Calibre Prize
2024 Calibre Essay Prize (Winner) | ‘why your hair is long & your stories short’ by Tracey Slaughter
‘A woman who cuts her hair is about to change her life.’
Coco Chanel
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In 1979 in the town of Paradise Lake, women of fifty favour blue knitwear and Peter Jackson cigarettes. They cook sponges without a recipe, don’t mind a brandy and dry, and love their grandchildren with an intensity that takes some of them by surprise. They’re most readily distinguished, one from another, according to their golf handicaps and the generosity of their judgements.
In early August, deep in the winter of Melbourne’s stage-four discontent, journalist Rachel Baxendale became the story. The Victorian political reporter for The Australian newspaper was attacked online for questioning Premier Daniel Andrews on his government’s hotel quarantine program, as an explosion of new coronavirus infections caused unprecedented economic shutdown and the curtailment of civil liberties. As thousands of people watched the premier’s live press briefings from their living rooms, Baxendale assiduously probed Andrews about the use of security guards instead of Australian Defence Force personnel to guard returned travellers.
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The notion of what it means to be different, and the question of how we know we are different, invites us to consider statistical method and its implications for our society, for only in the context of what is normal can an individual be assessed as different. Mathematically, it would appear that the relationship between an individual and a society composed of individuals is by no means straightforward, a subtlety increasingly lost on those citizens who, armed with degrees in the social sciences, emerge from our tertiary institutions to study, rehabilitate, and edify us.
Picnic is probably Fay Zwicky’s most confident collection. In it she renounces certain kinds of brilliance for a freer and more open style of poetry – what she calls in one poem ‘the grace of candour’. It is a style that approximates moral qualities: honesty, direct ness, kindness to strangers. And it is in fact such moral qualities that give force to this collection
And midway through the first course
of pickled fish in the restaurant
by the river that night
slid a black on black
barge
under the brilliantly lit
bridge