‘Racing’s Darkest Day’. So screamed the headline on Queensland’s Sunday Mail on 19 August 1984, less than 24 hours after Bold Personality’s dismal impersonation of Fine Cotton was rumbled.
Dear Mr Wrexham, I know you don’t know me but please, please, please you have to help me
I feel calm as I watch the sun rise behind the row of ice-cream-coloured houses.
Late on the afternoon of Tuesday the ninth of April in the Year of Our Risen Lord 1468, a solitary traveller was to be observed picking his way on horseback across the wild moorland...
Well, I’m dying! A lot of men make it to the end of their life and they don’t know they’ve reached it.
It would be inaccurate to say that my childhood was normal before they came.
Water closes over the body. Swallows it. The rocking of the boat subsides quickly.
No parent should have to bury a child. Sadly, I did. I knew almost immediately after Shaun was born that it was just a matter of time.
Afterwards, Kate Dowd believed that if luck had been with her, if Jack had been unable to find his way that night, things would have been different.
I’m on the highway a few miles out of town when the noise starts: a scraping, grinding din that jackhammers my heart into my stomach.
It was only three days after Colleen had gone missing that anybody told her mother, Muriel Craig, and the news made no sense to her.
Where was I? In bed, obviously. Willow’s bed – that much also obvious. In Willow’s secret hideaway. But where was that?
My father taught me to kill. In balmy Brisbane nights, on our front lawn and in our backyard, we kill cane toads together.
‘I’ll tell you one thing,’ says Mum, distracting me as she scoops up the last of the chocolate brownie with vanilla ice cream. ‘I don’t know much about positive ageing, but I’m positive I am ageing.’
I walk, therefore I am I rise. I rise and take my place between the earth and sky.
The wind and heavy rain coming right off the sea rattled the cottage windows and pounded on the glass.
She crouched in front of the mirror in the dark, clinging to them. The baby in her right arm, the child in her left.
The woman jolts awake, gasping, heart pounding. Gunshots echo in her head, ones conjured in sleep.