Short Stories

I recently moved back to my hometown of Adelaide after twenty years. What has struck me is the number of abandoned petrol stations I’ve seen spread out across the landscape, along with the fenced-off  vacant land  that has been there ever since I was a kid. Travelling by car with various family members over the past few months, and being part of the ongoing conversation about the rising price of petrol these days, all the while passing deserted servos, motivated me to look into them. Out of curiosity, I decided to map the  abandoned petrol stations  that currently litter South Australia because I’m a visual learner. And no one has done it yet. I approached this task with the intention to try and make connections. Between neglected places and ownership. Between environmental impact and accountability. Between fossil fuels and renewable energy. Between integrated land management and social well-being. Between my new-found home in Adelaide and me. I started this pro...

Dusty red and gold lanterns droop from a yellowing ceiling in the dark. Antique wooden tables hide under white cotton tablecloths. Unfilled cardboard boxes stand atop one another on the brown laminated floor in the corner of the room. The stillness in the closed restaurant is lonesome. Abandoned ghosts serve an empty building that has fallen into disrepair. The Hong Kong Palace only accepts orders from the past. Still, the deliveries continue to roll out to customers that don’t exist anymore. Outside, overgrown weeds split concrete footpaths that exhibit fading graffiti. Across the street from the Chinese takeaway stands the Anglican Church of the Holy Redeemer. The fragmented house of prayer is forever waiting. Waiting for the sun to rise. Waiting for the street lights to change. Waiting for the years to pass. Waiting for the presence of the Holy Spirit. Always waiting for salvation. Perhaps, one day, the ghosts of Hong Kong Palace will find themselves here, enduring worship and hav...

My husband asked me what I thought of the destroyed Neolithic pots at Ai Weiwei’s exhibition. I was curious about my favourite interests, archaeology and art coming together. Thirty glass jars on a wooden shelf contain powdered Chinese Neolithic pottery that Ai Weiwei had broken and grounded to fine dust. It is suggestive of a memorial site. A series of cremations. Alluvial debris. Stardust. Granules that once had a form and function are now symbolic of a bygone era. In adjacent rooms, Chinese artefacts are displayed as readymades. Neolithic vases are inscribed with the Coca-Cola logo in red and gold paint. Ai Weiwei drops a Han Dynasty Urn, captured in three black and white photographs in the mid-90s. My thoughts concerning his artworks were not about defacing antiquity or desecrating the past. Instead, I considered what values the collective ‘we’ assign to the past. Artefacts that ‘survived’ are considered valuable because they represent information of that period, even if mass-produ...

If I try to articulate my dreams, I may invite them into existence. But I don’t know if my dreams even belong to me. I dreamt that I had to remove my own heart and place it in a safe box before entering a celestial detector, which was capable of registering hearts and sounding the alarm. Before taking out my own heart to pass through, I had to replace the crater in my chest with something unknown. A foreign substance. For the time being. It was part of a game the whole world was playing. The multitude of hearts lined up on a conveyor belt had colourful auras that determined their specific powers. I knew my heart would restore itself if I returned.  I was sitting along the edge of a sandstone cliff with my twin. We were not the same person, but we both had the same memories. Were we thinking different thoughts at the same time? We came from a dangerous land where the trees and flowers burn. We both agreed to keep all our unborn children safe from the world by not bringing them into ...

We hung out after school in the gully by the stormwater drain, better known to us as the tunnels . Traffic echoed above our heads as we explored the sewer graffiti below, daring each other to go further into the darkness without a flashlight. Nervous laughter, hearts pounding, and the potent smell of nearby plants saturated our first kiss. We were just particles of the town we grew up in. Sheltering with friends in the shade offered a brief escape from the sunken moods of others and the melancholy rhythm of our minds. With the sunshine in our eyes and cold cement surrounding us, we floated away.  Down the road, next to the deli that sold gobstoppers and chewing gum with stick-on tattoos, was a telephone box. We would use the payphone to prank school bullies and call our parents to check if we needed to come home. Hidden from time, we grew tired. The moments of content left us behind in the red dirt, lying down and holding hands. It’s all gone now. The grassland is still there, but ...

She yawns in the passenger seat as he drives onto the highway in the early hours of the morning. He runs red lights, but she is too tired to argue with him. It’s still dark outside, and the traffic lanes are empty. The street signs blur past them until the car slows to a stop on the bridge that leads out of town. They sit in silence for a few minutes, just watching the windscreen. He gets out of the car first to look closely at the low cloud, all on its own and away from its pack, in the middle of the road. The hushed cold air makes the cumulus seem both alien and angelic.  It’s only the two of them, alone, with an obscure haze that has a shadow. He tries to capture the anomaly on camera, but the lens cannot focus on the surreal white fog that hovers. She stretches her arms up to touch it, but the cloud’s instinctive reflex shifts itself higher, out of reach. They are in a Jeffrey Smart painting of almost forgotten moments. How many others have stood on this spot after midnight in ...

A fresh start, that’s what she wanted. She left her youth behind during the war and moved into this apartment. Her new beginning started here. It was too cold inside, even with the heater on, but she was grateful and brave. She slowly renovated her new space, her new life. Peeling and scraping off layers of old wallpaper was a cathartic process for her, but it left the walls beneath pitted and scarred from her attempts to remove every last shred of paper. The wounded surfaces resembled the road that connects to the border of her town, a repetitious Highway of Death . It was everywhere. She wasn’t prepared to patch and seal the walls to perfect smoothness, so she used white paint to cover and purify the dents instead, whitewashing the apartment’s past.  After a few years, she moved on, but her sad eyes remained. The wallpaper followed her wherever she went; it left its mark. She grew tired after every misunderstanding, disappointment, and retelling of herself. Life had been unkind t...

I am a guardian of rubbish. In my white tracksuit, I cycle alone along the streets of Amsterdam and collect the trash that litters this city. With my cargo bicycle full of garbage, I wave at passing nightwalkers that fill the pockets of silence. They pause mid-stride for too long under dim street lights without responding. Why do they wait for me to ride past them? I catch a glimpse of their shadows darting into the darkness over my accumulating junk pile that continues to grow. Now I am unsure if those creepers were ever there at all. It is my duty to keep these streets clean. A pungent smell persistently follows me around town, keeping me company. I know someone is supposed to take over my shift soon because leachate has saturated my clothes. I make my way to the designated spot by the shuttered flower shop and look up at the stars, waiting. After a time, the air becomes too thin to breathe in. My skin feels tight and rubbery. Whooshing sounds of the ocean start to choke my ears. It ...

A rusty white swing hovers over the grass in nanna’s backyard. The ornate wrought-iron shadow remains still and silent in her garden full of geraniums. Our young bodies are too small for outside labour, so we wander to the shade house and wait. But not for long. We drink from the sprinklers that water the fuchsias and squeeze the buds until they pop open.  We take turns opening the creaky door to the grey shed, peering inside to see if a secret portal has opened up for us to escape. Black spiders live in here with the Blood & Bone fertiliser and antique furniture. Our dad’s abandoned youth lives here, too, discarded and mouldy. The musty smell lingers as the sun sets outside and time rests.  As the three of us walk single file along the pavement, ticking echoes from the wooden clock atop nanna's empty fireplace welcome us back into a cold house. We all think this place is haunted. Old newspapers are stacked high in the corners of rooms. Lace coat hangers full of potpourri ...

Orienteering was supposed to save us as children. Part race, part treasure hunt, we read specially prepared maps to navigate our way through the wild to a number of checkpoints. One year, the Whispering Wall was nominated to be on the list. Built over 120 years ago, the reservoir retaining wall overlooking the bush landscape proved to have powerful acoustic abilities.  The concave wall is perfectly curved and forms one sector of a circle, where sound waves travel unobstructed from one end to the other. We soon found out that words spoken at one side of the wall could be heard from more than 150 metres away on the other side. We were captivated. Forgetting about the other checkpoints, we lingered and listened to strangers share their secrets. They sounded so close by.  At the time, it felt harmless to be a passive participant, waiting silently to receive soliloquies from the other side. We compared our scars to pass the time in between intimate leaks. We were too young to under...

Holding a kite, along with the other kids on our quiet suburban street, we run free. Lovers of abandoned places, we leave the familiar neighbourhood and explore the forgotten railway station. We don’t move in straight lines but jostle with the wind. With each other. With ourselves. Still, we share the sky. Weeds stand silently beside crumbling stone walls while we wrestle with tangled kite lines.  We check the wind before flying. Sometimes there is barely a breeze, and at other times there are huge gusts. Licking our index fingers, we point them upwards towards the heavens. The side of the finger cooled by the breath of the blowing wind indicates the direction we must turn our backs on. Instead of taking a run-up, we hold our kites in the air and let the wind navigate for us.  One kite starts to spin in big loops, swirling closer to the ground, it meets the dirt track. We launch kites only to have them fall at our feet. Making slight adjustments to its design, we lighten the l...

The young couple would meet at the beach every Saturday afternoon. I used to watch them embrace from my rock pool. When they began their journey to the secret spot, I followed them around the shoreline, clawing my way up to observe the girl who had set me free. I trailed them, past the marina, past the tissue-box houses, along the esplanade, until they found the lonely table. I listened to them talk over the roar of the ocean about nothing and everything. She shivered during the night hours. I saw them kiss under the lonely table once, but only once. "The whitewash looks like wild white horses running towards us."  "Then let's race them. First one to touch the jetty wins!" "Wins what?" "You'll see." Together they ran, but her long satin skirt tripped her up and pulled her down. She laughed so hard at the sky that her face turned red. Then he pretended to fall spectacularly next to her. Sprawled out, smiling at each other for a moment, the...

“Is it all right you’re up here with me, or would you rather be with someone else?” After our steep climb, clambering over rocks under the afternoon sun, I took a moment to breathe in the view. Australia’s Central Desert is a mix of ochre red dirt with patches of green bush spread out to the horizon. It was greener than I thought it would be.  “No... I’m glad it’s with you.” Surprised by the question after what seemed like hours of sweaty silence. With throbbing dehydrated skulls, we sat down, our legs hanging over the cliff’s edge. We drank from our water bottles and sucked the nectar from nearby honey grevillea flowers. Her uncertainty reminded me of my own inherent self-doubt. We were two young women contemplating whether we should be here, forging a friendship in a wondrous landscape.  Curious about the collective stories of places, I imagined we were actively taking part in the desert’s living memory. Escaping from our perceived limitations and searching for adventure, we...

I capture people in my locale  From living room windows  Trusty old camera  Connects me  To the surreal world outside  Impatiently waiting  For red lights to turn green