Calibre Prize Essays
The setting is a gorgeous, somewhat decayed, many-roomed Georgian mansion in upstate New York, near the Hudson, in 2012. Nine screens placed around a darkened gallery space each show a room of the house, most of them occupied by a person and a musical instrument: a willowy woman in a slip on a chaise longue, ...
... (read more)I signed away ten years of my life at high school. Three hundred or so teenagers did likewise around the country; from Sydney and Melbourne to the wind-rustle quiet of burnt umber townships. We had similar reasons – wanting to be heroes and leaders, chasing self-respect, escaping loose ends, following Simpson and his donkey ...
... (read more)Each year, ABR’s prestigious Calibre Essay Prize, one of the world’s leading prizes for a new essay, attracts some of the finest writers from Australia and overseas.
Last year, the first prize of $5,000 was awarded to
Tehran, April 1987: Going Under - Descending in a stream of arpeggio broken chords: as we moved through night and the vernal air down into the green earth, my mother thought she heard a children’s song on the stairs as the bombs fell cascading. Like bells, bells of Hades sounding out inverted intervals, the bombs fell interminably. The sirens that were singing sang us downward to the damp islands of the underground shelter, a honeycomb under the Tehran metropolis, buzzing with heat-maddened, with death-maddened men and women ...
It is quiet and cool and dark blue. At this depth the pressure on my body is double what it is at the surface: my heartbeat has slowed, blood has started to withdraw from my extremities and move into the space my compressed lungs have created ...
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Michael Winkler (photograph by Chris Riordan)M
The history of my onomastic apprehension and misapprehension about the big thing in the middle of Australia: It is called Ayers Rock. No, it is ...
... (read more)#1 Martin Thomas reads ‘“Because it’s your country”: Bringing Back the Bones to West Arnhem Land'
In 2013 we published Martin Thomas's Calibre Prize-winning essay ‘“Because it’s your country”: Bringing Back the Bones to West Arnhem Land'. This powerful story of the repatriation of Aboriginal bones soon became the best read article on our website and we are delighted to be able to launch the ABR podcast with it.
... (read more)Percy Grainger walked to avoid self-flagellation. David Sedaris walked to placate his Fitbit. Virginia Woolf walked the streets of London, and later the South Downs, endlessly: because she loved it, because she was walking her dogs, because she needed to think clearly. For Henry Thoreau, every walk was a sort of ‘crusade’ ...
... (read more)On an early spring evening in 1919, in a nearly empty cinema in the English seaside town of Lyme Regis, a slight, dark-haired figure slipped into a seat at the farthest edge of a row. From here, she would have a clear view of the profile of the youthful pianist who, sheltered behind a screen, accompanied the silent film. In white tie and tails, with her fair hair slicked down, the young musician could easily have passed for a boy. But Henry knew better. She had already extracted from the cinema’s owner the useful information that the pianist who gave such superlative performances night after night in the dark, sparsely filled hall was his daughter, Olga. The delicious ambiguity of the young woman’s appearance only added to the pleasure of her effortless improvisations. The soft, feminine form in its stiff, masculine garb was as enticing as the verve and finesse of the music itself.
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