Issue Seven Contributor • Past Contributors
June 18, 2019
Gary McCartney is a designer, artist and writer originally from Northern Ireland. His company, McCartney Design, has won several Australian...
Read More
Brittney Alexander is currently studying professional writing and editing at Swinburne University. In her spare time, she enjoys reading...
June 17, 2019
Stuart Barnes was born and grew up in Hobart and lived in Melbourne for seventeen years before moving to Rockhampton. His first poetry...
Amanda Bell is a Dublin-based writer and editor. Her books include The loneliness of the sasquatch – from the Irish of Gabriel Rosenstock...
June 16, 2019
Audrey Molloy is an emerging Irish poet living in Sydney. Her poetry has appeared in The North, Magma, The Moth, Meanjin, Cordite, Overland...
In 2018, Mari read at the Strokestown International Poetry Festival and at the Irish Writers Centre International Women’s Day 2018-2019....
Gareth lives in Sydney with his wife and daughter. He has taught poetry and poetics in schools, youth centres, universities, libraries and...
Caitlin Bowen is currently in her third year at Swinburne University, studying both a Bachelor of Education and a Bachelor of Arts....
Guest reflection • Issue seven • Issue Seven Contributor
by Tom Meagher. A yearning for freedom from both physical and ineffable barriers re-emerges throughout this issue of Backstory. Visible and...
Issue seven • Issue Seven Essays
by Anne Connor Picking up on the work of Jane Elliott, retired American teacher and racist educator, imagine the history of the...
Issue seven • Issue Seven Fiction
by Moya Roddy. Similimum, similimum. Like with like. Homeopathy works by releasing the body’s innate power to heal, a power...
Issue seven • Issue Seven Reviews
A kookaburra laughing carries me home through the clearing where the wattles are bursting their golden crowns dancing against a brooding...
Reviewed by Angela Wauchop “… Herta’s eyes were open to an army of haters spinning their sticky threads among the populace. Every...
Issue seven • Issue Seven Poetry
Port Arthur, Van Diemen’s Land, 1842 By Bill Cotter, I slunk from black to grey and black again. Smelt the gum leaves. Felt the...
by Eleanor Hooker. ...
by Sven Doedens Cameron slammed the door behind him. He didn’t slam it too hard because he knew he could damage the door, and then...
Reviewed by Brittney Alexander. “He had always been fond of knives. Each hilt sat warm and comfortable in the palm of his hand, as though...
by Moya Roddy I told myself you didn’t feel the cold, out and about in tee shirts in all weathers. When the rest of us were...
By Gareth Jenkins An earlier version of this poem was a finalist in the 2016 Newcastle Poetry Prize and published under the title...
Reviewed by Angela Wauchop “The war had left them idle. Each bomb and bullet and bayonet had torn the fabric of the village to ribbons,...
Issue seven • Issue Seven Nonfiction
by Wendy J. Dunn The nurse bends over Dad with her stethoscope and listens to his heartbeat. ‘Not long now,’ she mutters under her...
Reviewed by Brittney Alexander. Gareth Russell’s book, The Darksome Bounds of a Failing World, addresses the sinking of the...
By Bill Cotter, Between 1788 and 1840, twelve thousand women were transported, usually for minor offences, to New South Wales. Oh,...
By Stuart Barnes This poem was previously published in Glasshouses (UQP 2016)...
By Magi Gibson she was nine and half her milk teeth gone because she’d kissed the boys behind the shed And she listened in on big...
Translated by Melinda Smith V: From my sick bed Sulpicia 5 (Tibullus 3, 17) Cerinthus, will you keep faith with your girl now...
Reviewed by Michael Aiken Gareth Jenkins’ Recipes for the Disaster (Five Islands 2019) reads like a series of rituals or incantations,...
Moya Roddy’s novel The Long Way Home was described in the Irish Times as “simply brilliant”. Her collection of short stories Other...
Issue seven • Issue Seven Contributor • Issue seven interviews
Interviewed by Samuel Elliott. Richard James Allen is an Australian born poet whose writinghas appeared widely in journals, anthologies,...
By Melinda Smith ‘Women only want to be shearers for the sex’ — Ernie Ecob, former Secretary, Australian Workers’ Union She...
