Peter Porter Poetry Prize
2025 Peter Porter Poetry Prize Shortlist
Read the five shortlisted poems for ABR’s 2025 Peter Porter Poetry Prize.
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Lachlan Murdoch’s defamation proceedings against Crikey promised to be a test case on the new public interest defence. Following Murdoch’s discontinuation of his claim in April, the scope and application of the public interest defence to defamation await another appropriate vehicle.
This week on The ABR Podcast we feature the 2025 Peter Porter Prize shortlisted poems, as read by the five poets. Now in its twenty-first year, the Porter Prize is one of Australia’s most lucrative and respected poetry awards. It honours the life and work of the great Australian poet Peter Porter, a contributor to ABR for many years. All poets writing in English are eligible to enter.
By the filling station on La Cienega a burger joint
somehow survives. This Sunday morning
a pink Thunderbird sags at the kerb,
and an old Studebaker, paint flaking.
Most of you will have heard of the Australian Council of Social Service (ACOSS), but for those who have not, it is the peak lobby group of the community welfare sector. ACOSS’s website will tell you that its aims ‘are to reduce poverty and inequality by developing and promoting socially, economically and environmentally responsible public policy and action by government, community and business while supporting non-government organisations which provide assistance to vulnerable Australians’. ACOSS has seventy member organisations, including eight Councils of Social Service at state and territory level, and another four hundred associate members. Every year, Council of Social Service staff lobby federal, state and territory politicians and bureaucrats with proposals and budget submissions. And every year, bureaucrats and ministerial staffers craft careful speeches for politicians game enough to face the Council’s tough questions about budgetary allocations.
All scientists are writers. Science only exists in the written form. What is not written is not published, is not accepted, is not knowledge, and does not exist. It is written science that is scrutinised, peer-reviewed, and cited – nothing else matters but to ‘publish or perish’. Scientific articles, in all their clever, compacted, content-laden complexity, may well be impenetrable to all but the most specialist reader, but this does not mean they are poorly written. Articles are extraordinarily difficult to craft; writing them is the hardest and most intellectually challenging aspect of scientific practice. Evidence – the experimental result or the novel observation – may well lie at the heart of science, but until this evidence is written up and published it remains an unpolished gem which cannot be appreciated or understood. Through the medium of the written word, science has taken us to new worlds. Charles Bazerman argues that ‘scientific writing is one of the more remarkable of human literary accomplishments … [and has] literally helped us move mountains and to know when mountains might move on their own’.