Calibre Prize

We woke early that morning as the sun lit up the two shared bedrooms, three of us in each one. The thin, printed cotton curtains were no match for that kind of light. We were eighteen years old. It was the first weekend of our first semester at university, and we had come to the beach house armed with our readers and highlighters.

In this week’s ABR podcast we hear from the runner-up of the 2023 Calibre Essay Prize, Bridget Vincent. Calibre judges Yves Rees, Peter Rose and Beejay Silcox praised Bridget Vincent’s ‘Child Adjacent’ for its wryness and compassion. They noted that it broadened our understanding of the family and interrogated the terrors and moral dilemmas of raising children in the climate crisis. Bridget Vincent is a Lecturer in English at the Australian National University. Listen to her reading ‘Child Adjacent’, published in the June issue of ABR.

I feel like I need to come out every day. I’m pushing the stroller, fishing out the dummy, pointing out dogs, but this isn’t what it looks like. At the playground or the checkout, I take the nods and maternal solidarity, staying inside the parenting illusion until it feels slightly disingenuous. I am not the mother. I am an aunt instead, if ‘instead’ is even the right word. There are categories – infertile, childless by circumstance, childless by choice – and within these, more specific groups like the Birthstrikers, who are publicly delaying procreation until there is climate action. Being an aunt of the Anthropocene is none of these, and all of them at once.

Sydney writer Tracy Ellis is the winner of the 2023 Calibre Essay Prize. Her name will be very familiar to ABR readers: Tracy won the 2022 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize for her story 'Natural Wonder'. (She is the first person to win both Calibre and the Jolley Prize.)

When Wheel left his jeans to soak in the bathroom sink one morning, he didn’t notice that the tap wasn’t quite turned off. He went out for the day and while he was gone, a clear, almost invisible, wire-thin needle of liquid continued to flow. It would have looked static, like an icicle, far from voluminous. But it was insistent, continuous. In his absence the trickle turned into a flood. It overflowed the sink and then the bathroom of the third-floor apartment. It crept silently down the hall into the bedroom and the built-in cupboards, blooming inside document boxes in search of absorbent substances. It was drawn through the diaries and notebooks where I, his partner of many years, had documented my adult life. The water seemed to soak my belongings specifically, as if it was coming for me, trying to wash me away. It left tea-coloured tide marks on my charcoal drawings and filled my shoes with puddles in the bottom of the wardrobe.

Calibre Prize

Since announcing the joint winners of the third Calibre Prize, we have received many compliments for Jane Goodall’s and Kevin Brophy’s winning essays, and various expressions of support for Calibre. Several of these appear on our website, and this month we also publish letters from Elisabeth Holdsworth inaugural winner of the Calibre Prize in 2007 and from Nicholas Jose, who also writes about the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature in this issue.

It is very pleasing to be able to announce that Copyright Agency Limited, through its Cultural Fund, will sponsor the fourth Calibre Prize, for which ABR now seeks entries. Once again the Prize is worth $10,000, making it one of the world’s most lucrative awards for a new essay. This year we are adding a second Prize Young Calibre which is open to those aged twenty-one and under. Young Calibre is worth $3000 not a bad start for a brilliant secondary student or undergraduate. More details appear on page 9, and both sets of guidelines and entry forms are available on our website or from the ABR office.

New Partner for ABR

Let’s be candid. Producing a magazine of this kind is not easy in a country with a small population and one where the life of the mind (even if not ‘the least of possessions’, to quote Patrick White) rarely commands the attention or glamour often associated with sporting events and other fashionable distractions.

The runner-up in this year’s Calibre Essay Prize, Sarah Gory’s essay ‘Ghosts, Ghosts Everywhere’ confronts spectres of the past in order to pose questions about how to live ethically in the present and about what responsibilities we bear towards the future. Drawing on a wide range of writers and thinkers as well as her grandfather’s experience of the Holocaust, Gory plots the process by which one generation’s traumatic suffering becomes another’s imaginative investment.