I’d like to see when cavemen roamed

Hairy heads to hairy toes

When dinosaurs walked the ancient land

Sixty million years ago

Trees as big as skyscrapers

Flies as big as my hand

A land of giants near and far

Sixty million years ago

I’d like to build a time machine

To take me back that far

To journey to my destination

Sixty million years ago

Exploring and discovering

Until every dinosaur is found

All creatures, land, sky and sea

Sixty million years ago

Then I build that time machine

And I go back in a zap

To a roaring, soaring fearsome world

Sixty million years ago

But oh no, where to go?

And what the heck is that?

A carnivorous creature comes towards me

Sixty million years ago

Now I want to go home

It’s not what I had in mind

This unspeakably ferocious land

Sixty million years ago

Quick, get back in!

Zoom away before it’s too late

Take me back to where it’s safe

Not sixty million years ago.

In the nursing facility she never calls home, I find my mother in the bed she has occupied since the brutal aneurysm claimed her balance and mobility four years ago. Her smiles these days are rare. Her eyes widen and her once warm, gentle smile contorts into a bewildered parody. But today even this version is not visible. She is clearly distressed.

‘Last night my whole family walked past that door. No one looked in. Not one. Not Mave or George, Rose or Poppy, Not Bill. Mum. Dad or Ray. Not even Poppy. They all looked straight ahead. Why? Why won’t they look at me? ‘

Her eyes glisten beneath her furrowed brow. Her hand goes to her mouth. I bolt shut my mouth to waylay the sob that threatens and blink away a tear. Once composed I say, ‘Perhaps it’s just their way of telling you it’s not your time yet..’ I’m struggling to put a positive spin on this latest reminder to my mother that everyone she loved in her youth is gone.

‘Perhaps… perhaps you’re right I just feel so … alone.”

In a vase brought from home I arranged the small bunch of late blooming roses I collected from mum’s garden. The thorns are vicious, but the fragrance is intoxicating. I place the vase on the laminated side table next to her hospital bed with the waterproof mattress protector that she finds comfortless. ‘Remember when I planted these?’ she says. I nod

‘You were only about five then. Coles were clearing them, so I got them for a song. They just needed some TLC. Funny. Given up for dead and now they’ll out last me!

I remember the Iceland poppies my mother would place in an amber vase on our oak sideboard. I have always loved them. So did my little sister, Dorothy. She loved them so much we even called her “Poppy”. Have ever I told you that? She had eyes the colour of cornflowers and a mop of curls that framed her beautiful little face. She was a favourite with everyone. Some of the men working in factory down the road would walk past kids at the factory gate who asked for their silken cigarette cards, and they gave theirs to Poppy. She would stand at our gate, hands out just like the big kids and say’ Tards pease’. She was so cute.

When I lost the sixpence I received on my fourth birthday in the long grass in our backyard, she offered me her ha’penny. I remember her chubby little hand as she held it out as she tried to comfort me’.

‘Here Maawg, don’t kwy,’ she said.

‘What did I do? I threw it into the grass. How I lived to regret that. I saw her stunned look and the tears in her beautiful eyes. I watched ashamed as she knelt, searching for her precious ha’penny. She searched in vain for that ha’penny, but she never once uttered a word of rebuke. Wise beyond her years, she was’.

I have heard this story so many times. I have watched my Aunt Rose and my mother sob as they recalled the minute details sixty years after the event. It is as if somehow the retelling of it wards off oblivion. But it was the day a moment’s distraction changed the fabric of my mother’s family forever.

On November 10th ,1914; my mother’s fourth birthday, the war to end three million lives and ruin countless others, was a bellicose infant. It was a time before sealed roads and fast transport. Before the proliferation of the telephone. Horses still had their role to play in the lives of working people.

On this morning, a horse pulling a heavily laden cart lost its footing on the greasy clay surface of the road and fell. There was a great ruckus as people ran to see first- hand the frantic horse as it struggled to get to its feet and the men trying to regain control over the terrified animal.

Mum’s eldest sister, Lily, was dusting the oak sideboard with her usual diligence. At fourteen Lily had left school to assist my grandmother. She had just lifted the decorative tin of Daisy Fly Killer when she was distracted by the excited voices of the gathering crowd and the cries of the stricken horse. She placed the dish on the dining table .and dashed to the verandah.

This tin was designed to dupe unsuspecting flies. It contained a prettily designed flower which proved irresistible to hovering flies containing as it did a concoction of a sugary syrup laced with colourless, tasteless arsenic.

No one remembered Poppy going into the parlour but go she did and spying the pretty floral container on the table pulled the lace cloth covering it towards her. Having secured her prize, she did what she always did to flowers; she kissed them. Like the hapless flies, Poppy too found the syrup sweet and sipped it. When Lily returned to her abandoned chores, she found Poppy licking the syrup off the flowers. Poppy looked up.

‘Pwiddy flowuhs,’ she said and smiled.

Lily snatched the container from the bewildered toddler and screamed for her mother. My grandmother, realizing the danger, prepared an emetic. From the icebox she took the jug of fresh milk and poured a large glass. She gentle entreated Poppy to drink all of it. She then stirred two dessert spoons of salt into a glass of warm water until it disappeared. Bending down she put the glass to Poppy’s pursed and by now trembling lips.

‘Drink up darling,’ coaxed my grandmother.

‘But mawmy, I ...” protested Poppy.

‘For me?’ entreated her mother

Poppy took only a few swallows then spewed the curdled milk over the glass over her mother’s hand.

She gathered Poppy into her arms and studied her face intently. It was clammy partly due to the effort it took to spew up the toxic cocktail, but her mother was not convinced that she had purged Poppy of the poison. So she carried Poppy a mile to the doctor’s.

She hadn’t given any thought to the fact that it was by now Saturday afternoon and therefore not the surgery’s opening hours.

She rang the doorbell and was greeted somewhat stiffly by the doctor’s wife. My normally reserved grandmother blurted out her predicament and the wife, now more sympathetic, showed her into the surgery and informed her husband. The doctor listened to my grandmother’s recount of events and examined Poppy. ‘Well, Mrs Fear, you did well to induce vomiting. I think you have rendered my services redundant.”

‘But I’m not sure how much she drank. Or if it all came up,’ said my grandmother. ‘You mothers worry too much. She’ll be fine”.

My grandmother, unconvinced, returned home with Poppy. By now the normally vibrant infant was listless and tired and my grandmother put her to bed. It was just on sunset when my grandfather and his eldest son, Jack arrived home from work. My grandfather walked into the kitchen, concern cloudy his grimy face.

‘Where’s Poppy?’ he demanded. He didn’t need to be told that something was wrong. He knew that when he arrived at the gate and she wasn’t there to greet him.

When he walked up to her cot she looked up and tried to smile but she managed only a pale imitation. For two days she lay growing paler, weaker, as bouts of vomiting and diarrhoea wreaked havoc on her tiny body. Dark circles formed around her eyes. Cornflower blue gave way to blue black ink. My grandfather, in desperation, gathered her in his arms to take her to Camperdown Children’s Hospital.

‘If you move that sick child, she might die and it will be on your head,

John,’ warned Aunt Louisa. Aunt Louisa was a midwife and attracted some of the kudos afforded nurses. My grandparents deferred to her perceived wisdom in medical matters.

And so, Poppy languished.

On the third day my grandfather refused to listen to anymore, quasi professional, anecdotal or well-meaning advice and gathered the featherweight child into his arms and drove in his dray along Parramatta Road to the Children’s’ Hospital.

There are choices you cannot remake; words you can never forget. They lurk, waiting for those moments when you are most vulnerable and then rise to tear away any defences you have tried to build.

‘If only you had brought her sooner…we could have pumped her stomach. We always do... as a precaution.’ the doctor said. And with that, she was gone.

What was the intent of those words? Warning? Indictment? Empathy? No matter. In twenty-four hours, all that was bright, gentle and joyous was extinguished. Rage and grief engulfed my grandfather.

Something in the family died too. My grandmother had lost two babies in the years before my mother’s birth, and she was to lose two more infants before the decade was out. But Poppy’s death was a body blow. Avoidable; preventable; futile.

The funeral confused my mother. Holding twelve-year-old Rose’s hand she followed the black horse-drawn hearse as it made its way through Rookwood Cemetery. As the hearse came to a curve in the road they caught a glimpse of the stately black horses, their heads adorned with matching plumes, and the small blue coffin visible through the glass sided hearse.

At the grave side the Anglican priest spoke in solemn tones. Those about her sobbed but my mother was transfixed by the pretty, flower strewn coffin suspended above the gaping rectangular black hole. When the attendants commenced to lower the coffin, she flung herself forward and screamed for them to stop. It was inconceivable that Poppy would be shut away forever from the light.

My grandmother pulled my mother back, gathered her into her arms and held her fast trying to comfort her.

…………

My aunt, Mavis, was born in late May the next year, followed by George, Lesley and Milton. Lesley died in the pandemic flu of 1919. Milton died eight days after his birth in 1921. George, a bonny child born in 1916, contracted rheumatic fever when he was three and struggled with its legacy all his life.

My grandfather worked hard delivering coal and the ice he produced with my Uncle Jack, but he never again allowed himself to become besotted by his infant children.

In the last year of his life he spoke to my mother, for the first time since Poppy’s death, of his enduring sadness. My birth had brought memories to the surface and without the diversion of work which had insulated him for many years he would play his accordion and sing. I would join him and he smiled as I danced.

Sitting on the back verandah with my mother looking over the same backyard which still concealed Poppy’s precious ha’penny, he reflected on the gulf created by Poppy’s death.

‘The rest of you… you were ye mother’s… but Poppy… she was mine.’

‘One day, dad, you will see her again…,’ she had said.

‘Ah.., but it’s the waiting ‘he said and then fell silent.

They never spoke on the subject again.

According to his wishes my grandfather lies at rest with Lesley, Milton and his beloved Poppy.

My mother never acknowledged November 10th as her birthday. Instead, she chose to celebrate it on 11th November, Armistice Day. Only when I applied for her birth certificate did I realise the ruse and understood its genesis. ……………………….

Enlivened once more by memory she says. ‘Have I told you about Poppy”, I smile. ‘I think you might have. But please… tell me again.’

Brinawa Intentional Community, 1985

First birdsong, she slides from the bed and is silent, silent, out, not breathing until she quietly closes the door.

It’s a familiar routine. She steps across the room to the fuel stove and reaches for the matches. She operates by muscle memory. The matches are not where they belong. Terry is home.

They are not on the table. So, maybe his pocket. In the gloom, she fumbles about, and with a small “Yes” of triumph, she locates the coat and is rewarded with a woody rattle. She pulls them out, and with them comes a small flat blue packet that she does not recognise. She moves the packet to the table and the back of her mind as she goes through the morning routine.

Once things are humming, she slips out into the cold grey morning light. It is well past dawn, but the sun has yet to climb above the mountain. Kookaburras share their first joke of the day, and it carries on the slight breeze.

Her breath is sharp as it goes in, and it leaves as a cloud.

She is used to the cold. She had grown up just over the ridge. But at Cornerstone, it was never like this. There, life was easier, and there was a toilet you could flush.

Oh, to have a toilet you could flush.

She heads towards the makeshift thunderbox, but instead, turns and squats behind the old peach tree. The white frost, frothing yellow urine, a hint of pinkish blood and the dull green grass catch her eye, and she smiles at the unexpected beauty.

Terry has promised that today he will empty the toilet pan, but she is not silly enough to fill it with wee in the meantime. She hopes he is staying home for a while. She is exhausted. “Okay, you mob! Rise and shine!” Three tousled heads move on their pillows, and three sleepy smiles come back at her. “Ten more minutes,” begs Terry, and she laughs at his desperation as the two children stumble from bed.

Kids at the table, and it is school-morning chaos. Burnt toast and spilt porridge, quiet sibling sniping.

“What’s this, Mum?” asks Kris as his dad enters the room.

They have all stopped what they are doing and are looking at Terry as he lurches across the table and roughly snatches the small packet from Kris’s hand. The moment is frozen. He looks her straight in the eye, and she feels his accusation and her unnamed guilt.

“You bloody kids need to keep out of my stuff!” he shouts and rams it in his pocket. He is out the door before the first protest erupts. Kris is crying, and Layne is indignant, and they are all shocked. What was that? What just happened?

Layne slides closer to her little brother.

“You are all right, mate, never mind,” she soothes, an arm draped over the small boy’s heaving shoulder.

They are all waiting for his return, thinking his absence a momentary thing, a call of nature. It’s his first morning home.

So, they wait. They ask their mother for answers even though they know she has none. They become fractious, and she becomes increasingly still.

She is puzzled by that little flat packet. It was a small, square, factory-sealed blue bag with white lettering, similar to the sterile dressing in the first-aid kit. She hadn’t bothered to read it in the gloom. She frowns, trying to remember.

His car keys are here in his coat pocket; he is out there somewhere.

As if she can read her mother’s mind, Layne says:

“He must of gone to Janelle’s.”

“He must have gone to Janelle’s”, corrected her mother.

“We have to say Jahna now, remember!” Kris is quick to correct both of them.

He is right. Several Brinawa women, as well as others from around the village, had become involved in the Centre of Light and had undergone a spiritual rebirthing process, during which they acquired new, exotic names. Janelle became Jahna.

‘Why would he go to Janelle’s?’ asks Callie of no one.

Janelle, or Jahna, has the nearest dwelling on Brinawa, but it is still a ten-minute walk away, and it is pretty early for a visit. None of it made sense. Janelle is her friend, not Terry’s.

When Callie had first come here at seventeen and pregnant, Janelle was the only one of the women to welcome her. The others displayed a kind of hostile tolerance. It had taken her years to establish any level of credibility. They were sophisticated, educated, and welltravelled women, and she was a kid, fresh from the local high school.

She is trying to keep it together, but a black pit of fear lies inside her. She just wants Terry to come home and pull his weight. She really, really wants an emptied toilet pan. She can do it, and she has done it. She can and does do just about every job around here. But this job simply does her in.

She tidies the children, packs them lunches, loads them into the old Land Rover, and drops them at school. They are all subdued.

Her father had given her the Land Rover a couple of years ago. Terry had left for the big antinuclear rally in Sydney, then travelled to Aquarius Revisited in Nimbin, and then he went off to Pine Gap. Terry was never in a hurry, and a three-day event always took at least a month. She never knew when it would be over until he walked in the door.

Dad had been ropeable. The very idea that Terry would leave the three of them on Brinawa with no car had had him incensed. Dad had begged Callie to pack up the children and move back to Cornerstone. When she refused, he gave her the old Land Rover.

It had been a tough year in many ways. During that first trip that year, when he had headed off to the anti-nuclear march, Terry had left them stranded. Janelle had saved her then. Early one morning, Janelle packed them up and took them to Social Security in Taree. It had taken all day, but by the time she was safely back at home, she was a Supporting Parent in receipt of her own payment.

She should have notified Social Security as soon as Terry came home. She did not. He was never around for long. Even her dad, the most law-abiding of men, encouraged her to maintain her autonomy.

Callie took control. She paid Hadley the rent, and she kept the cupboards stocked and the garden growing. She was the responsible adult here.

As she drives home, she feels the dull ache across her abdomen and an odd feeling of impending doom.

What had happened? It had to be that odd little packet, but what the hell was it? She can see it there in Kris’s hand, and she can see him rubbing his thumb backwards and forward, enjoying that odd squelchy feeling.

Now, Terry has skulked off while she was on the school run. A gasp of pure exasperation escapes her, and her head drops to the steering wheel. She is so tired of never being warm or clean enough and never having any downtime.

Inside the shack, his coat is gone, and the table holds no note of explanation. She looks into the bedroom and sees that his bag is gone too, never unpacked. He has never left without her washing his clothes. Something is very wrong.

She thinks of the firewood, and worse, she thinks of the toilet pan and then her abdomen cramps viciously, and a tear of self-pity slides down her cheek.

She has walked to Janelle’s and is breathing in the smoke from her friend’s chimney when she sees Graham’s dog starting to rip into a garbage bag on the step.

“No, Dudley! Bad dog!” she yells, and the dog disappears as Janelle swings the door open.

Callie steps towards her, expecting her warm embrace, but Janelle is focused on the garbage spilling onto the grass.

She steps quickly past Callie and begins stuffing rubbish into the bag. Callie watches colour rise in her friend’s face as she picks up a wet-looking, whitish plastic bag. By her foot is a small, empty blue packet, and even from where she stands, Callie can read the word Durex printed diagonally across it.

She sees it clearly now.

Durex.

It lands inside her like a stone.

Jahna is calling out her name, begging her to wait, but Callie is already moving, the sound falling away behind her.

She has done enough waiting.

In memory of Leone Hooke

In memory of Joyce Buswell

In memory of Louise Stewart-Scott

Entries open - Friday 20 February 2026

Entries close - Sunday 26 April 2026 11 pm

Winners announcement - Saturday 13 June

Gloucester Gallery

25 Denison St Gloucester

Doors open at 2 pm for a 2.30 pm announcement.

• All genres accepted eg plays, prose, songs, drama, essay, poetry 

• Maximum number of words - 2000 

• All ages encouraged to enter

• Entries should be submitted in English, using one side of A4 paper, typed double-spaced (except poetry) in a standard typeface (12 pt min.), using generous margins. No fancy fonts, clip art or decorations of any kind.

• File type: PDF 

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• NO NAMES OR ADDRESSES TO APPEAR ON MANUSCRIPTS. Title and page number (ONLY) of the entry should appear on each page of the manuscript.

• The entries will be judged on originality, creativity and writing skill. The judges decision is final.

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• Entries must be original work and must not have won a cash prize in any other competition nor been published in any form, as at the closing date of the competition. 

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• Cost $5

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