now there’s cancer in your brain
I see your worth
Something the illness can never claim
The beauty inside of you
Like a clam, you can never claim
Doctor says you’re dying
I don’t think they are trying
No compassion, care or hope
as your light slowly starts to fade
I wonder how I’ll cope…
I can’t work out the truth, what’s real?
I don’t know how to feel.
I don’t think you are sick, mum.
Maybe you can heal
Only 6 months left to cherish life
You were once someone’s loving wife
There’s so much more life to live,
There’s so much more life you could give.
I’ll find ways to keep you, mum
They say you’ve gone insane
You’ve always been my shining sun,
But now there’s cancer in your brain
I’ll push against the storm
Work 2 jobs, maybe 3
We’ll stay above the sea of debt
We’ll make it mum, you’ll see.
There’s no current that could take us down.
But our ship is rocking and the sea is rough.
Don’t worry mum, I know you’re tough.
But the scent of death is looming.
As my thoughts start consuming.
The blood’s in the water
And the sharks are near
You are already dead, Mum
The hour is here.
On an island, just you and me
As your spirit drifts out to sea
I’ll find ways to keep you, Mum
Your soul is taken away as swiftly as the breeze
The pain, the fear, bring me crashing to my knees.
The hallways which once echoed your laughter
Now lay quiet as the door slams against the rafter
Frozen in time, stopped in its prime.
I still smell the rosemary and thyme.
Scents from a better time.
We’ve fought a long battle
You tried your best,
but now it’s time for you to rest.
I couldn’t find a way to keep you, mum
You ended up insane
You were once my shining sun,
But cancer took your brain
I am sorry …
I can’t keep you, Mum.
Queensland Times Award- 14-15 Years
Beat Highway by Emerson Hurley (First Prize)
drifted,
untethered from everything
in a haze
of taxicabs and boxcars,
and the apparition of 5th Avenue
dissipated like
a recollection,
and I was left lonely by the highway
in infinite New Mexico;
I saw
the million eyes of night
burning in the supernatural glow
of the cityscapes,
lonely souls
moaning wordless lamentations to each other
like riverboats wandering
the Midnight Mississippi,
winding down to deathly dark;
I walked arm in arm
in the small hours,
always a child,
down tortured passageways
down sundrenched boulevards
with blinding sincerity,
spoken softly in the most
lucid hours of
the night;
I danced,
with feet of tin
tip-tapping on the cobblestones
in the sodium pool
of a streetlamp,
in the pounding basement
pierced by cold water
and cigarette smoke,
jazz,
and the unearthly saxophone
wailing all man’s miseries
and solace;
I saw salvation
dashed apart
and risen
and dashed apart
again
and again,
ecstatic visions,
heard the
eli eli lamma sabachtani
scream
above the roofs of the tenements,
the roofs of the skyscrapers,
the roof of the world;
I was the vision of America,
the voice of America,
the conscience of America,
America’s agony
and reprieve,
American evil
and magic and dread
and brilliant hope of
deliverance,
America’s journey
down the highway
into night
and day
and
Utopia;
I screamed
joyous
hysterical
lunatic revelations
to the desolate stars
and wept bitter tears of solitude
for all humanity;
I
LIVED.
Sparks by Jena Woodroffe (Second Place)
I let you stay in my neck of the woods,
Because yours got too dark.
You became weary of the looming shadows trailing behind you,
So I lit my candle.
It could never compare to the sun
That disappeared when night fell,
But for now it would do.
It chased away both your shadows and my own.
However, I often found myself standing in the circle of light,
Scared of what will happen when the flame flickers out,
And my neck of the woods,
Becomes just as dark as yours.
Marco and Me by Emerson Hurley (Third Place)
We imagine ourselves solemn,
bearded, silken, eyes closed,
sunset filtering chromatic through our eyelids,
prismatic through amber wind chimes
tinkling, plashing
in the pools
and the gentle wind;
chimeric evening,
suspended in time.
We imagine ourselves wandering,
pleasantly aimless in the cool light
along the moonstone paths
meandering like rivers;
we imagine rivers
winding luminous through the night.
The reflecting pool shows
but our rippling selves;
in the squares of the chessboard,
in fragmented shadows,
we discern
everything.
The traveller is one
who stands in the Bazaar of Mirrors
and in the tumbling noise and colour
sees himself clearly in the glass;
the traveller hangs above the void
and knows
the infinite unknown.
At journey’s beginning
I imagined he said
all possible cities
hang spectral in the mind
like lanterns above the twilit streets;
and on return they are extinguished,
and only the real remains,
which is itself a deception.
So that,
he said,
and here opened his eyes
and drew a breath of smoke
through the pipe
we may only truly say that
we exist
here,
in this sequestered peace,
apart from the world;
and the smoke rings drift up
into the eternal sky.
Sp( )ces by Emerson Hurley (Highly Commended)
The first thing you could remember
was
absence.
It absorbed you,
softly in each corner of your mind,
the knowledge of
something
(that, once, you’d
had)
(you thought and did not realise)
that, now, you had
lost.
So complete it has been!
That vision,
that
(artificial)
truth,
those brushstrokes
guided by reality,
definitive,
that hung in the background
(upon which everything
was built),
mutely.
(speaking in your ear)
You scarcely noticed when
the cracks appeared,
shot through
(your entire being)
the backdrop –
until,
suddenly,
you did.
You saw –
(that they’d been)
no reason at all.
(there all along)
And betrayal spun around you
like dust,
or ashes.
The mangled, misted photographs
(faded)
stared daggers
when you didn’t watch them.
The ticking of the clock
slow and steady gunshots
from behind.
(Kill off the underlings of memory
one by one)
(Keep the culprit for
comfort)
You breathed a sigh
and
(without thinking
or even feeling)
put back with relief
what had been
(a piece that was once
so certain
was)
removed.
(and could not,
despite the subterranean efforts,
be restored)
Continuous Places by Emerson Hurley (Highly Commended)
I want to wander
in the morning hush
through the nimble streets
streaked pink and grey
by the ephemeral dawn
floating like dreams
or silence
among the watchful cornices
and untethered windows
where the sleepers stir
and walk the path I walk
in dreams
speaking the steady changeless words
that form the quiet daybreak conversation
drifting in snatches of
Good morning dear
and the tender touches
like fragments of unknowable melody
pirouetting with wastepaper in the breeze
among the quick and airy tracery
of the swallows
that wing loops around
the axis of the earth
in twisting solitude
so far beneath
the last soft refrains
of the spiralling stellar dance
and so far above
this timeless instant
that never pauses to
draw breath
The Spoken Unspoken by Heidi Leeman (Highly Commended)
you can feel it in the air between us
I can feel it
I always can
the truth
it crushes our bones
knits our knuckles together
forces ties around our necks
where our hands once lay
fingers that teased through minds
and slipped love into roots
now choke the ease out of conversations
it nips at our exposed shoulders
that are naked to the world
collars that once bore it
now break beneath it
we were once combustion
confusion
conforming not to the molds of the world
but to the chasms in each other’s chests
filling and completing
explorers in every crevice and elbow nook
jumping from freckle to freckle with adventurer eyes
but suddenly
we fell
and we did not fall for each other;
we fell apart
we crumbled like the cliffs we said we’d never cross
and became just grains of sands on each other’s beach
we stumbled into the abyss
convinced each other that the echoes weren’t real
we stopped igniting
we weren’t conjoining
we aren’t aligning
now, we are just existing
next to each other
a whole bush fire between us
the world rages in flames
while we stand cold
unspeaking
yet moving our mouths
tell me, why am i so alone?
you are not the only force in my life
i have the wind that blows me in the right directions
and the waves that always drift me when i refuse to float
i have the forests that teach me to stand up for more than storms
and every cloud in the sky that gives me a new day
but I lack the warmth a night brings
no summer air
not even a campfire to tell me stories
it is just my mind
my thoughts
and the tears
always the tears
crying whole rivers into the night
washing away the soil you once ran on
cleaning my body of all the places your heart touched
I can’t reach them all now
not without you
maybe
if i stop crying all the time
the fire might spark again
would you love me?
would you hold me once more?
would you spin me like a globe in an antique store,
pin me against the wall like a faded map?
would you explore me with a compass,
and call me your world again?
then again, i’m not sure if being your world is enough
because you are every star in the sky
and every drop in the ocean
and every grain on my beach
you are the forest telling me to be tall
and the wind whispering “go on”
you are the whole universe to me
but in this whole universe
the space exists the same
i can still feel the weight between us
i can always feel it
lead on our tongues
bundles of burdens on our minds
our solitude weighing down the hope
it’s not enough to crush the world
but it’s enough to crush me
Magnetic Aesthetic by Te Aroha Manuel (Highly Commended)
Her body is a sanctuary for subtle glances and eager gazes,
Her porcelain chest is riddled with an array of freckles,
Spotty cosmos, unexplored constellations,
Oh how I wish my fingertips were rocket ships.
You could wrap a gift box in the auburn tresses of her hair,
Tug sweet poems from her sealed lips and sip red wine from her collarbones,
Inaudible whispers, bitter beverages,
Oh how I wish I was old enough to drink red wine.
If she cupped her delicate hands together, intertwined her frail fingers,
You could sprinkle soil in her palms and grow an orchard of flowers and fruit.
Hidden gardens, crippled leaves,
Oh how I wish I had a green thumb.
You could balance a warm mug of lemon tea upon her hip bone,
hang dream catchers from her shoulder blades,
paint masterpieces with her gnawed knuckles,
and sweep sugar with her eyelashes,
Magnetic, aesthetic, whereas I am pathetic,
Oh how I wish I were a boy, then my feelings-
I would not regret them.
*No Title* by Hayden Bradford (Highly Commended)
Individuality, what became of thee?
The world has me choking,
Diminishing my plea!
We are all following duplicity; it has everybody fooled.
And those who break away and stand,
Are shamed and ridiculed.
What happened to uniqueness?
Big boned and confidence?
No makeup, natural beauty, assurance being the essence?
You were smothered, and choked in the expectations,
Of skinny barbies and muscled men with no inner foundations.
We no longer strive to be different from the rest,
Instead, we follow mindlessly.
We have become obsessed!
So, rest in peace individuality, wish us the best of luck,
For we have abandoned you, and have run you amuck.
But I shall still follow you, and for you I’ll always pray,
That we will one day open our eyes, and that you come back to stay.
Broderick Family Award – 11-13 Years
Red Dress on the Hill by Olivia Priddis (First Prize)
Ash, flames and blood swelter around
Not a speck of green on the ground.
The sky turns red which causes great stress
As Mother Nature makes a mess
While the hillside is covered in her red dress.
The red dress has now spread around
Terrorizing all of the towns
Completed with some black lace
Covering all the vulnerable space
For nothing is safe from that destructive gown
Now we are all fleeing, packed with worry
But Mother Land is not sorry
Suitcases are full, tears grow
As we leave behind our triumphs and the woes
Now the blazing orange fire behind us quickly grows
Animals are crying, gasping for air
As they quietly sob with despair
Green and brown to black and red
We are driving past them filled with dread
No one speaks, we only stare, why has she done this, it’s not fair
Behind me our house lies in a heap
The first time I saw my father weep.
Mother gasps in agony at the sight
As she shields her eyes from the blinding light.
Into dirt, black lace seeps, never out of sight
The sirens suddenly become near
While the pitch black lace shows no fear
The fire has now reached its peak.
Sandpaper throats, we can no longer speak.
For Those constant screams will never disappear
Been years now, our town has thrived
Shocked of how we survived
The memories are still so strong
We shall always remember the iron will
Of that petrifying, blazing red dress on the hill.
No Time for a Joy Flight by Portia Hoole (Second Prize)
A start awake in my downy nest, the wailings of hungry nestlings
A painful growl, a yearning for nourishment
Swooping into a graceful dive, claws skimming dew-soaked grass
Wind whipping my face as I soar
Up into ocean blue
Through the gentle stirrings of air
It billows under my cottony wings
Smooth and soft – perfect to glide
But I must remember my hungry nestlings
(This is no time for a joy flight)
Over fields, crowded with grasses, dotted with small, smiling ferns
Over flowers, pansies and posies, rainbows after the last downpour
Yet my mind is focused not on these wonders, but “What shall I have for breakfast?”
A plump mouse? A wriggling worm, perhaps?
I shall decide when I find the place
But I must remember my hungry nestlings
(This is no time for a joy flight)
An ecstatic tingling coursing through
My bones and my soft, downy fluff
Each stiff feather
Quivers with delight
Right through a cloud
Coming out dripping
As if I dipped myself in the sea
But I must remember my hungry nestlings
(This is no time for a joy flight)
A gentle dive, a long, arcing parabola
Through dark air, between the contorted, gnarled branches of evergreens
Mottled feathers mingling with sharp needles, no prey could see me now
In the fertile ground, a pink, juicy worm
Head peeking above the earth
Swooping down, I can snatch it from safety
Oh! Yes I did
Hurtling back into cyan air, my heaven
I shall hurry home now
To my dearest ones and my cosy hollow
I could not forget my hungry nestlings
(This is no time for a joy flight)
Pa’s Tale by Anna Davidson (Third Prize)
When I was young and gullible,
my pa would tuck me in.
Then every night how I would beg,
great stories he would spin.
Believing every tale he told,
he never seemed that frail.
Now at his funeral I’ll recount,
This was his favourite tale.
This happened years and years ago,
when he was young and free.
He had a faithful crew and boat.
They sailed the seven seas.
Through fierce and angry hurricanes,
through terrifying waves,
through sun, and salt, and sea he sailed,
to find great treasure caves.
But that one night was much too hushed,
as he surveyed the scene.
Grey mists that blew around his ship,
were all that could be seen.
T’was pa who first did notice when
a nightmare did appear.
It reeked of death, gore and decay.
He felt despair, and fear.
Above the daunting hull of black,
a flag flapped in the wind.
The crest upon it haunted him,
the skull and crossbones grinned.
‘There’re pirates, man the cannons quick!’
Explosions, shouts and cries.
He’d put up one tremendous fight,
but soon they’d have their prize.
The roaring of the cannon’s blast.
The shudder of the brunt,
and soon they were aboard his ship,
so fierce a treasure hunt.
defending and attacking he
slew pirates everywhere.
But still outnumbered they were doomed.
Despair did fill the air.
But such sweet melodies arose,
and all the fighting ceased.
Pa glanced to where they all did stare,
at mermaids from the east.
How everyone was in a trance,
in love with their sweet tunes.
While everyone was occupied,
he killed the dumb buffoons.
He told me then, how he survived:
his love for Ma was true.
He couldn’t love the mermaids song.
Ma they could not outdo.
And though this story wasn’t true,
he was so kind and brave.
I am so glad that I knew him,
so sad he’s in his grave.
I’ll always treasure his tall tales,
as now I tuck him in.
I hope he will sleep soundly, as
great tales I hope to spin.
Grandma’s Cupboard by Jade Martin (Highly Commended)
I used to think that the creaky wooden cupboard,
That was smeared in lavender paint,
with bars enclosed in a dull hazel rust
and a spotted mirror on the door,
was art.
It was elegant in its own way,
The curves like waves on a raging ocean,
Every spiral like a minute snail shell
And tiny flowers dancing along the bottom.
I used to think that grandma’s cupboard was art,
Until he chopped it up,
As I was peering out the window,
And now it’s a bundle of wood left to spoil.
Sister Sister by Rebecca Linton (Highly Commended)
Sister sister don’t you worry
You may be young but you are strong
And let’s just hope there’s nothing wrong
Sister sister don’t you worry
Sister sister I’m so sorry
But nothing’s ever going to be the same
And we won’t have time for any more games
Sister sister I’m so sorry
Sister sister I know it hurts
But I promise you’ll be alright
Please just make it through the night
Sister sister I know it hurts
Sister sister please don’t cry
Yes, you may be bald but you are ALIVE
And even with no hair, you will SURVIVE
Sister sister please don’t cry
Sister sister it’s ok to be afraid
You are amazing, you are brave
You have the courage that I crave
Sister sister it’s ok to be afraid
Sister sister just hold on
It’s the end of the race, the final sprint
And I can’t imagine your eyes without that mischievous glint
Sister sister just hold on
Sister sister please don’t go
It’s been so long, and we’ve come so far
What will I do without you, my shining star?
Sister sister please don’t go
Sister sister this is the end
But you’ve accepted your fate as you take your last breath
And fall into the tranquil hands of death
Sister sister this is the end
Sister sister, oh how I love you so
You’ll always be with me, in my heart
And now I realise that you’ve been there from the start
Sister sister, oh how I love you so
Delicately by Talia Bulstrode (Highly Commended)
The small seed sits in the earth.
It has no sense of happiness, sadness or mirth.
As it wonders what it will be like when it is a tree,
It sits in the soft, brown earth …… delicately.
Around it are many other seeds,
Wondering, wondering what great deeds
They will do for the earth, which desperately needs
The eventual help of these small white seeds.
As the sun clasps the curtains of night in its hands,
Small shoots poke up through the earthy sands.
The sun goes down, the moon rises high,
A leaf unfurls, grasping for the sky.
Green eyes blink. Wings buzz by.
The tree sees so much, yet has no eyes.
Branches appear, more leaves show
All around, green things grow and grow and grow.
Flowers bloom, red seeds bubble
Out from the trunk, just like stubble.
The cool breeze blows, seeds fall free
Touch the soft earth …… delicately.
The Queen of Demons by Rebecca Linton (Highly Commended)
A mother rides through the darkness of night
A child clasped in her arms so very tight
Her breaths come short and her face is white
Looking down at the child with eyes so bright
“Mother! Mother! Look and see!
Morrigan rides here beside me!”
“Hush, dear child, for we must flee,
Away from the places where evil roams free!”
“Come with me boy, follow me home,
I have treats so sweet, your mouth will foam
Come with me boy, follow me home,
Come with me now and you may play in the loam!”
“Mother! Mother! Can you not hear?
The words that Morrigan breathes in my ear?”
“Hush, dear child, we must disappear!
Do not make a sound, do not shed a tear”
“Come with me boy, you must be fair!
My daughters shall tend to you with sisterly care
They will feed you chocolates, and braid flowers into your hair
Come with me boy, for time cannot be spared!”
“Mother! Mother! Morrigan speaks!
She offers me sisters, she offers me treats!”
“Hush, dear child, or she will get what she seeks,
“Do not listen, dear child! Else courage, she defeats!”
They reach their destination and the child falls silent
The mother knows that they cannot be forever defiant
Yet she sighs in relief, to be far from that tyrant
Away from the place of treachery and violence
But somewhere
In the darkness
Morrigan waits
Words on her lips
As she dreams of their fates
An army of demons
Stand by her side
Lusting for war
And things long denied
The demons roar
At horrors unseen
And Morrigan smiles
For she is their queen
Rabbit Proof Fence (Ballad) by Hayley Victor (Highly Commended)
The story that we’ll hear, about the Rabbit Proof Fence
Is one of amazing courage, the distances were immense
But three girls were determined, “We’ll walk back home!” they swore
They had to see their mothers; they broke the white mans law.
Molly and Daisy and Gracie, they had a perfect life
Until the white man came, and put them into strife
Despite the fact they fought, all three girls were caught
Driven away in a car, that left their mum’s distraught
The girls were sent on a train, what a long ride it was
For it was not exciting, scary in fact ‘twaz
To Moore River they went, trained by Mr Neville
The girls already there, called him Mr Devil
Mr Neville’s mission, find the kids that were white
He sent them to school, oh what a fright
Molly and Gracie and Daisy, they found this kind of funny
Molly whispered to the girls, lets escape while it is sunny
The girls took great caution, when they left the camp
To cover their steps carefully, the ground needed to be damp
So Moodoo couldn’t see, where their feet had been
They hid behind a tree where, they could not be seen
They trekked on even further, until they found a man
Who gave them kangaroo, its colour was quite tan
They continued walking further, until they found a house
They spotted a group of chickens, they must act just like a mouse
Oh no they got caught, taking the chicken’s egg
The lady got upset, the girls started to beg
“Okay, stay the night, but you must leave tomorrow
Here are some jackets to wear, these are just to borrow.”
Moodoo came that night, searching for the runaways
He could not find the girls, they were now stray
They walked on even further, they’re getting quite tired now
Molly spotted a man, they walked over somehow
The man said “your Mother” and pointed at Wiluna
Gracie was so excited, she wanted to be there sooner
She was quite lit up in joy, the other girls not so much
They didn’t reply to Gracie, they walked away as such
Molly and Daisy walked, they said he could be a crook
You never know these days, everyone’s on the look
For someone doing something, that could be no good
Gracie ignored the girls, in pure silence she stood
Molly said to Daisy, she will come I know
But Gracie did not follow, she walked away slow
She walked to Meekatharra, to see her mum she hoped
Moodoo was waiting there, to catch her while she moped
Molly and Daisy walked, very far indeed
Into the desert slowly, water was in need
They were dehydrated, they even passed out
Until the eagle sang, that left them with no doubt
They suddenly realised that, home wasn’t far away
They continued walking further, they couldn’t bare to stay
Further and further they walked, only seeing the moon
They were distressed and sad, reward was coming soon
Persistence paid off, they found their mums at last
Reunited with hope, they teared up real fast
As for Gracie that is, life isn’t neat
Molly and Daisy though, they wouldn’t miss a beat
My Grandmother’s Masala by Soraiya Munshi (Highly Commended)
Bubbling and sparkling in the yellow liquid
I see the chicken and the carrots,
But I wonder if I saw the red blasting chillies.
As I take a sip from my spoon
I taste the spices dancing on my tongue
The cinnamon and zeera coming into my head
I smell the cloves tickling my nose
and is that spice stars I see with my bare eyes
The Secret Life of a Clock by Rebecca Linton (Highly Commended)
I tick-tock all day
I am a time keeper, a time handler
I can control actions, movements and events
Sometimes time flows through my hands like desert sands
And sometimes it pours slowly like thick sludge when I’m holding a grudge
Because I am the master of the day
Contrary to what people say
And when that belief is defied or my wishes are denied then I tend to simply… stop.
My hands stop ticking and time seems to freeze
Only restarting when I please
Things do get quite chaotic
And my ticking is rather hypnotic.
I wonder what it’s like to be a watch
The Education Of Lonely by Louis Langoulant (Highly Commended)
Aloneness
Is the empty space
That is filled with deflated air
A traditionality
Is to fill that space with frivolity
But sometimes one wonders
What if you learn from that feeling?
Rather than attempting to console yourself with insubstantiality
One wonders
What if?
Ipswich District Teacher Librarian Network Award – 8-10 Years
Why Willows Weep by Abby Jennings (First Prize)
Oh ancient wise one what have you seen?
The world when it was new and green
Where creatures roamed about the land
Free from harm at human hands
Oh king of the forest what have you heard?
The gentle flapping, the wings of a bird
War and guns, violence and greed
Words of hatred that grow like a weed
Oh tall majestic one what have you felt?
A gentle breeze, the snow at its melt
Smoke, fire, the feel of the saw
Acts ignoring nature’s law
Oh ancient wise one what do you know?
That man will reap, what man will sow
When Cancer Won by Lillian Crocos (Second Prize)
A petal falls from my flower
Like an apple not far from the tree
It slowly makes its way to the ground
And my heart strangely skips a beat
Another petal follows and lands on top of the one before
It feels like I’m being torn up inside
And slowly falls one more
My bones now start to break
The floor is my new bed
I beg the petals to stop as the pains intensity spreads
Then the last petal falls
And my heart beats one last beat
My hand grip on the stem loosens as my eyes flutter shut
I fought so hard, but my final battle I have lost
Now all that’s left is my body
In a hospital bed
This is what it felt like the day that cancer won.
You Are my Star by Sophie Roussos (Third Prize)
Like the cry for rain from dry, cracked earth
I needed your warmth and kisses at birth.
Like a spark of light in a dark, cold cave
You steered the ship and stood silently brave.
Mum, you showed me how to bake a cake
How to make my bed and the leaves to rake.
You make me hot chocolate on a chilly night
And hold me tightly when I get a fright.
It’s so much fun when you teach me to sew
And you make my bear a brand new bow.
I like it when we play with dolls
When we dance real silly and we go for strolls.
You give me food, lots of love and protection
You offer advice and show me direction.
You tell me, in time, to use my wings
To fly on my own and see what life brings.
I love you mum; you are my star
You shine me light and you’re never too far.
What I hope to give you, in return, is pride
A mountain of memories; a leap in your stride.
Like a ray of sunshine, in a day of gloom
The sweet songs you sing, brighten my room.
Like the sound of voices when someone’s alone
It’s you I look forward to, when I’m coming home.
The Poppies Shine by Coby Fields (Highly Commended)
The sun came up
The moon went down
The poppies rose above the brown
The boy, now man lay down his gun
World War One was finally done.
Shake and Quake by Bridget Warren (Highly Commended)
Devastating earthquake
Destroying with jagged crevices
In the blink of an eye
Toppling the town like Duplo
Breaking hearts and homes.
A Night at the Beach by Amelia Sim (Highly Commended)
The sound of the sea echoes through my ear,
The colour of the shallows is sparkling crystal clear.
Shadows from the mangroves creep into the blue,
All the fish are sleeping and the sharks too.
The seagulls above are searching for a meal,
But instead, they only see rippling teal.
The moon hovers above the rough blue sea,
The whales upon the shore feel sadness, not glee.
A grey tear falls from a stormy cloud up high,
The whales lift their eyes and heave a deep sigh.
When the sun soon rises, sadness will fill the air,
For another day at the beach brings grief and despair.
The Chestnut Stallion by Eleanor O’Brien (Highly Commended)
The great chestnut stallion, his beautiful mane fraying,
And down the great cliff I hear his mares neighing.
But then I hear the sound of the gruesome gun,
And all his mares and foals gallop and run.
But the stallion defends and rears;
Facing the gunshots that he bears,
While his mares gallop safely away.
But I will remember him, deep in my heart, he will stay,
Golden mane tossing,
As he starts bossing ,
His mares away.
Remembering Ipswich by Lilli Williams (Highly Commended)
Remember when the stars shone bright upon the Yuggera people
When paddle steamers chugged up the Bremer River
And you could see the church with the steeple
Remember when the old buildings had a big clock tower
You can still hear it in your heart going tick tock tick tock
I can feel its mighty power
Remember when the Woodend miners would leave the mine
Looking like a dusty shadow
And marching like soldier ants in a line
Now the Jacaranda tree flowers and time has moved on
With pools, shops and schools
Another stage has already begun
So many changes that I can’t count like the number of stars in the sky
I wonder if the Yuggera people look and try to find the hiding stars
It makes me think what time will bring to the next people passing by
Fury Skies by Clodagh Cowman (Highly Commended)
The storm crept up to the Sun and swallowed it whole.
It called for it’s thundering friends who were now loading up with fury and bolts of lightning.
As Mother Nature saw what was happening, she started to cry tears of sorrow and unhappiness.
The trees looked to the heavens with astonishment and worry.
The dangerous storm threw its lightning to the Earth with happiness and glee.
The flowers begged and pleaded the tears to stop flowing.
The mighty wind blew the violent storm and his colony of friends beyond the Sun.
The Sun fought its way through the mouth of the storm, stretching it wide and hard.
It slowly transferred the sadness of the land to high spirits and cheeriness.
The Water and the Wind by Jackson Martin-Blakey (Highly Commended)
The water danced with the wind as the moon shone light through the veil of sky.
The sun swayed with the earth as the trees gently rocked back and forth with the ticking of time.
The ancient mountains smiled as the water and the wind danced in the cool of the evening.
The boats rocked happily around the pier as the ground heaved to help the Earth spin.
The clouds bounced around in the sky while watching the stars transport beams of light as the water and the wind waltzed throughout time and time again.
The Charge of the Light Horse Brigade by Amelia Sim (Highly Commended)
Starting at a weary walk – really slow,
We soon make out the bombs distant firey glow.
The mounted troops start a gentle trot,
We are all doing it – the lot.
Our horses start – they get a fright,
But us, the soldiers, carry on with all our might.
We push on to a dusty canter – quite fast,
My mate fell off his horse – I hope he can last.
Now we charge – at full speed,
My horse and I take the lead.
Onward we race – the bullets come thicker,
We jump the trenches, take the foe and so…
VICTORY!!!!!!
Zoo Family by Olivia Boase (Highly Commended)
My family is a zoo.
My Dad is the brave lion, strong and ferocious the leader of the pack.
My Mum is a vigilant snake, powerful and always protecting her precious young.
My annoying little sister, Liliana, is a nosy meerkat, an annoying creature that sneakily takes and steals my food, toys and my most treasured items.
My other little sister, Ella, is a monkey, irritating, loud and always full of never ending energy!
And I, I am the extra spiky hedgehog, warm on the inside but tough and thorny on the
The Campfire by Arabella Basha (Highly Commended)
The chunks of blackened wood,
They fall away to create pure white ashes,
Smouldering ashes,
The red-hot coals create a fiery glow,
Offering warmth to many a toe,
The smoke,
Snaking its way round the circle,
The flames,
A glowing blue to a deep orange,
Curling flames
The heat is intense,
But the campers don’t mind,
They share stories between mouthfuls of heavenly s’mores,
Nothing gives joy more than the campfire.
Colder, Colder, Colder by Amelia Sim (Highly Commended)
30 degrees to 10 degrees,
It’s getting colder, colder, colder.
Autumn leaves fall gracefully from the trees,
Blowing in circles in the chilly breeze.
Change fills the sharp air everywhere,
Woodsmoke wafting from somewhere.
Warm to cold, light to dark,
Happy squeals to a howling bark.
Dew crunches on the lawn in the morning,
The grazing animals are shivering and yawning.
Frost clings to darkened wet leaves at dusk,
Smells of crisp cold damp air musk.
Lying on the couch, warm and snug,
Sipping hot soup from a steaming mug.
Colder, colder, colder.
Winter by Pippa Ellis (Highly Commended)
Drip drop snow shall fall
Tick tock goes the clock on the wall
Then I see the land is bound
Deep snow yet warmth is found
Outside this time has passed
But in my heart it shall last
With snow as cold as a splinter
What is this time called?
Winter.
The Never-ending Sahara by Huntar Paterson (Highly Commended)
The sand dunes look tiny compared to the steep, jerky mountains in the distance,
Sand as gold as the sun looks like it goes on forever,
A perished skeleton of someone long-gone is to be seen,
And the wind whistles and whips the skin,
Beneath the blinding sun.
As it gets darker the animals come out,
Scared half to death as a death stalker is coming closer,
Then feel the soft, fluffy fur of the fennec fox going past,
Spy the radiant addax with its horns as big as big as spears,
The minute Scarab beetle leaves tracks in the sand.
The sound of village children laughing fills the air,
As the smell of traditional food tempts one to join,
Happy smiles are everywhere,
Women balance water jugs on their head,
In the clustered village.
River 94.9 Award – 5-7 Years
Eels by Freddy Davey (First Prize)
The eel can slide from side to side.
They’re really big, and like to hide.
They have long bodies, but no hair.
They use their eyes to see with care.
They taste your scent if you are near.
And spark a threat for you to hear.
It’s wise of you to clear their way
So you do not have an awful day!
Night Time by Caterina Falco (Second Prize)
I love Night Time!
As I look out my bedroom window I see the magical moon.
It lights up my backyard with its silvery glow.
The twinkling stars make the sky shine so bright.
I wish I could touch a star – they are amazing and so so sparkly.
When I lay down in my bed and before I go to sleep, I hear the bats
and possums beginning their day, rustling around my yard.
My dreams will now be filled with light while I lay my head to sleep the night.
Creepers in the Daytime by Leo McNally (Third Prize)
Creepers in the daytime
That’s alright
Now that it’s nighttime
They give me a fright
They move like a snake
And slither and slide
Hisses they make
Around they glide
I fight them with a pick ax
When I see them in the day
I hit them in the backs
It’s a good game to play.
I found a new HOME now by Ariba Omar (Highly Commended)
I have many friends from different countries,
But why do we need to treat someone special when it’s not needed.
I don’t need our sympathy,
Neither do I need money,
I just need a pat on my shoulders,
A nice smile can also brighten my day.
Why do people scare when I am addressed as a Refugee?
Is it so SCARY?
I don’t think so.
I have not come here to snatch your happiness and peaceful life,
I will not take your jobs too.
I just need peaceful sleep and want to see happiness on the face of my parents and siblings.
I love multicultural Australia,
I am not scared anymore.
I sleep peacefully throughout the entire night.
I love my freedom.
I really want to stand on top of the mountain and shout that I am happy NOW.
I can look in the eyes of the sun and can point out that the rays don’t affect me anymore as they are rays of happiness and hope in my new life.
Now I can proudly say that I have a place which is my HOME now,
I have my extended family-the whole country which has embraced and accepted me, my parents and my siblings.
Cars by Zachary Strickfuss (Highly Commended)
Cars are fast.
Vroom! Screech!
Cars are fancy.
Bang!! Crunch.
Cars are loud
BAM! Roar!
Cars get broken.
BAM!! Bang! Kapow!
Waiting for my true friend-not anymore by Ariba Omar (Highly Commended)
I have many friends,
But I am still waiting for my true friend,
Who would love and will not bully,
Who is sweet, caring and a bit silly,
Hope I find my true friend soon.
Bullying is not good,
It destroys our complete childhood,
My friends mocked at me and made me sad,
I cried, and cried and felt very bad,
But in the end I told everything to my dad.
My dad took me in his arms,
He talked and calmed me down at his farms,
He said: I am beautiful, clever and intelligent,
I do not need a true friend,
As I can be a friend of myself.
Now I do not want a true friend,
I love myself and I am my best friend.
I am a Bird by Ariba Omar (Highly Commended)
I am a bird,
Cluttering and fluttering,
Under the sun glittering,
And sometimes shivering,
Flying all over the world.
The sparkling water, the green grass,
The race with the bees, joy of missing my class,
I am enjoying the sight,
Because the day is so bright,
And sailing like a knight.
Why the sky is so dark and full of smoke,
Are they burning trees of oak,
Could see blood everywhere,
Also hear the soft prayer,
But a deep silence in the air.
Oh ! This is the war-zone,
Hungry, innocent children and people are monitored and killed by drone,
Sound of the gun-shots could be heard,
This is my last word,
Wish I did not fly all over the world.
Cowry Shell by Holli Lang (Highly Commended)
When I find a cowry
I sing special songs while I hold my bright blue thongs
I look through the rocks and the curly-lock seaweed
I can hear the sound of the sea
I can hardly believe the whistling of the trees
The wind whips my hair over there
It moves the leaves of the trees
When we’re all worn out
And when we get home
We all paint our nails
For dinner we have fish
It smells like the salt of the sea
We will all go back tomorrow
I love the sea