Selected stories
Hand in Hand / Skin to Skin
2025, Published in Nature-Human
I come from a big family. One-hundred of us. Cozy, compressed, our layers of latex so close that when one of us leaves the box, it’s always a lingering good bye. Those nearest cling on as their skins are separated.
But we always leave in pairs. We find comfort in that.
Petrichor
2025, Published in Stranger Weather, Grattan Street Press
The man calling himself Lyle Mueller parked in the motel lot and scoped out the rooms: white doors, tarnished brass numbers and windows with unanimously drawn curtains.
He popped the door and stuck a leg out, gravel crunching under the sole of his boot, feeling the press of static against his tingling skin. He could smell the impending rain: porous soil and leaves, all eager for a downpour.
Killing Murray Darling
2024, published on www.writing.org with thanks to Future Leaders
‘Killing Murray Darling’ was the winner of The Writing Prize 2024,
written in collaboration with Anna Kosovac.
Red dirt kicked up from the tyres of Claire’s rental as she pulled up to the boat ramp. Maps had seemed sure enough, and the e-mail had mentioned the boat ramp, but there was no-one waiting.
The Fourth Wall
2024, TEXT Journal, Volume 8, Issue 2, October
ScriptIt churned out a list of ideas for Season 41 of ‘The Gang’. Ten seconds, twenty episodes. I deselected a few. JJ had spent the entire last season in a coma, so it was too soon for him to be marrying Sally in a dream sequence. And Zippy had come out of a birthday cake in season 15, so it didn’t make sense for his newly discovered identical twin to be doing the same now.
The Great All
in The Saturday Paper, 25 May, 2024
Everything was warm at the start. I was one with everything, like a pizza with all the toppings. A joke that wouldn’t make sense for aeons.
This was the time of the All, when I shared my pulse with the Earth.
Speaking in Tongues
2023, Kalliope X, Issue Five: ‘Summer 2023’
The morning of January 12th, 2020, began as a regular day for surfer Wynand Brouwer, who spent the morning in the water at Milnerton Lighthouse, in Cape Town. Just a few hours later, Brouwer was admitted to the Groote Schuur Hospital, reporting symptoms of slurred speech and an itchy, pins and needles sensation in his tongue.
Booster
2023, In Reverie, Issue one
I’ve never gotten used to the liquid breakfast, but it’s the only way to get all the vitamins, minerals, amino acids, and steroids you need for a healthy body — and a half-way healthy mind — without an all-day IV. My father was basically held together with spackle and Band-Aids by the time he hit fifty. He was forever complaining about his bad knee, swollen prostate and herniated discs. I just noticed my first grey hair, so the shakes work, but eating through a straw doesn’t have the charm of pancakes.
Chekhov’s Coconut
2023, In swim meet lit mag, Issue four: ‘Flip’
The boat arrives at sunset, pulling in under a fruit salad sky. Pineapple, melon, grapefruit and mango, all layered under coconut clouds. The wind whips the waves up into a meringue froth, and I wonder if they eat pavlova in the Pacific. The boat bounces up alongside the dock and I move from fibreglass deck to wooden jetty, my stomach grumbling a thank you. Much longer, and I’m afraid I would have added my own gastrointestinal rainbow to the crystal water.
Buenos Aires
2022, in Resilience: a celebration of poetry, fiction and essays, Mascara Literary Review, 15th anniversary anthology, Ultimo Press
Resilience looks upwards to the ever-changing, ever-present skies, where fingers and fist touch the horizon. Resilience is often deeply imagined and hard won. Resilience, by turn, is fervent, supple, rhizomatic, generative. Like the beguiling evenness of an orchid, resilience is enduring and delicate.
To celebrate its 15th year Mascara Literary Review presents their first print anthology, featuring writing that addresses and explores the theme of resilience through fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction. In this anthology, writers explore the multiplicity of resilience – rebellious and experimental, paving the way to reclaim, rewrite and amplify. Resilience offers a futuristic and promising gaze into the future: What does it look like? How did we get here? What have we lost and/or inherited?
Resilience is edited by Michelle Cahill, Monique Nair and Anthea Yang.
Ter-Mine-Nation Day
2022, in Meniscus Literary Journal, Volume 10, AAWP
The beat of a helicopter’s blades kills the silence on our last morning as a country. I try to find it against the glaring blue sky, but with the sun overhead I have to squint. It’s little more than a dragonfly in the distance by the time I spot it. ‘Do you think they call them choppers because they cut up the sky?’ Ellie asks. ‘Machines like that have cut up the whole world.
The Sting
2022, in [untitled] issue 10, Pinion Press Melbourne, Australia.
‘The Sting’ was awarded 2nd place for the [untitled] short story award (2022)
The lift stopped with a ding, followed by a too-long pause before the doors opened. Apparently it was an energy saving feature – super sustainable – but it made Jeanine nervous. That pause felt just a hair longer every time, like this might be the moment the doors decided it would be more efficient to just stay closed...
An exciting issue that is a collection of the [untitled] short story competition longlistees, which was judged by award-winning author and story wizard Laurie Steed. The issue features an editorial from Blaise van Hecke, and short stories by Shaun Allen, Ben Redwood, Daniel T. Car, Anna Miller, Natalie A. Vella, Nancy Podimane, Katrina Burge, Jane Downing, Seth Robinson, J.A. Gleeson, Mick Davidson, Rosemary Dickson, Megan Howden, Vicky Daddo, Bon-Wai Chou, Shaun Allen, and Tyler McPherson.
Watch Me
2021, in Everything, All at Once, Ultimo Press, Sydney, Australia.
’Watch Me’ was selected as winner of the Ultimo Prize and was the opening story for the collection.
Endless sunshine bleaches the curtains and wears the nerves of a woman stuck inside. A chance encounter with a stranger changes the course of a life in small but significant ways. An imagined audience drives people to the extreme. A young woman wrestles with inheritance and loss.
Compiled from the winning entries of the 2021 Ultimo Prize, this collection represents Australia’s next generation of literary talent. Their work is forward-thinking and provocative, exciting and surprising. Beautifully designed by George Saad, Everything, All At Once is populated with characters seeking comfort and connection in an uncertain world.
Fresh Air
2020, Aurealis Magazine #136
The wind felt hot enough to break the skin. It blasted the exposed patch between the cuff of Corrie’s coat and her glove, warning of future blisters if she wasn’t careful.
‘Shit.’
She fumbled with her sleeve, stuffing it into her glove, then lifted her gaze to the east, and even through her goggles found herself squinting against the steady blast of wind. She looked out across the blackened hills and the sweep of dry earth that had once been bush. The fires had taken care of the eucalypts. Now, there was only a scattering of deadwood carcasses jammed into the ground…