Category: Issue Seven
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Introducing issue 7 of Other Terrain.
by Tom Meagher Glenice Whitting’s piece Why We need to Write the Exclusion Narratives captures a common theme throughout this issue of Other Terrain. In this issue, we explore the tragedy of the untold stories of forgotten people, the unseen scars borne by those who survived, while we remember those who did not. In Uppgivenhetssyndrome, Michele…
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Courthouse Steps
By Jenny Butler Snow is swirling, landing gently on the courthouse steps. Prosecutor for twenty years and I can’t go up the goddamn steps. I pace and light another cigarette. Policy is that those who wish to smoke may do so nine meters away from the building. With me it isn’t policy compliance but an…
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‘Autobiochemistry’ by Tricia Dearborn
Review by Caitlin Bowen Tricia Dearborn is a veteran of Australian literature, with ‘Autobiochemistry’ being her latest long-awaited release. A poetry anthology collection broken into five sections, we move through events in Dearborn’s life as though she sits gently close by and guides us through memories, relationshipsand moments of both pain and triumph. No stranger…
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IN THE GARDEN OF SUCCULENTS, CHANGI AIRPORT, TERMINAL 1
By Melinda Smith You and I enter by the Barrel Cactus, and stand too close to each other at the bar. Two beers, some conversation, some digs at the flight we have just endured — we can do this, we have an air-traffic-controller’s view of pink afternoon clouds, of the Siamese Sago Palm,…
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Claiming T-Mo by Eugen Bacon
Reviewed by Angela Wauchop She blinked, studied him anew. The man whose eyes were full of space when they were not holding something wild. They were chameleon, shifting appearance with light, as did the color of his skin […] Sometimes he seemed quite tanned, sometimes tan lifted to gray. The first time she saw him,…
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Why we need to write the exclusion narratives
By Glenice Whitting Every person has the right to participate equally, to be valued, to be heard; therefore, exclusion narratives need to be revealed and scrutinised. Through these stories, we learn from the past and can shape a better future. They are stories of stereotyping, discrimination and mistreatment, and they come from negative attitudes and…
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Above All Else, Respect Your Father
By Tina Tsironis There’s this small boy I know. In a tiny Greek village wedged within the port city of Perama, he loves playing hide-and-seek with his closest friends. He always picks the best hiding spots: among the branches of his parent’s lemon tree, folded into the musty shoe cupboard in the laundry, or squeezed…
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What are your sins?
By Anita Patel. Walking to confession Bless us Father two by two in checked pinafores and straw hats – glad to escape out of the classroom into the sunshine… just a short stroll to where you are waiting to forgive us… For we have sinned mocking Sister Mary Immaculata’s bum wobble and lying to our…
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Love is a battlefield
by Jenny Blackford. The town by night packed full of girls on stilts of mouse-soft suede or shiny-shiny leather higher than mountains high as the sky. Studs and buckles hold the clue: these steep shoes are weapons in the longest-running war. Fake-tanned legs swing glossy-long, gold-burnished hair shines straight as any Bronze Age sword or…
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Art of the Deal
By Magdalena Ball i. While I grew up in lower Manhattan’s housing project the pre-dawn cusp of gentrification there was a shadow rising a skyscraper in my head sixty-nine stories growing upward with the realisation that childhood was ending prematurely. When the tower was built on the site of Bonwit Teller’s iconic department store…
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Reflections
by Jayne Fenton Keane Between cocktails, insomnia and jetlag I wonder how to measure the distance between us in kites and how to name all the clouds – not by their classifications cumulus, nimbus, cirrus, stratus but by memories. Touch me like this here no not like sin not…
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Waltzing Matilda
By Bethany George Michael sat in the second row of the church pews. His elbows leaning on the row in front, head bowed towards his chest. He could not face looking at the sad-eyed portrait of his departed friend, nestled in an assortment of bold Australian natives on top of the majestic walnut coffin. Michael…
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what you must do you must keep your mouth shut
By Ali Whitelock if you want to you can tape it shut with the snoring tape––he keeps it on the side of his bed sometimes it rolls off onto the carpet the cat hair sticks to it because what you must understand is how you feel is not how others feel. the important thing…
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Reflections
By Marilyn Humbert in the mirror a perfect mother of a daughter well behaved a son flawless as his father chiselled jaw, ice-blue eyes no one sees her rusted imperfections the welds cracked almost unhinged no one hears her silent screams on standby night or day her mind tattered as her breath chain store…
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Lipstick
By Magi Gibson Putting on my make-up at the bathroom mirror, – for me, a daily act, a sacrament, a quiet solemnity – I find my lipstick’s almost done – a blunt and bloody stump at the bottom of its silver bullet case. But how can I think of shopping for lipstick while food…
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*Uppgivenhetssyndrom
By Michele Seminara The unconscious is a precise and even pedantic symbolist. — D. M. Thomas All over the camps / children’s eyes / revolve inwards / like moons Their muscles wane / as minds release / cruel world They scored their grief with razors / they lit their flesh / like flares But…
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The end of the road.
By Wendy Wicks Barrelling along the unmade desert highway at 100 km/h, the station wagon is pursued by a plume of red dust. Red plain, dusty red saltbush, the occasional fading, abandoned cattle yard. Little else. The driver, weary from fighting to keep the car on the road, is focused on reaching Lake Cargelligo where…
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She Counts…
By Magi Gibson, She counts dead women. Not women wiped out in warzones by bullets and bombs, nor the 63 million missing in India – Rita Banjeri is keeping count of them. Nor is she counting the Korean Comfort Women, piecing together what’s left of their bones from the fire pits where they perished. No,…
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Book Review of Natasha Stott Despoja’s On Violence
Reviewed by Angela Wauchop “While chairing this organisation has been one of the great privileges of my life, it means that every day I am conscious of one of the most heinous manifestations of gender inequality: violence against women and children.” On Violence is one of the latest books in Melbourne University Press’s On series of…
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Leonard
by Charles Murray We’ll say a prayer for love tonight remembering his poems; And laud the crack which allows the light to enter and soften our rooms; The rooms where we hide all the pain in our souls, all the ache of being without, and we’ll pray for the rhyme which happens in time to…