Calibre Prize
Hold your nerve
I have not told anyone that there is a small child growing in my bedside table drawer. The Ziplock bag containing E’s hair, a mass of tangled brown. A handful of baby teeth.
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It takes more than half an hour to put on all the layers of the dry suit. First the woollen thermals, then the thick undersuit and the neoprene seals around the neck and wrists. Finally, the membrane shell. All this before we even look for the hole in the ice. By the time we hit the water we are as plump and blubber-thick as the more cold-adapted creatures: seals, whales, little penguins that leave trails of bubbles blurred behind them like a zoetrope strip. Pierre calls it our sumo suit, the ‘Japanese Squeeze’. Will tells him it’s the closest Pierre’s ever got to an exotic embrace. Pierre says he is innocent and pure and doesn’t want to know about Will’s sordid carry-on. We’ve been working together so long that this kind of thing seems funny. When we step off the Zodiac onto the ice, we move like one gangly animal. We scan the horizon and sniff the air. The centre of gravity low in our bodies, every bit of us on high alert to feel if the frozen sheet bends at our step. There are no shadows here. It makes it hard to see what we’re looking for: a place where the ice opens and we can slip down into the hanging cathedral beneath.
Before the May 2022 federal election, Anthony Albanese, partly to silence critics of his ‘small target’ campaign and partly to manage wider expectations, proposed to lead a Labor government that under-promised and over-delivered. A deliberately thin ‘look-at-them’ election campaign was designed to keep the focus on a tired and compromised Coalition government, rather than following Labor’s usual approach of fighting for voters’ attention with big new ideas. For a social democratic party which exists for reform, it was an unorthodox strategy and one not without risks. The political capital from any ‘over-delivery’ might well accumulate for a ‘re-election’ bid in 2025, but the thinness of Labor’s 2022 enticements would be obvious.
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