To the woman at the end of our Main Rd near home. Waiting for the bus with a child in a pram, and a stubbie of full strength cracked well before midday – I’m sorry I judged you. I don’t know what your day (or life) has held. It’s obviously your choice what you…
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CW: Abuse, child abuse Freedom. As a kid, it meant zooming down our street, which ran from one edge of our flat dusty country town to the other, on my beloved yellow bike. Letting go of the handlebars, tipping my head back and taking in the cotton-candy coloured sky right on dusk. I was forever racing…
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I have spent the better part of my twenties working 80-hour weeks on an endless cycle of corporate deals. It is at 3am during one of these weeks of sleep deprivation that I realise I need a new hobby. Something to relax. Something that doesn’t involve waking up at 5am, riding a bike and sweating…
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I can still close my eyes and remember summer holidays as a kid. The car trip we made each year, to the small beach town on the other side of the mountain ranges. The smell of eucalyptus and the soaked earth under the vine tangled rain forest, swallowing up the road as our car made…
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I have never been one to free fall into addiction. The hook always skimmed close to my head, but it never latched. So many times, when I was battered and weak. You would think it would be so easy for me to then reach over an uncrossed line for a bottle or pill. I have…
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None of it matters. The plastic, the gadgets, the high glossed magazines; the heels with the right brand name, faded out on the soles, from all the running you do to keep in front. Things obtained to make life easier, dull a pain, stroke an ego; to make you feel like you mean something while you hurl…
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Writing a memoir is a monumental task. And I write that as someone who has never attempted to do so. Consolidating decades of one’s life into a work small enough to be held in one hand seems titanic, especially given the complexity of its primary source: memory. The subtle art of memoir has been beautifully…
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This is the final instalment of Really Honest Postcards from Lyon, April Smallwood’s six part series on life as a young Australian expatriate in France. You can look back over the series here. Dear Ike, I love that the French expression for placing an object down so as to not surprise you is, ‘Op!’, and…
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It is a wintry August evening and I have my window open to let in the crisp city air. I am chilled to the bone, but my room smells the way car tyres do after a burnout and I hate it. It smells this way because I have my own home gym. When I think…
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The colour of the tomatoes is changing each day. There are two on the vine; plump sisters, green-golden in the dapple beneath the frangipani tree. They were green yesterday, and now they have changed. I plucked a large tomato from the vine a few days ago. It was almost bursting, skin taut, still somnolent with…
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Last January I met with a friend who had just completed a year of No Retail. I’ll give a little backstory before explaining the challenge. Kari spent time volunteering for the Good Will and learnt something surprising: the crap you donate thinking you’re some virtuous Mother Theresa – jettisoning your H&M blouses that never fit…
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When I think of backpacking, I think of dragging a battered backpack along the road and changing from buses to trains to coaches to trains to buses. I’m not sure if this next admission will make me lose my Backpacker Cool Points (Ha… like I had any of them) but in the whole time I’ve…
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**TW: rape, violence** It’s been one year, one month and ten days. One year, one month and ten days later and I am not afraid of going to sleep anymore. Like a child, I was afraid of the dark. It’s fair to say that I haven’t really known myself in this time. I have been…
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At the moment, I’m in a rather enviable position compared to most foreign backpackers in Australia. I have just had the last of my 88 days signed off for my second year Visa and I have only been here for just over four months. Now I have almost eight months up my sleeves to…
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