Samia Goudie is a Queer Bundjalung woman currently living on Ngunnawal country. She has published widely both as an academic working in health and the arts, and as a film and digital story maker. Samia is a member of Canberra based UsMob writers and FNAWN, First Nations Australian writers network. She has received an AFC mentor award for a short award winning film US Deadly mob and has had four documentaries screened and toured at festivals. Her various digital story projects are available on line and archived with the state library Old and FNQ’S Indigenous knowledge centres. Samia received a Fulbright fellowship in 2006 based around research in creative practices using digital story telling as a method to archive oral stories using new media and as a curative healing practice in First Nations communities dealing with intergenerational trauma. She has had multi media/word/installations and exhibitions of visual art and poetry at various locations including the Wollongong gallery, M16 gallery Canberra, ‘Territories’ at Laboratory of Arts and Media (LAM/LETA) University of Paris. Her multimedia/artwork has been is held in private collections nationally and internationally.
Samia has been publishing poetry and short stories more frequently over the last several years and has works published in the Southerly, IWP Iowa press, Wakefield press, Norton and Norton, 3CCmedia journal, Aiatsis Press, Too Deadly: Our Voice, Our way Our business (Us Mob Writers anthology), Giant Steps (2019) and What We Carry (2020), Recent Work Press and Routledge press. More recently she was highly commended for her submission to the Varuna First Nations Fellowship which gives access and support to Varuna’s residential writing space in the Blue Mountains. She has also won support and runner up with the Boundless Indigenous Writers Mentorships, supported by the NSW Writers centre and Text publishers, which matched her with Melissa Lucashenko as a mentor for her current work in progress, which is a novel.
Box
Won’t fit in The box
Hard edge
Cold steel
Sharp
Refuse, Resist
Don’t fit, won’t fit, can’t fit
Tried
Believe me I tried
Even the box rejected me
There must be something wrong
I contorted, twisted
My shape, my voice
My hair, my hands,
You even tried to alter my soul
I was never enough
Can’t fit
sit still
Move back
sit down
shut up
Refuse, Resist
Even when you medicate me,
debate about me,
label me,
Nah,
Aint nothing wrong
with my voice, my hands, MY shape
My gender, my colour
who I am
I am large and round
have limbs bound with the roots of trees
I can touch the sky
Inhabit stars
Why would I give any of that up?
To fit in your box
It
There is fear haunting us in shadows
Now walking amongst us in full sunlight
Unavoidable
My friend, tells me,
In her community nearly all the Elders lie dead.
There is fear haunting us in shadows
All those Stories gone
All the language lost
Who will teach the young?
Was it like this
When the tall ships sailed in?
Fear grips my broken heart
And now like the last cruel blow
her 11-year-old niece
HAS It
There is fear haunting us in shadows
She attends funerals everyday
They drive hours to stand in long lines
hoping today they can get a Vaccine
Instead of body bags
She asks for prayers
Please pray for us
She always ends her posts,
Miigwech
It’s raining here
I’m so far across the southern sky
Across the wide ocean
a dark afternoon
clouds brooding
Banksia’s dancing
oblivious
These days
On a good day
I spend time outside under open sky
Seeking solace where none seems possible
There is fear haunting us in shadows
I choose to turn towards the sun
Miigwech
NOTES
Miigwech means loosely, thank you, in Anishinaabemowin also known as Ojibwa. However, it has also a tone that conveys respect and request, recognition and integrity. Gratitude.
Marcelo Svirsky is a Senior Lecturer at the School for Humanities and Social Inquiry, University of Wollongong. He researches on questions of social transformation and subjectivity, decolonisation, settler-colonial societies and political -activism. He focuses on Palestine/Israel, and addresses these topics by drawing on continental European philosophy – particularly the works of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault. He has published several articles in the journals Cultural Politics, Subjectivity, Intercultural Education, Deleuze Studies, and Settler Colonial Studies among others, and various books and edited collections: Deleuze and Political Activism (Edinburgh University Press, 2010); Arab-Jewish Activism in Israel-Palestine (Ashgate, 2012); Agamben and Colonialism with Simone Bignall (Edinburgh University Press, 2012); Collaborative Struggles in Australia and Israel-Palestine (2014); After Israel: Towards Cultural Transformation (Zed Books, 2014), and together with Ronnen Ben-Arie – From Shared Life to Co-Resistance in Historic Palestine (Rowman & Littlefield International 2017).
Barren
Grown to provide
And for no other task,
That was the might,
Of those roses
On a shared soil,
They grew,
Just, and no more than,
To service life as roses
And when the spells changed,
Their house,
Forced by trade,
It was made barren.
Barren of a vile craving,
That sent you without regret,
Making the land a castle,
By giving harvest a name.
Of your tears and cries, barren,
Of your pain,
Barren, until your return…
‘Roses of Sharon’, refers to a field of roses in the Plain of Sharon in Palestine (Ottoman times). The photograph 1900-1905 was part of a collection that was initiated and published by Underwood and Underwood and was accompanied by the book Traveling in The Holy Land through the Stereoscope, written by Jesse Lyman Hurlbut. This photograph, was presented in March 2017 as part of the exhibition ‘Time Machine: Stereoscopic Views from Palestine, 1900’, at Brown University (US) and curated by Ariella Azoulay and Issam Nassar.
Josie/Jocelyn Deane is a writer/student at the University of Melbourne. Their work has appeared in Cordite, Australian Poetry Journal and Overland, among others. In 2021 they were one of the recipients of the Queensland Poetry Festival Ekphrasis award. They live on unceded Wurundjeri land.
News of Animals/Nature is healing
The waters of Venice are clear, almost. There aren’t any sudden swans or dolphins out of the blue, the elephants do not get drunk in tea-fields cleared of the social distancing efforts of the redoubtable Yunan workers. It not even the same photo of the same elephants, curled up like content ammonites. Meanwhile deer in Nara prefecture, Tokyo, without their vinegar/grain crackers from tourists, inquire after safe food in the metro, empty malls, galleries of “Western” art, disinterested as that one doe in a cathedral, or that one dog meme, sitting in a flaming cockpit bottom text I Have No Idea What I’m Doing, going viral, haphazardly. Nature is recolonising Venice, says the owner of the Venice Hilton. “The water is so blue and pure”, she says. “Nature has no name, only what is given”. You’re still in quarantine, buses are still trickling over your window, you look at your arm, primate hairs poking through sunburn.
Gay Jesus as You
I like gay Jesus almost as much as I like you. I like the water congealing in his side, clear trans- -substantiation, from a cop’s spear as much as I like you. The touch enflames, the matter -of-fact saying now things will be different: your body will not be that of your forebears. I like the orange pips with gay Jesus’ face inside, conch shells on the shores of Galilee whispering Christ is come to the thirsting ear as much as I like you. I like the hole he made of his rib-cage, a beautiful before-after mastectomy photo, of his hands like a glory-hole almost as much as I like you. I like the time passing and time to come, time hiding like the devil in a stratum of chalk/sandstone, the outline of an Ichthyosaur or bird-dinosaur, saying Christ this is a long time to yourself… as much as I like you. I like the generations of spiders you hate— the parallel church of our gay, eight legged lord they form— that saw gay human Jesus saying nothing in their language going back to cocooning their food as much as I like you. I like the sense of a gay beginning and ending, the word split, tentatively as much as I like you.
Paul Collis is a Barkindji person. He was born in Bourke, in far north/west NSW. His early life was informed by Barkindji and Kunya and Murawarri, and Wongamara and Nyempa story tellers and artists. Paul grew hearing traditional stories of Aboriginal culture and Law. He earned a Doctorate at University Canberra in 2015. His first novel, Dancing Home, won the 2017 David Uniopon Award for a previously unpublished work by an Indigenous author, and the 2019 ACT Book of the year Award. Nightmares Run Like Mercury his first poetry collection is published by Recent Studies Press in 2021. Paul lives in Canberra and teaches occasionally at University of Canberra.
(26th January) – Mend That !
I’m too black to be Blue… too black I am, to be true Blue Aussie, like you. I’m not like Johnno and Crew, too black I am, to be that Blue. so no happy birthday, Australia, or Oi, Oi, Oi, for You!
Situation In Sydney…
“Na. Not doin’ that. Not goin’ to rehab”. And then, there’s that silence. You know?
Denial, everywhere. Denial in silence.
(her skinny little body, a tremble. her eyes fill with shame and pain) I search her face for a sign, for one little memory, of her.
She knows what I’m looking for. Eye’s overflow. “I’m sorry, Uncle”.
I think of Christmas morns in PJ’s, and her, lost beneath a mountain of wrapping papers.
Laughter with smiley faces. Tears of joy as seven bells rang out loud.
Everywhere the Christmas bells.
Think . . .First day at school and new uniform, slowly turn into first cigarettesand later to boyfriend kisses.
Movie dates and birthday cakes, and she slowly slips away into a grown-up world. For a moment, for just a moment, she’s back – that shiny face littlekid back with me, for a second.
I searched the city for a bed in a Rehab. But all the beds were taken. All the doors turned closed.
Despair. Now everywhere despair.
Everywhere…
Black Sisters….
They’re all buried out there, near Fred’s grave. All in a line. We lovingly called them ‘The Black Sisters’. The Nuns built a small little place for the dying, named it Bethlehem…old drunks and cancers from grog boys and old girls went there and were nursed by these beautiful Nuns until they passed on. They were dearly respected and loved by us Murrdie people in Bourke…The Black Sisters were Ours. Most of the Nuns worked the rest of their life and died in Service at Bourke. An Aboriginal man suicided in front of their Altar one night after being jilted by his lover (a married woman). Duncan’s suicide announced the end of the Nun’s service in Bourke. When I was back home there 3 years ago, I ran into some of the Blacks Sisters at the Bakery, early one morning before going to Brewarrina. “Lovely to see you Sister’s” I happily said. “Lovely to see you, Brother” one Nun spoke, as they all held their hands in prayer position and bowed to me. “I think you Sisters are all Barkindji now, hey! Its so good to see you again. Will you be here long?” “Not long. Ha ha…Not Barkindji, ha ha.” The speaking Nun joked. “Just a short visit, this time.” she finished. “All us Aboriginal people…. we all love you, Sisters” I said and began to wipe tears from my eyes. “As we all love You,” Sister concluded. I waved goodbye. I walked to the car; it was already a hot day, revved up the air con and we drove the dusty road to Bre. I began thinking of kindness and love acts. The next day was my last one in Bourke that trip. I went to the Cemetery to say goodbye to my deceased relatives. I noticed fresh prayer papers at the graves of the Black Sisters. I realised that it must have been one of the purposes of the Nun’s visit, all the way from India again was to pay their respects to their Black Sisters.
At the 2020 Emerging Writers’ Festival, our special projects editor, Jo Langdon edited emerging author, Dani Netherclift’s prose poem, a reflection on life in the pandemic, “Haunted Autumn E/merge, is an exploratory video performance of Dani’s work and other featured writers, produced by Pip Gryllis from the Emerging Writer’s Festival.
Varuna Mascara Fellowship
We were delighted to partner with Varuna in 2019 for a Varuna Mascara Western Sydney Writers Fellowship which offered a one week, all expenses paid residency at Varuna, a publishing consultancy worth $800 & and a manuscript appraisal with Giramondo Press. This is an innovative and prestigious opportunity for a Western Sydney Writer currently working on a poetry, fiction, or creative non-fiction manuscript.
We would like to congratulate all the shortlisted writers; the manuscripts were of an excellent standard. As judges we considered quality and originality of writing. Our thanks to Varuna, the Writer’s House and Create NSW for this opportunity for Mascara to support excellent writing.
Shortlist
Jessie Tu “Field Notes on Language and Voicelessness”
Adele Dumont “Elsewhere”
Dave Drayton “The Poetranslator”
Shannon Anima “The Running Game”
Jessica Seaborn “Tommy Brewer”
Winner
Karina Ko lives in Sydney where she graduated in Law and in Arts. Her parents came from Hong Kong. She is working on a collection of short stories.
Judges Comments: We were impressed with Karina Ko’s original voice, tackling awkward, often political topics like class, ethnicity and queerness with a surreal and surprising imagination.
Brenda is a writer and artist of Wiradjuri and British heritage. She has written three poetry collections and her next, ‘Inland Sea’ will be published in 2021. Her poems and reviews appear in edited anthologies and journals, including Australian Poetry Journal, Overland, Quadrant, Southerly, Westerly, Plumwood Mountain and Best Australian Prose Poems 2020 (MUP).
A Walk in the Park
Outside my window the street has lost all certainty. At first light there is an
uneasy haze, patterns drifts in and out of focus. On most days I am left with
this waking dream, a shadowy sense of the world closing in. Fear the dream
is becoming a reality, a life of dissolving shadows, disappearing pathways. I
wait for sunlight to bring definition, solidity to a row of pines. Under winter trees, I disturb patterns of bare limbs thrown across grass, circle the pond where shade swallows a mass of reeds. My mirror image trembles, shaken by wind over water. With the sun overhead, a shadow closes in, a hunchback weighty at my shoulder. Larger than life my companion looms ahead. I quicken my stride, strengthen my hold on ground tilting sideways, but it catches up in seconds as I change direction. Look back at the giant striding at my heels.
Distancing
Isolation is now the default position for us all. To avoid the close down, we all have to find our own escape. Forget the measure of a city waiting to keep us in place. I am used to silence. For someone who likes to venture into solitary terrain, dreaming is my way out. Some say distancing is dangerous, but I have not disappeared. Inside this room, the air is full of ideas. Best thoughts build into songs, stories of Country. I sense the sound and smell of dry forests after rain, crackling under leaf litter. I have not disappeared. I am still moving, writing sacred places into memory. Words take off, hang on air like dust motes, scatter ahead as random thoughts on red earth country. Landscape grows sparse, arms and legs turn into branches smelling of mulga wood. I feel a slow cooling as my feet take root in water stored for the changing times. Some say I have already faded too far. May never find a way back.
Petra White lives in London. Her most recent book is Reading for a Quiet Morning (Gloria SMH 2017).
The Visit
Because I was permitted to
I waded through water.
Eyelashes still as the tiniest fronds.
The pond pure sleep,
a demon thrust down into the dark,
the nestling of elm roots.
Then the slow drip of colour
in the mind, a friend
for the seconds the light held.
I walked out into new darkness,
where I was permitted to go,
the moon waiting for me
like a piece of enchantment
I was taught to resist.
The moon, with its grey blotches,
splintery daylight,
white as as my father’s face.
The Typist
The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights
Her stove, and lays out food in tins.
T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land
1
Unseasonable as a warm winter, pale on an utterly rainbow afternoon.
Not begging to be heard, not begging at all.
Here, everywhere, outside the window, on the streets and in the parks
danced men with twig like women in their ravenous arms, a dance
like that of creation, half terror, half the terror of love.
I fumbled into my small
red revolting car that smelt of rain and clattered with dirty coffee cups.
In traffic waited like a stumped parrot on a rod.
Then windows wide, the brashest air gushing in.
Fleeing melancholy,
I drove and drove and never ran out of fuel.
And the road did not run out, the world turning in the sun’s glimpse.
Unbearably fresh the yellow flower fields
blazing in the heat
like crowded slabs of hell
the yellow flowers
blazing like tomorrow,
when I land and weep
the yellow flowers blazing like my skin
behind a hot windscreen,
pounding me into the here, the trickle of sweat.
When body becomes body,
nothing more
only the flowers seem to sing.
2
See the muscular roos they leap above the nose-tickling weeds,
their flanks curved like machinery, paws bristling about the thin line
that is neither heaven nor hell but the tickly brush of the instant, barely tolerable.
Oh humans. Grainily composed of future and past,
who are, Rilke said, forever saying goodbye.
Suppose I got my teeth down into the instant, and lived there,
who would I know? The ‘open’, he called it.
How a spaniel enters a room and is instantly part of it,
how he knows just enough to get by,
fixing on a human like an apple grafted to a pear.
How a woman puts her head in her hands after a difficult conversation, how another says,
I am a tree planted halfway up a hill, I cannot spread my canopy to the top.
How the human hope sparkles everywhere.
3
Where is the chorus that wails around the car,
who sings the notes that make suffering true?
Melancholy silvers the tongue with ice,
freezes the self.
More light, more light.
Soul sits on a high shelf and eats breakfast,
the moon is a broken cabbage below her.
The god that created hell
and the hell that created god.
The strange joy of desiring nothing.
Wide sweep of road
and the waving spinifex know no minutes.
Only blank sunshine, desert.
The car carries nothingness,
empty seatbelts glinting in the light.
4
I stopped at a roadside diner and ordered chips, the only food, with ten different sauce bottles,
prepared in the bubbling silence and grubby neon light of the lonely diner
where nine people lived in the midst of vast planetary scrub and wind-bent trees,
feeding giant road-trains that arrived and left with a million lights dancing
each driven by one poor-postured man all day and night in solitude.
Colossal swathes of road like time, stretching before and after.
I sing the whole human package with its clutch of knowings,
the heart with its grappling of love, statistically half open a quarter of the time.
The body that travels like Ophelia into the estuary with hands outstretched
and nothing in them but reeds and echoes
of when the dust of the present washes off the fingertips entirely.
A journey unfolds of itself as the road unfolds beneath the tyres.
And then I turned toward death, my durian-scented hitch-hiker.
Life, he said, that reddish glow, it yet haunts your cheeks.
He spoke and as he spoke I could not choose but hear.
I stand like an animal with life and death intermingled in me, not unlike you
who have never felt more alive.
What if I offered to take you off your own hands now?
What would you say?
He said, like one who could not politely be refused.
The smell of chips ghosted the car.
The black road had gripped my soul.
I prayed for a stay of dawn.
And I clutched his thready arm.
Can we be friends instead? Will you visit me again?
Before long, he said, before long.
And vanished, leaving me with the long haul of life.
Always asking, what next, what now?
The formal voice that sings the formal notes.
Nicole Smede is a musician, poet and educator of Worimi and European heritage, exploring a reclamation and reconnection to ancestry through language, poetry and song. Her work has been broadcast on national and international radio, published in anthologies and journals and features on ferries, in visual art and sound art works. Nicole is grateful to live, learn and create on Dharawal country. https://nicolesmede.com
Baraya
I hear voices of ancestors
crossing this country
spirit awake
with an anxious energy
I tread carefully
amongst old Lore
Yii
batjigan barray
gulawyn
bikan*
old grandmother trees
usher me
to ancient summits
where songs ebb
and flow with the wind
passing through
open palms
they travel
the songlines of my body
stirring the spirit within.
*this (is)
dingo country
koala
platypus in Gatthang
Cicadas
The landscape vibrates loud
bending branches
beaming brightly from boulders
an intense hum of wings
where fearless thrill seekers
deep sea divers
dropping downward
abandon
rocky shelves overhead
trembling under our feet
stoney shoals set
slippery steps
balancing
immersed in cool silence
we tread tranquil waters
arcadian
arching apex
achilles
toward the embankment
we tread water
and the soundtrack rings loud
in our ears.
Rosemary’s Rocks
Yellow blossoms –
like bright shards of light
disrupt this green and grey landscape
they’re early this year.
Damp moss softens
underfoot moulded steps
trail behind
and I ascend this rocky slope
does it, like the trees
recall my last visit?
Resting here
senses sharpen
birds in syncopated song
cut through crisp air
and mist
suspended
between ridges
clings
like the cold to the tip
of my nose
Rose Lucas is a Melbourne poet. Her first collection, Even in the Dark (University of WA Publishing), won the Mary Gilmore Award in 2014; her second collection was Unexpected Clearing (UWAP, 2016). She is currently working on her next collection At the Point of Seeing.
She is also a Senior Lecturer in the Graduate Research Centre at Victoria University
Family Portrait Van Dyck, c. 1619
In their best Flemish clothes – lace ruffs and jewelry, brocaded fabric –
this young couple gaze intense and hopeful
out of the canvas;
they lean toward me as though all this
were as fast as the shuttering
of a lens;
their bonneted child,
dandled on her mother’s knee,
looks behind and up –
she has no need to look my way;
Her parents are vibrant with youth and prosperity,
their connection to each other,
their pride in the child;
like every family – holy in their ordinariness –
they hold the unfolding generations
squirming
in their richly upholstered arms:
Look! we have made this future – it belongs to us.
Only consider –
(and here the benefit of hindsight) their willingness to pause, to sit while a painter composes studies takes their likenesses in pigment and brushstroke, placing them
lovingly within the rushes of time –
Look carefully –
hold fast to the slipperiness of this moment –
it will not always be like this.
From Mallaig
Heaving out from the harbour, its narrow lean of wooden houses, salt-weathered in a cloudy light –
a ferry clanks and judders picking its way past little boats, their tangle of nets
and out into the slap and wash of darkening water:
stink of diesel and fish swim in freshets of air,
rubbing cheeks into ruddiness;
until the hump of island
sails into view – its possibilities of destination, palette of smudged greys and greens
flickering through the glass;
the angular spine of the Cuillins scrapes against
a loamy sky,
writhing in channels of wind;
while, deep in boggy fields, something shifts,
restless in peat –
These tannin-soaked fields,
this permeable membrane,
this elongated moment when a boat might clip and ride,
a shoreline in sight.
Amanda Lucas-Frith lives on Wangal land in Sydney’s inner west with her partner and two children. She’s a communications and publishing consultant, and is currently completing the final subjects of a Master of Strategic Communication at UTS. She attended the 2019 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and is a member of Youngstreet Poets. Her poems have appeared in Snorkel and Cordite Poetry Review.
Border Protection
My life in lockdown looks
the same as it did before—
I search for my daughters’
hats, make snacks and play-
dough, and lavish colour
on each letter of the alphabet
just to tickle my tongue
to yellow, lilac, vermillion.
So many ways to make
bright things brighter
now the days close
and open like paper
fortune tellers. I write
to silence the chatterbox
to a single answer
and in this imaginary,
wage my Machiavellian
war against the diminutive
queens that surround me,
nesting between bathroom
walls or fortified around
the cubby house. The pest
control company kept
its social distance and said
they only use natural
chemicals, but at this stage
of the pandemic, I’ve lost
my organic moral advantage
and crave the kind of
annihilation only pesticide
can give. In the face
of diminishing freedom,
it’s curious how much
I desire to tame the dissenting
rattle, to be listened to
and obeyed as the single
absolute power of my
house, not minding at all
the cognitive dissonance
of wanting my daughters to
only do as I say, and never
as I do.
A Bright Room
When you arrived, I snapped
open like a purse and the surgeon
lifted you out, one sleek penny
at a time. He held you
level to his gaze and assessed
you like a rare coin, while a wake
of midwives pressed their fingers
to your mauve flesh.
Your father cut the cord
connecting us and we waited
for your cry in the bright room,
under the theatre light, where nobody
had mouths and every pair of eyes
held mine. I looked up to see,
reflected in the light’s mirror,
a kaleidoscope of myself
separate to my body—a ruby smile
from hip to hip—not mended
but altered by a blanket stitch.
Born again in a sea of sedatives,
I saw you there first: pools of black
gusting the surface to glass.
You arrived as a southerly wind
howling to the bright room,
your squalling cry cooling to my
touch, as I held you skin to skin.
Josie/Jocelyn Deane is a writer/student at the University of Melbourne. Their work has appeared in Cordite, Australian Poetry Journal and Overland, among others. In 2021 they were one of the recipients of the Queensland Poetry Festival Ekphrasis award. They live on unceded Wurundjeri land.
Paul Collis is a Barkindji person. He was born in Bourke, in far north/west NSW. His early life was informed by Barkindji and Kunya and Murawarri, and Wongamara and Nyempa story tellers and artists. Paul grew hearing traditional stories of Aboriginal culture and Law. He earned a Doctorate at University Canberra in 2015. His first novel, Dancing Home, won the 2017 David Uniopon Award for a previously unpublished work by an Indigenous author, and the 2019 ACT Book of the year Award. Nightmares Run Like Mercury his first poetry collection is published by Recent Studies Press in 2021. Paul lives in Canberra and teaches occasionally at University of Canberra.
Karina Ko lives in Sydney where she graduated in Law and in Arts. Her parents came from Hong Kong. She is working on a collection of short stories.
Brenda is a writer and artist of Wiradjuri and British heritage. She has written three poetry collections and her next, ‘Inland Sea’ will be published in 2021. Her poems and reviews appear in edited anthologies and journals, including Australian Poetry Journal, Overland, Quadrant, Southerly, Westerly, Plumwood Mountain and Best Australian Prose Poems 2020 (MUP).
Petra White lives in London. Her most recent book is Reading for a Quiet Morning (Gloria SMH 2017).
Nicole Smede is a musician, poet and educator of Worimi and European heritage, exploring a reclamation and reconnection to ancestry through language, poetry and song. Her work has been broadcast on national and international radio, published in anthologies and journals and features on ferries, in visual art and sound art works. Nicole is grateful to live, learn and create on Dharawal country. https://nicolesmede.com
Rose Lucas is a Melbourne poet. Her first collection, Even in the Dark (University of WA Publishing), won the Mary Gilmore Award in 2014; her second collection was Unexpected Clearing (UWAP, 2016). She is currently working on her next collection At the Point of Seeing.
Amanda Lucas-Frith lives on Wangal land in Sydney’s inner west with her partner and two children. She’s a communications and publishing consultant, and is currently completing the final subjects of a Master of Strategic Communication at UTS. She attended the 2019 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and is a member of Youngstreet Poets. Her poems have appeared in Snorkel and Cordite Poetry Review.