The Plastic Beach

Sulphur wafted up from the bubbling Santorini island caldera as crowds of young people holding their noses, lined the white cliffs from Oia to the harbour. The nylon sea nets to keep out the rubbish had dissolved, allowing plastic bottles, dirty nappies and garbage bags covered in yellow foam, to beat on the base of…

In Xanadu

For David Ireland While the skid marks of life are happily cosseted in their beach front properties supported by seven-figure investment portfolios, in a country town, which once employed steel workers, there are no yuppies lining up to buy the asbestos-clad weather boards and erect glass palaces Satan would be happy to live in, although…

Icarus also Flew

‘Truth is a mobile army of metaphors’, Nietzsche JIM’S JOURNAL Justine had left her husband a year before and had taken me as a lover. She was 35, ran a small music store and looked like her name sake in The Alexandria Quartet, with olive skin, high cheek bones, green eyes and black hair. There were…

A Beginning

Amree’s sandals were one size too small. His toes ballooned and the heel strap chaffed. They stretched when wet so he’d quickly dunk them in the swimming pool before he’d wipe down the white plastic sun lounges, put the towels out and fish the leaves out of the pool. He liked the first hour of…

In the Blood

The knock on the fly screen door rattled down the corridor of my old rental house like a small stone in a tin can. As I opened the front door, an orange corona appeared around the frizzy henna-head of a woman in her early 60s, as the sun set behind her. The woman had graduated…

The Witch of Goodwood Road

All writers have a witch story which often involves a young boy, a small town, a faithful dog and an old woman. I ain’t saying all of this story is true because I’m old now. When I look in the mirror, I see my grandfather but the giggling boy is still there, spinning his outlandish…

Symphony of the Pots and Pans

Two grand pianos stand in the music room covered in dust. Geoffrey pulled the blanket over his knees. His pyjamas draw string had broken so he stayed seated on the old sofa. Cars passing down Elsternwick road on a wet Saturday morning sounded like a G note sustained in a large, empty concert hall. “I’ll…

The Lantana Code

In a waterless brown land with fat white people fixated on property prices, as the 24-hour news cycle weaves fear and hatred around a tattered body politic, a secret government plan was concocted in the grass-covered bunker of Federal Parliament, to hound the poor of their welfare overpayments, whether they’d been overpaid or not. Built…

The Kiss

Adam Adamson was young enough to know a kiss was not just a kiss. The prosecutor delivered her summary in a voice which could snap carrots. Adam’s kiss was sexual assault perpetrated on a young woman who never saw it coming. The jury of nine women and three men nodded. The reporter’s knees in the…

The Avian Rig Veda

Not much had changed in 50 years. Clea lay on the bed and watched the ceiling fan wobble, moving hot, humid air around the bedroom. The broken air conditioner lay on the floor next to the fly screen. From her balcony, the Malabar Coast stretched north and south with the tropical Kerala jungle running down…