Fiction
He was a man with a pinboard, and that boosted him a hundred points in her nervy evaluation, the first night she saw his room. On the pinboard were tickets, a laminated backstage pass, a wrapper from a Swiss chocolate, all those things that could wait for drowsy burbling nocturnal stories in the dark, the recounting of Times Before Her recited off like threaded bead ...
Inherit your great-grandmother’s wild red hair and hear the boys sing Griffin’s Gingernuts are so spicy when you walk past the Four Square court. Feel like a freak. Ask your mother if you can cut your hair short when you start high school and hear her say but it’s your best asset. Worry about your assets. Regret not cutting it on the first day of school when your form teacher christens you Orphan Annie and everyone laughs. Eat your vegemite sandwiches alone at one end of a wobbly bench outside the gym and ignore the fat girl wobbling it at the other end. Howl into the headwind as you bike home from school. Hate your mother when you arrive red-eyed, wind-whipped and she sighs. Wish you were Orphan Annie.
... (read more)I phoned my father when I arrived.
He said ‘Your mum’s just round at Aunty El’s’ in such a way that I knew she wasn’t; that she’d left the room with her hand to her mouth when he’d first said hullo, love, and I felt so sorry for us all.
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In the spirit of our annual ‘Books of the Year’ feature, in which we ask a range of writers and critics to nominate their favourite new fiction and non-fiction titles, we asked ten Australian short story writers to nominate their favourite short story collections and individual stories. As this is the first time we have run a short-story themed feature of this nature, our ten writers were free to nominate older titles if they wished to do so. Our only request was that at least one of their selections should have been published recently and that at least one be by an Australian author.
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Are You Seeing Me? by Darren Groth & The Minnow by Diana Sweeney
Anybody who knows a little about the role played by Australian horses in World War I will know that the story did not end well for the horses: 136,000 left these shores, and one returned. Readers of Morris Gleitzman’s Loyal Creatures (Viking, $19.99 pb, 160 pp) who are unaware of this statistic might be in for a shock.
At the outbreak of war, Frank Ballantyne, not quite sixteen, is working with his father, sinking bores and locating water for farmers in the outback. It is a skill that will serve Frank and the army well in the deserts of Egypt and Palestine, which, after lying about his age, he finally reaches – with his horse Daisy, and his father, who has also enlisted – in 1915.
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