A selection of long listed works available in the Vision Australia Library
The Rot by Evelyn Araluen (Poetry)
The Rot is a recalcitrant study of the decaying romances, expired hopes, and abject injustices of the world. A liturgy for girlhood in the dying days of late-stage capitalism, these poems expose the fraying nerves and tendons of a speaker refusing to avert their gaze from the death of Country, death on Country, and the bloody violence of settler colonies here and afar. Across sleepless nights, fractured alliances, and self-destructive coping strategies, The Rot is what happens when poetry swallows more rage than it can console, quiet, or ironize.
Ankami by Debra Dank (Nonfiction/Memoir/Social commentary)
'Be careful what you wish for,' wrote Aesop, 'lest it come true.' Debra Dank had long been desperate to visit the National Archives, to paint a fuller picture of her family, to add flesh to the name-bones and the few precious stories she possessed. What she discovered would shatter everything she thought she knew about her family and her past. This is a story about absences and the secrets that come with them, about unknown but somehow still present family. An account of sorrow and incomprehensible loss, and the essential power of memory.
Fireweather by Miranda Darling (Fiction)
Life for Winona Dalloway is not as it should be. Her husband is no longer her husband, her children are not at home with her, and the city in which she lives is besieged by fires. Black ash falls like snow, songbirds screech like dinosaurs, and the doctors are calling her mad. Winona is forced to prove she is a sane, rational human being. As the professionals grow more insistent, so too do the voices crowding inside her head. She seeks solace in the company of plants and animals, and begins to imagine an entirely other way of being—one that might make whole her broken heart.
Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy (Fiction)
Dominic Salt and his children are caretakers of Shearwater, a tiny, isolated island, home to the world's largest seed bank. During the worst storm the island has seen, a woman washes up on shore. As the Salts nurse the woman back to life, affection grows. But she isn't telling the whole truth about why she came to Shearwater. When she discovers the sabotaged radios and a freshly dug grave, she realises Dominic is keeping his own dark secrets. As the storms gather, they must decide if they trust each other enough to protect the precious seeds in their care.
Wait Here by Lucy Nelson (Fiction)
A collection of hilarious and heart-wrenching stories: each is a sidelong glance at the lives of women who – either by choice or by circumstance – will never be mothers. A dancer struggling with the many ways her body has betrayed her. Two elderly sisters who’ve been inseparable throughout life make a momentous decision. A wet nurse haunted by the ghost of her own stillborn daughter. For these women who can’t, don’t or won’t have children, childlessness is a hard-won prize, a freedom, a stain, a joy, a battle, a trifle, a conundrum, a wound. It is nothing. It is everything.
I Am Nannertgarrook by Tasma Walton (Fiction)
From her idyllic life in sea country in Nerrm (Port Phillip Bay, Victoria), Nannertgarrook is abducted and taken to a slave market, leaving behind a husband, daughter and son. Pregnant when seized, she gives birth to a son, whom she raises with the children of her fellow captives. Nannertgarrook is separated not only from her Boonwurrung family, but from her birthright – the ceremonies she so joyously part of, the majestic whales who are her totem, the land and sky and sea country and its creatures. All these things she loves as deeply as she does her blood kin.
