The Adas 2015: The Ada Cambridge Biographical Prose Prize, The Ada Cambridge Poetry Prize, The Young Adas Short Story Prize and Graphic Short Story Prize.

By Williamstown Literary Festival

This volume of short-listed entries for the Ada Cambridge literary awards is an exciting new venture for the Williamstown Literary Festival, with an enlarged format and two new categories – the Young Adas Short Story and Graphic Short Story Prizes for authors aged from 15 to 18 years.

Designed to encourage western suburbs authors, this expanded suite of prizes comes with a new name – the Adas 2015 – to match the youthful spirit brought to the festival by a group too often overlooked in writing competitions for young people.

The anthology contains the short-listed and winning entries for each of the four prizes: nine stories for the Biographical Prose Prize, ten poems for the Poetry Prize, ten short-listed Young Adas Short Stories and the print edition features two Graphic Short Stories.

The adult stories engage us in the lives and consciousness of an extensive range of individuals, times and places – some familiar and close to home, others remote and exotic; some involving family relationships; others the experience of war, loss and displacement.

The Young Ada Short Stories are no less varies – ranging from experiences of adolescence to fantasy-horror to stories of war, dementia, childbirth. The Graphic Short Stories add a welcome variation of genre and tone to this volume, narrating their tales with humour and verve by wordless means, through skilful and effective use of visual imagery.

The poems too are indicative of the high calibre of poets working in the west. No less varied than the stories in style and subject matter, they give voice to diverse emotional states and situations. Some witty, others more sombre, all contain imagery, rhythms and insights that reverberate in the mind and imagination of the reader.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Williamstown Literary Festival
• Release date: Jun 11, 2015

Williamstown Literary Festival

Friends Catherine Ryan and Angela Altair sat down over a coffee in Williamstown’s main street in 2003, and wondered if a local writers’ festival could ever take off. The Williamstown Literary Festival has now grown into one of the country’s most respected wordfests, attracting some of Australia’s best loved authors. The festival is run by a committee of locals, supplemented by contract staff at festival time. The festival has a strong focus on local participation, with the annual People’s Choice awards showcasing aspiring local writers and poets. The Ada Cambridge Award for Poetry and Prose is run annually with the winners being announced at the festival’s opening.

Book preview

Foreword

Elisabeth Grove

This year’s festival theme, ‘Swimming in Words’, chooses both water as a metaphor of language and the act of swimming, moving purposefully through words on the page, to bring together reader and writer. Using different strokes and various styles, all the resources of shared language, writers conjure alternative worlds that we readers can enter only by exercising our minds and imaginations.

This year’s anthology of short-listed stories and poems for the Ada Cambridge Prizes is a new venture for the Williamstown Literary Festival. Links with the past are maintained in the title of the prizes to honour one-time Williamstown resident and author, Ada Cambridge (1844-1926), who wrote famously of Hobson’s Bay: ‘And now here I was living by the sea at last – my heart’s desire from childhood.’ We now welcome a new name, The Adas 2015, and two new prize categories: the Young Adas Short Story and Graphic Short Story Prizes for authors aged from 15 to 18 years. The introduction of a non-verbal dimension into the creative mix of these prizes was initiated by our sponsors, Mary and Kevin Mack of Documents on Call, concerned at the under-representation of this age group in competitions for young authors. In addition to donating the Young Ada prizes, they continue to print this volume at no cost to the festival.

The first run of the Young Adas has tapped impressive local talent. Within the 1000-word limit, the ten short stories range widely in subject and setting, the best displaying considerable depth and maturity. Some concern growing up; others explore fantasy; yet others enlarge our sympathies in tales of war, childbirth and dementia. The high standard of writing from this new generation of authors is proof that all is well in the world of words. Disappointingly, however, just a handful of submissions was received for the Graphic Short Story Prize, perhaps because of the short time frame, the specialised nature of the genre, and/or the perception that only comic-style stories were eligible. In fact, the Graphic Short Story Prize encompasses various genres of illustrated story, including those with a higher ratio of text to image. For this reason, only two graphic short stories are included, both the work of one artist. A delightful start to this new award, stylistically and thematically diverse, they might be the work of two different authors, the one quirkily humorous, the other, exciting and fast-moving. In the space of four pages, each tells a lively, entertaining and finely drawn tale.

Like the Young Adas, the adult prizes for poetry and prose come from writers who live or work in the western suburbs of Melbourne (from 25 postcodes). The tenth Ada Cambridge Biographical Prose Prize is unique in its requirement of biography in the form of a short story ‘based on a true life experience of the writer or another person’. While such stories may be autobiographical, some engage us in other lives, thus achieving greater complexity and emotional distance than unmediated personal memoir. Some of the nine short-listed stories take us no further than Highpoint and other parts of Melbourne; others transport us to distant times, places and lives as vividly realised as any work of fiction. In 3000 words or less, the stories tackle major events – relationships with lovers, children, parents, grandparents; bitter experiences of war and displacement; the pangs of adolescent sexual discovery. The best create a distinctive narrative voice and the authentic flavour of a life lived. The first prize winner provides a moving but unsentimental account of the consciousness of a returned Second World War serviceman, damaged, alcohol-ridden, befuddled.

The only constraint on the eighth Ada Cambridge Poetry Prize is the maximum length of 30 lines, requiring clarity and precision but also allowing the concentrated impact that only poetry can achieve. The ten short-listed poems are all assured and inventive. Some are intensely personal, exploring the links between present and past with tenderness, bemusement or humour. Some reach into other lives and states of feeling, generating, in the case of the first prize winner, an unforgettably empathic sense of a homeless man in Swanston Street. All of the poems reward re-reading; their images, rhythms and individual voices continue to reverberate in the mind of the reader.

Without the work of all entrants, whether successful or not, these prizes would not exist. It takes courage to write poems and stories and to expose them to the critical judgement of others. The Festival Committee thanks all authors and encourages you to keep on creating. Warm thanks are also due to all our sponsors, to the judges and short-listing judges of all four prizes.

The journey home

Adam Deverell

John felt his head lurch suddenly forward as his whiskery chin jolted against his chest. He woke with a start, snorting salt and gasping for breath. He could feel his legs kicking air, his arms dangling over the side of the boat as it bucked in the Gulf of Papua. Had the hospital boat been hit? Who had dragged him from his hospital bed? He knew they had evacuated the ship when the Jap bombers came in. His left leg was crushed, useless; he was told they had to leave him. Now he was in a lifeboat, miles from the bay where they’d launched out of Port Moresby. He couldn’t remember how he’d got into the boat, couldn’t remember the bombs hitting the hospital ship or the flames ripping through the ward or the screams and bellows from the sailors.

‘Sister Maria, is that you? Captain? Where are we? Were we hit?’ he croaked.

The boat kept on its trajectory, up, down, up, down. He couldn’t sit still. Perhaps he was drowning? ‘Bloody hell, help me, I can’t hold on any longer!’ he cried, his eyes still shut, not wanting to see the eternalness of the sea coming up to meet him, not wanting to think about his life ending like this. He could see the moon so close to him it was almost like a street light, its brightness within touching distance. The boat creaked, as if in pain, as if it wanted to collapse around him.

‘Come on Dad, it’s alright. We’ll get you home.’

‘Yeah Dad,’ a boy interrupted, his voice bored, resigned. ‘We’re almost home, just half a mile. Keep it down, would ya! I don’t want the neighbours gawking at us.’

His fingers found cold metal. He moved his hand further down and rubbed up against worn fabric. He made himself open his eyes a little and saw two kids pushing him along a road. Lights shone above him in the summer night sky. He could hear traffic hiss past just a few feet away. A pram. He was in little Alan’s pram. His legs were bundled unceremoniously over the ends, his head bounced every time they hit a crack in the footpath. The wheels screeched. And the kids were his, fetching him from the Moorabbin pub – wasn’t that where he’d been? He could hardly remember the night beyond playing a couple of swing tunes, shouting a few ex-servicemen a lager or two and arguing if Jim Laker was the best bowler in the world with a testy Englishman.

‘Thanks you two, just try to be more…just get me home.’ He wanted to spew. Instead he held it in, trying to ignore the pram’s exaggerated suspension thanks to its darned huge wheels, and at the same time knowing he should at least be staggering home past the red brick fences of Union Street instead of being pushed in a baby pram by his two bloody kids. He closed his eyes tight, amazed at his life. He thought it would never change, would always be there, just as beer always flowed in the Prince, as the sea lapped against the Brighton baths, as willow hit leather, as the piano keys hit note, after note, after note.

It was difficult to say what he was best at – cricket or piano. He lost interest in anything he couldn’t immediately perfect, but both came naturally to him. He made a decent quid playing with his jazz band, The Kit Kat Syncopators, at Saturday night dances and the Gardenvale Dance Hall. Long, smoky nights of endless tunes, going on until the crowd left the halls damp with sweat and spilled drinks and exuberance. Still he could have kept playing – Fats Waller and Winifred Atwell and requests for songs he studiously adlibbed or plain ignored. Then there was the drive from home at Montrose up to the Healesville Grand. Afternoons in the winter, snow in the hills beyond and his dislike of the girls who wanted to stand at his piano, staring at his dancing, elegant fingers, cheapening the music. It paid the bills, much to the amazed chagrin of his brother, a doctor, who often said it’d be half his luck to earn that much.

Then the cricket. Captain of the Richmond First XI, talk of playing for the Vics that never did eventuate, standing in at slip and ordering his field around Jolimont like a regimental commander, coaxing his bowlers into one last steam train of an over under the Melbourne sun. The smells of cigarettes mixed with cracked leather and the rich aroma of cut grass. Even better, standing out on the pitch in his green felt First XI cap, driving a ball to the boundary on the up, knowing life couldn’t get better than a century stand and a pot in the club rooms after, and a long Saturday night on the ivories to follow.

He was right. It didn’t get any better. Not even nearly.

‘Are we almost home kids?’ John sighed. Disgust at the thought of having to be wheeled home in a kid’s pram gave way to the comfort of the mattress and pillow at his head and the warm summer night. He could get used to this. Perhaps they could just park him in the garage when they got home – he was sure he’d have a better night’s sleep than constricted by the sheets in the house.

Then he remembered his hat. The brown felt Fedora. Had he left it on the bar? He couldn’t quite tell if it was on his head. And if it was, was it crushed, wedged into the back of the pram? ‘My hat kids, where is it? Did you get my hat?’ He was panicky now. The thought of one of those drunks staggering out with the hat, laughing at they hurled it beer-stained onto the train tracks, made him gag.

There wasn’t a man in the Moorabbin pub that could wear the Fedora as well as he could. Even on the turps he cut