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Journal

Funded by Copyright Agency, Department of Local Government, Sports and Cultural Industries, and our Founders Circle, Journal is an online column hosted on the Centre for Stories’ website showcasing writing by local, national, and international writers in support of the writers’ sector that has been heavily hit by the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The column includes stories of creative non-fiction about real personal experiences. Stories of migration, daily life, sexuality, labour, family, and relationships. Journal serves as an immediate response, directly or indirectly, to the pandemic, and will provide a historical snapshot of those responses.

Read Journal here.

DEATH BY CHOCOLATE by Tiffany Ko

'Gingerly, I unclasp the diary and open to the first page. It’s titled: 2nd February 2003. And underneath: Today I had death by chocolate cake.'

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CODE INDIGO by Baran Rostamian

'In navigating and surviving dating-app-dates (D.A.D.’s for short), it is entirely vital to have some sort of escape system – although not necessarily one this elaborate...'

GATHERER by Karen Wyld

"Writers are seekers. We seek out images, new thoughts, adventure, and tales to tell. We look for meaning in all that we see, hear and feel. Gatherers are both seekers and finders."

Image of two hands side by side, with a piece of red string tied to each ring finger.

LETTER TO MY MOTHER by Tania De Rozario

'If I sound cold, it is because I am. The minute I understood my trauma had currency, you stopped being my mother and started being material. This icy attitude is how I survived.'

Illustration of a man yelling at a small child as she cries into her hands

VISIBLE WITNESS by Adele Aria

'Since we’d left, and during any this visit ‘back home’, I would hear about things like this. It painted the picture of how we needed to be grateful for where we lived now, but also so careful. We didn’t know how quickly things might turn, again.'

Illustration of a desk with a typewriter on it.

SOMETHING'S NOT RIGHT by Manohar Shetty

'...I have notebooks and diaries dating back to several years crammed with such first drafts. Often these drafts are barely legible. But they’re there, at no risk of being wiped out by a virus. The flow of ink on paper is still an unmatched sensation.'

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THE OPPOSITE OF PAIN by Kaya Ortiz

'Shame is the unwanted legacy I am learning to leave behind. It began with my nose, the nose I inherited from my father, and his mother, and who knows how many mothers and fathers before them.'

Illustration of a pregnant woman at the doctor

STOLEN MINUTES: AM I A BAD MOTHER? by Sandi Parsons

'Numbers can't explain willpower or the territorial mothering instinct that ignited the moment I held my son for the first time. My urge to nurture and protect my son continued to grow, and it required an abundance of willpower to set my mothering instincts aside.'

HONG KONG/BETWEEN HOMES by Siobhan Hodge

'I say moved, but we never really ‘left’ Hong Kong. My father still works there. My mother and brother live there as well. My sisters and I all have permanent residency. Before COVID-19, I could still safely say that I returned at least three times every year.'

Illustration of a person with black hair painting on a giant canvas

RECOLLECTIONS by Yoshika Kon

'I painted my portrait. It didn’t look like me. Closer to the assignment’s deadline, I realised that the colour of the paint I was using for my skin wasn’t quite right. The more I worked on my self-portrait, the more unrecognisable I became.'

Illustration of trees in a forest with small mushrooms at the base.

WHAT LIES BENEATH by Bindy Pritchard

'But lockdown has caused nature to encroach upon my ordered world. Tendrils have creeped into the cracks. I crave daily walks with the family along the Djarlgarra river and at Piney Lakes Reserve.'

BUS #242 by Barnali Ray Shukla

'The driver still furious, was chasing the Audi. I was still clutching onto the steel rod which had helped me unlike my fellow beings. A soundtrack of a war movie was playing in my head.'

Illustration of some papers, a cup of coffee, a pen, and a pencil

THE QUIETNESS OF GIVING UP WRITING by Ben Walter

'Writing is something we’ve spent years learning and refining, something that has formed our identities and how we understand ourselves; in giving up, we’re quitting before having the kind of success we might feel is warranted.'

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FACE FORWARD by Emily Paull

'When we spend too much time looking at ourselves in the mirror, women are labelled vain, conceited, self-obsessed, and yet so many of us, if asked, I am sure would say that we don’t like what we see.'

Illustration of a person holding a puzzle piece in each hand

SQUARE PEG, ROUND HOLE by Daley Rangi

'I spent a lot of my childhood in my own head, desperately protecting my squareness with aggression and confusion, ensuring depression as the world demanded more from me with each passing year.'

Illustration of tents in outback Australia

UNDER KIMBERLEY SKIES by Nandi Chinna

'As we have been taught to do by our Nyoongar friends, we pick up a handful of sand and introduce ourselves to the original owners and their ancestors and thank them for having us on the country.'

THE DEATH OF A GENTLEMAN DRUNKARD by Abhimanyu Kumar

'The women worked in the homes of the colony while the men ran the illegal bootlegging operations, with full knowledge and tacit encouragement of the police.'

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PLAYING WITH BULLETS by Randa Khamis

'I grew up hearing what we endured. Stories of a time that now seems oddly familiar with its parallels. Like being confined to your home, fear of the outside world, a threat lurking in the streets.'

Illustration of a person running through a park at night

I RAN (DRUNK, AT NIGHT) by Andrew Roff

'I’m in a nice, safe part of town, and anyway I’m a young man and my prefrontal cortex hasn’t quite finished developing, and I’m fast, so I have absolutely no fear of being assaulted.'

Illustration of a person with grey hair hugging a person with long black hair

SHARE, HOLD, KNOW by Kirli Saunders

'I’ll share the Dreaming, as it was told to me, so that our babies can be true to Mother, themselves and Community, so that their hearts can be full.'

SUSPENDED BETWEEN TWO NOTHINGS by Susie Anderson

'I told myself I wasn't moving to leave heartbreak behind, the heartbreak was in the leaving itself.'

CANDY, AN EXCERPT by Esther Vincent Xueming

'After moving out, I experienced a sensation of fragmentation that I never felt before. An unreal sense of existing in two separate places, of belonging and not belonging wholly to each space.'

Illustration of a lounge room with a television, couch and lamp

LANGUAGE BARRIER by Raf Gonzalez

'Being raised bilingual, language was one of the main ways I expressed my comedic self; but as I lost my fluency in Spanish, my vibrancy regressed and I became isolated.'

Illustration of a woman wearing a hijab walking along the foot path in front of tall apartment buildings

THE PERSON WHO SITS IN THE MIDDLE by Ati Aziz

'When a close friend asked me why I still wear my hijab when I no longer believe, I gave him a terse answer every time. “I’m just doing it for my family.”'

THE NESTING DOLLS by Luisa Mitchell

'The stories were passed down from one woman to another, and through them, you could still feel the embrace of someone who came before you; from here, from within yourself, the Mother said.'

Illustration of a small black bird sitting on a window sill

MUM'S VOICE by Vivienne Glance

'I didn’t realise it at the time, but these were more than mere words, they were a window into how she lived in the world.'

TO LEAVE IS TO BE GENTLY PULLED BACK by Chris Lin

'Maybe there’s something in the act of return where you’re not just retracing your steps. You’re folding back on time too.'

Graphic illustration of a person sitting with their back to a mirror

FRACTURE by Alexander Te Pohe

'in the sleepless hours i look out my window, wishing on a star nestled between tree branches. i ask the star to heal me. in reply, it blinks out.'

Graphic illustration of three people holding signs and protesting

NO AMOUNT OF BLACK COPS WILL MAKE THINGS BETTER by Veronica Heritage-Gorrie

'Come the colonisers, come the crime.'

graphic illustration of a person holding a CV

QORBAN'S STORY by Phil Sparrow

'They had some skills, but mostly they had a good attitude: learners, not experts. Poor rural people do not want city boofheads coming to tell them how to fix their lives up.'

Graphic illustration of cardboard boxes with household items in and around

SHIFT by Alyssa Shapland

'It was always jarring to come back; the hand-drawn ‘I Can Do It’ poster on the ceiling above the bed betraying the anxieties of the insecure teenage girl that I was claiming not to be anymore.'

Illustration of a family having dinner together

RECIPE FOR RHYTHM by Josephine Clarke

'I can close my eyes and hear it still – the patter and rumbling of the dialect in the cosy kitchens of my childhood village.'

Illustration of birds flying above rooftops

RADICAL LOCAL by Karen Lee

'Of course there were hills and valleys, I think I knew, but as I go slower, go over old ground, unexpected views emerge around corners in un-walked lanes, as I ascend slopes barely noticed before.'

Graphic Illustration of some flowers in a vase

THAT DAY by Sarabjeet Garcha

'But her passing was so sudden that she couldn’t glimpse her ‘flag of sky’ one last time. When eyes close without warning, who can tell what moment of beauty they freeze on?'

Graphic illustration of a barbed wire fence

DRAWING WHITE LINES ON THE WATER by Reneé Pettitt-Schipp

'After nine years of trying to make sense of what plays out at our nation’s borders, I am left with more questions than answers.'

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SOUND TRAVELS by Franchesca Walker

'The problem came at night, usually after I’d spent hours watching or reading the news. In that space – after dark but before bed – silence became a vacuum that worries rushed to fill.'

Graphic illustration of three people sitting around many giant books

HOPE AND MOTIVATION WHILE WRITING by Jasmin McGaughey

'I want to write my own love letter to my heritage, to show that First Nations girls, Torres Strait Islander girls and African Australian girls, can be in fiction and have adventures and be very important to Australian literature on a whole.'

Graphic illustration of two children drawing a picture

DEAR BARCELONA by Emily Siggs

'I learnt how to be lonely again, and how to be good company to myself; how to notice, how to try and enjoy every moment of solitude and bustling city noise.'

THE WORKSHOP by Boey Kim Cheng

'How to invite the moment into the span of the sentence, let the light of memory wash over the paper and the elliptical light print its shadow words on the page.'

Graphic illustration of a hand holding half of an earth with a house on it

SOMETIMES A SHADOW, SOMETIMES A FRIEND by Zainab Syed

'I learn early on that no matter where I live, I will always be too far away to make it home.'

Graphic illustration of a person driving a car with a large dog in the backseat

SISTERS by Jay Anderson

'And every time I saw her, her arms parted for an embrace and the corners of her mouth stretched to call me sister.'

Graphic illustration of a person with a mask on walking alone

THE SERUM, THE BLOOD AND THE WATER by Sampurna Chattarji

'I think of all the people with “weakened immune systems” walking miles and miles to reach home, without food, shelter or water.'

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MYTHS, DEMONS AND HEALING by Inez Tan

'I think becoming a writer means asking yourself again and again why you write, how to keep coming up with new ideas, how to trust yourself more, and how to keep falling in love with writing.'

Graphic illustration of a child riding a bicycle

LIKE RIDING A BIKE by Laurie Steed

'It’s pretty funny, I’ll admit, for there is always something ridiculous about trying to have things in your control, only to stuff it up.'

Graphic illustration of people lining up to embark on a plane at an airport

IT SMELLS LIKE HOME, IT SMELLS LIKE HERE by Saadia Ahmed

'Seeing how Australia dealt with this outbreak by putting people before profit made me slowly and gradually fall in love with a country that had started feeling like home.'

Graphic illustration of a street intersection

1.8KM FROM TARGET by Frances An

'My Vietnamese-speaking capacities recalibrate after a few lines but if she hears my messed-up accent, she’ll assume I’m a whitewashed Asian who doesn’t care about our culture.'

NOT PART OF THE PLAN by Brooke Dunnell

'My imagined child would spout endless questions, half of the words indecipherable, and squeal when we failed to understand.'

Graphic illustration of many different people standing in a crowd.

NO FICTIONS, NO MYTHS, NO LIES by Ashwani Kumar

'Everyone has a home except migrants, for it is displacement and dislocation. They build a home for everyone but can’t own it.'

Graphic illustration of two people who look exactly the same doing tug-of-war with a piece of rope

WRITING IN BLACK by Jannali Jones

'I set about writing what I thought people wanted to read about; a certain ‘Aboriginal’ experience that was expected from an Indigenous author.'

Graphic illustration of a woman standing with an umbrella next to a child also with an umbrella.

ALL LOVE BEGINS AND ENDS THERE by Camha Pham

'How are women not revered for this rather than being relegated to the sidelines? How did men manage to turn the creation of life against us? We are life itself.'

THE UNANTICIPATED LIFE by Tinashe Jakwa

'Looking forward to the future can be a worthwhile endeavour. But, I have found that it can turn into an all-consuming practice that can have a debilitating impact.'

Graphic illustration of a cat laying on a newspaper

THE PARABLE OF BANSI LAL BABU by Rashida Murphy

'"You remember Bansi Lal Babu?" asks my father, frowning down at me as I sit on the floor of our lounge, back against the wall, ginger cat purring on my lap.'

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