“We were trying to find somewhere in the city to have sex. It was three in the afternoon and we had been driving through the suburbs for two hours, looking for the right spot. For any spot. We were only visiting Canberra for two weeks. Neither of us had much of a sense of the city, of its layout or its secret places, no idea where might be best to drive towards. My phone was the only one with a functional SIM card, and so I used it to look at the digitized map. There were green stretches all over the capital. Green seemed useful. Green meant bushland. To the north lay the contours of Mount Ainslie and the Black Mountain Nature Reserve. They seemed practicable for our purposes, but we were starting from the south side of the city’s artificial lake. On that side of the map I could see a long corridor of green, from the Federal Golf Club, to a lookout at Red Hill, and then, crossing a highway, Mugga Mugga Nature Reserve, and Isaac’s Ridge. Let’s head there, I said, investing hope in a place that was far from the National Gallery and the National Archives, from the High Court and the glassy low-rise government offices where everybody in the city seemed to spend their days. What kind of a city has so much green space, I asked from the passenger seat. Neel moved his left hand across the gear stick to my thigh and squeezed. It had been five and a half days. We were desperate.”

An excerpt of the story can be listened to on this episode of the Kill Your Darlings podcast.

“We drive a long, straight road beneath slate-grey skies beside the flooded river. The floodwaters surge around trunks of oak and ash, a fast-moving membrane the colour of milk tea. The road is still dry, and safe enough for now. Traffic carries on. The levee isn’t expected to break.”

  • Red (The White Review) March 2016

"It was the first week of 1976 and she had just turned 17. The day school let out her parents packed the car with suitcases, a plastic tree, a big box of tinsel and a smaller box of gifts, and they drove the family north. It was too hot in the new house in Strathfield, they said. Better to have Christmas by the beach. Which was her mother’s way of insinuating that Christmas lunch that year would not be roast pork and gravy but a supermarket ham and potato salad crunchy with sand."

  • Afraid of Waking It (Griffith Review) October 2015, Winner of the 2015 Griffith Review Novella Competition. Anthologised in The Drover's Wife, edited by Frank Moorhouse (Penguin, 2017).

"He set the camera up by the wall in the space he used as his studio. It was one of the many rooms in the too-big house he didn’t need. It was mostly empty – the wallpaper left to peel away from the walls, the plaster to crack and the dust left undusted. In the light that came in elongated grids through the barred windows I watched him move around the room beneath me, holding up the light meter to gauge the exposures."

"My mother had a house in the Blue Mountains, has a house up there still. I went up to there after I did the Bad Thing to myself. I knew the house would be empty that week, and I knew under which pot plant the spare key was hidden. I was meant to be in classes, so I emailed my professors with unclear stories. A sick grandmother, I told one. Appendicitis, I told another. I borrowed my housemate’s car and drove out along the highway the two hours from the city, the radio on, yellow lights slipping by. Far beyond the road flames vaulted up into the night from the chemical plant at Silverwater where the poison turns fresh air to fire. It was almost beautiful. In the dark."