Winner: “The Case Inside”
Second Prize: “The Witch’s Bottle”
Third Prize: “Something You Should Know”
Commended:
“Clay ”1st Prize
Bill Reed (Vic), “The Case Inside.” A complicated, disjointed, difficult story, in the way that Faulkner’s Sound and the Fury is all of those things—not an easy read to begin with. However, “The Case Inside” resolves into a poignant drama of bent or broken, institutionalised people whose only possessions are their wishes and memories, whose only hope is each other. An impressive tour de force.
2nd Prize
Fred Curtis (Vic), “The Witch’s Bottle.” A skilfully executed “ghost story” that employs classic techniques used by well known writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James and Shirley Jackson: apparitions, visions and threats of harm by people with atavistic tendencies. At the end, the reader does not know if all uncertainty is resolved or if worse things are to come.
3rd Prize
Judith Eburn (NSW), “Something You Should Know.” A clever murder mystery centred on a hit-and-run killing of a woman who had been on her way to confess to her closest female friend that she had been having an affair with her husband, the same man who identifies her body. Did the murdered woman’s husband do it—he found the love letters—or the husband who was having the affair with her—he is relieved now that the affair is truly over? A page-turner.
Commended:
Erica Woolgar (NSW), “Clay.” A delicate story comprised of two related strands. After a chance encounter and an unlikely embrace, one art teacher (Julia) senses and asks Edwina if she is a lesbian, something the potter is astonished to realise: “I just knew something…” And that’s that between the two colleagues for the time being. In the second strand Edwina becomes more and more attracted to a beautiful and talented eighteen-year-old student at art college. “Perhaps it is my lost youth I’m longing for,” she thinks. She fears for the girl, wants to hold her and protect her: she longs to shape the clay, a metaphor sometimes used for teachers. Once more Julia sees and says what is needed about Edwina’s developing feelings for Hilary: “Every now and then you come across a girl with some special quality…it doesn’t happen often…and when you see it… You nurture it between the hours of nine and three, five days a week…for as long as the kid’s in school. Then you let it go.” And that’s that: a story that celebrates passion and simultaneously commends restraint.
Jenifer Hetherington (WA), “Paradise Slice.” Jenifer Hetherington (WA), A story of marital comings and goings, of men leaving wives and wives taking lovers, and of women’s gossip about such goings-on (Jo the protagonist quotes her father about marriages that “floundered on the rocks of desire”). When Jo’s mother flees an art exhibition by her friend Naomi, Jo speculates it is because the mother intuits from the paintings that Naomi is a lesbian, or that her mother and Naomi are lovers. When Jo says her mother is scared of not being alive, the mother counters, disarmingly, that she admires Naomi who “Every day of her life wakes up to something she actually wants to do.”
Bronwyn Mehan (NT), “Red Badge of Courage.” The date is the late 1930s or the early 1940s, the target the building between Liverpool, Elizabeth and Castlereagh Streets in Sydney. The bomber, who studies Marx and Engels, is “stricken with fear and indecision” but also strengthened by a commitment to Self-improvement, Organisation and Emancipation. But what does she have in her tapestry carry-all, and what does she have against the iconic Mark Foys department store?
Paula Jones (WA), “Red Caps.” A tense drama ingeniously played out between morning’s Captain Radio and a sinister caller-in. The slick radio jock, newly moved from community radio to commercial, despised as arrogant by colleagues but regarded as “a goofy breath of fresh air” by listeners, is out of his depth with the canny caller. The question at the end remains: who dunnit?
Rosemary Allan (Qld), “The Still Point.” A photographer from a cancer-prone family has a suspicious shadow on her lung in the X-ray. She guffaws when her radiographer hopefully tells her it might be a healed lesion from tuberculosis she had as a child. What follows is a long meditation on those who preceded her, the younger sister who died at 48, and the eldest, Gemma. She recalls the three of them together in their twenties at their grandmother’s for their father’s funeral, concentrating on weaving a daisy chain to shut out their grief. The day after they buried their father, dead at 52, the mother died (at 56) and they placed the daisy chain about her neck. On the flight to the South Island in New Zealand the narrator had read to the mother from TS Eliot: “At the still point of the turning world. / Neither flesh nor fleshless; neither from nor towards; / at the still point where the dance is…” Through her meditation and the photographs she takes, the narrator practices being dead, reaching the still point.
Winner: “A Real Gentleman”
Second Prize: “Conflicting Earthling”
Commended:
“Page by Page, Hour by Hour”1st Prize
Violet Macdonald (Tas), “A Real Gentleman” (13). Just before the funeral a bereaved wife reminisces to her son about how she met the dead man and what their life had been like, concluding he was a good man, “a real gentleman.” She tells of their seeing “Gone with the Wind,” of their dancing at the Belle of Bangor. But small details undermine her monologue, like the song bird that crashes into the window as she speaks, and the fact that young man can imagine her twirling in her white gingham dress but only sees her dancing partner—his father—as a faceless blur. A piece written with great sensitivity and subtlety.
2nd Prize
Thomas Patterson (NSW), “Conflicting Earthling” (15 y o). A variant of the French genre, the roman à clef, where the characters are thinly disguised parodies of real-life personalities—as in Phillip Roth’s novel The Pump House Gang which features Lyin’ B Johnson, Trick E Dixon, John F Charisma and, later, his remarried widow Jacqueline Charisma Colossus. In “Conflicting Earthling” the protagonist, named Aussie, from West Earthing (“by far the better part of town”) is a student at the United School of Arts (USA—think about it) where the leader of the gang is George W Bushell and another member is Aussie’s cousin Pommy. It would spoil the story to say more than that its central issue is Dubya’s overrunning East Earthing to gain control of its tobacco for which he has an insatiable craving. A topical romp.
Commended
Dawin Song (NSW), “Page by Page, Hour by Hour” (14 y o). A school student is caught in the tug of war between a mother who wants him to develop socially, not becoming too nerdy, and a father dissatisfied with the boy’s 58% mark when entry to university Law requires 99.50% and Medicine 99.75%. This well developed piece is as much about the mother as her son (she says, “I have to get out of this house. I can’t waste my life like this”). Required reading for all parents.
Gordon Qian (NSW), “Soot” (15 y o). A young student is conflicted about the “F” word, which his/her mother thinks s/he uses although s/he doesn’t; the mother knows the young person thinks it, and that is good enough for her. The confusion created by the fact that so many students at school use it is bad enough, but the hypocrisy of the teacher, who is overheard using it too, is worse. An informal disquisition on the evolving nature of language, especially slang, one that raises questions about what really is on the mother’s mind...
Robin Holmes (WA), “Technology at Its Greatest” (14 y o). A sci fi piece, I take it (“Colaris was a city that lived off technology and along with this was filled with evil”). A key player who joins the good guys in their struggle against the Wizard and the Tech-Ninjas is the Zone Ghost who can go in and out of different dimensions. Zone Ghost is refreshingly realistic and pragmatic, as when he tells the woman who summons him, I will do all I can… But you might have to get the police in on this…”
Harriet Macdonald (Tas), “The Third Law” (20 y o). In the post-2030 Republic people, called “units,” are known by numbers not names (some are single digits, some multiples), things are reduced to basics (there are caffeine, not coffee, machines), apartment buildings seem indistinguishable from asylums, and society has only 34 laws which the protagonist teaches to units in the jail where he works. A key law is that mathematics, which made possible the atomic-bomb explosions of 2030, is now banned. The story is about one unit who would give anything to know his name.
Nick Sharman (WA), “Through the Window” (15 y o). A depressing tale about a boy who sees each scene on the railroad platforms of the stations he passes as echoing the domestic violence at home by the father against the mother and their son, the narrator. It causes him to preview the treatment he will receive at his own stop when he is once more assaulted by the thugs waiting there (“Hey fellas, it’s Marcus the retard”). That leads him to an idyllic fantasy we hope, without much warrant, will come true for him.
Winner: “The Whisper”
Second Prize: “Harmless Alright”
1st Prize
Kaitlyn Franklin (Vic), “The Whisper” (12 y o). A bright young person solves a fifty-year-old murder while the mother is away on a business trip. The disquiet the reader experiences is, firstly, the fact that the mother is profoundly alienated from her own mother, one of the grandparents the child stays with while she is away, and that the grandparents seem oddly disinterested in the event. And yet one of them is the murderer…
2nd Prize
Jacinda Gray (Qld), “Harmless Alright” (9 y o). A near-as-darn-it 3000-word story that makes the most of each word in a sprawling narrative that defies condensation. Suffice to say that it’s about SQUIRT—the narrator, George Bovert Jake Lown, Michael Zane, Emily Chell, Rachel Affler and Chloe Groverson—who live up to the group’s name by being Smart, Quick, Understanding, Impressive, Reliable and Terrific. An adolescent extravagance not without mature insights into adult behaviour.
Judge, Brian Dibble