Varnish Online
A collection of written art, assembled piece by piece. This curated gallery holds a mix of mature and emerging talent, where the breadth of voices creates a harmonious exhibition.
Patrons are invited to engage not with a single work but the complete collection – one that exposes varying techniques, styles, and accounts.
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37. Two Small Lives by the Window
She dreams of the apartment in New York more often now that she’s in Melbourne…
34. My Cousin’s First Cigarette
My cousin’s first cigarette is home in the hammock of speak-flesh…
33. Touching Distance
When they were younger, they used to stay at his family’s bach in Kaupokonui…
31. Seminyak
My iPhone had taken to reminding me of the last trip I took with my father and the week we spent in Bali…
29. Wrong Forecast
When I went to work that day, in the tavern next to the building, I heard several entities soaked in homemade liquor, which was doing well, unlike other branches of the economy; they were bitterly discussing current political events…
28. Trampolines and Boys with Broken Bones
When I was little – so little, in fact, that I couldn’t distinguish my parents’ angry voices from their excited ones – I used to watch the boy who lived in the house beside us bounce on his trampoline every afternoon…
27. Your Roots Are Showing
The fellowship of a table-tennis club in what Paul Roberson, my former guitar teacher and dear friend, recalls as a “colonial port city at the far flung edges of a dying empire”…
25. The Suicide
When Mira found out Liam had killed himself, she’d been crossing a Cambodian road to get to a temple…
23. Bitter Fruit
He charges into the water with bull-like force, his heavy thighs parting the waves, silver-haired chest open in defiance…
21. White Cabbage Butterflies, North Beach Wollongong
Up above the high tide line, soft shapeless sand slips in snake-like drifts under my feet…
20. Taking Up Space
On 15 February 2003, a month before I turned twenty-three, I attended the anti-war march in London, in opposition to the invasion of Iraq…