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2016 Boldrewood Literary Award winners
Prose


First prize        Fitzy’s Complaint                                                        Roger Vickery
 
Second prize   Liang Xiao                                                                   Paul White
  
Highly commended
 
Epiphany                                                                                             Val Clark         
 
Badgengandah Bridge                                                                          Garry Hurle
 
Battle of the Stockyards                                                                       Carmel Lillis
 
Second-Hand Light                                                                              Kat Pekin
 
Movement at the Station                                                                      J.S. Scholz

Poetry

First prize            Drought and Flood                                                    Mark Miller
 
Second prize      Triptych: In the Marine Light                                       Mark Miller
 
 
Highly commended
 
The interchange                                                                                  Jenny Blackford
 
Beneath the Stars of Mother Country                                                    Sue Grocke
 
A Terrible Dream                                                                                Tom McIlveen
 
Angela                                                                                               Leonie Parker
 

Judge's comments

Prose  |First prize        Fitzy’s Complaint
Intelligently contrived humorous piece with evocative descriptions, careful character delineation and deft handling of multiple voices.
 
Second prize   Liang Xiao
 
A sympathetic examination of one man’s burden and deliverance in a cross-cultural context. The prose lingers where appropriate, not detracting from the overall tightness of composition in a work of judicious length.
 
Highly commended
 
Battle of the Stockyards
 
A very Australian tale with a methodically assembled plot culminating in a wry twist.

Poetry |  Overall the standard was quite high, which made the judging experience enjoyable. Numerous poems were written with a regional perspective and captured a sense of place and character effectively.
 
There was a large number of poems that employed a rhyme scheme. While this was handled fairly well, there were instances where the poem seemed “forced” or restricted by the demands of the scheme. Few poems seemed to employ enjambment between couplets and stanzas, which would have had the effect of freeing up the lines.
 
The less successful poems had a prose feel in the sense that they could have usefully been compressed to their essentials.
 
Others failed to take advantage of the rhetoric stresses available in poems at beginnings or endings of the piece or stanzas.
 
My congratulations to the winners and high commended entrants as well as to all those who entered the competition.
 
Winner: “Drought and Flood”
 
This poem effectively conveys the contrast between two weather phenomena typical of regional and Outback life: drought & flood. It does so with economic and memorable imagery such as in the stanza where we see –
 
            Cattle coalesce along the fence-line,
            they lie down in hollows
            beneath pockets of bitten trees
            beneath an upside-down sea
            of bruised nimbus
 
Interestingly, the poet uses rhyme and near-rhyme from time to time, showing an awareness that this can be done for dramatic effect.
 
But the most striking element of this poem is its strong and emotive closure, where the river is personified in flood, “betraying…closeness” to yield a “muddy boot / of our neighbour’s missing child”.
 
2nd Place: “Triptych: In the Marine Light”
 
A very close runner-up, this poem dazzles with striking imagery, such as where a “weedy seadragon…takes on an ethereal glow” in the morning sun with “lacquer-black eyes, / like china beads…”
 
The third section of the triptych is especially impressive where we see the moon climbing “the black staircase of sky” moving “like mercury through the water / the stars her unstringed pearls / spilling on the floor of the world”. The poet uses line breaks and rhetorical stresses with great effect here.
 
Highly Commended
 
“Angela”. An intriguing sense of elusive character, in which the speaker engages with a young girl and her “private” father at a distance. The ending was perhaps too ambiguous as the speaker “got it” while the reader wasn’t so sure.
 
“The Interchange” was the best of the numerous poems inspired by past wars. It was written in free verse and more efficient in its story telling, using rhetorical devices to enhance the movement and pacing of the work.
 
“Beneath the Stars of Mother Country” provides a sensual view of Outback life from an Indigenous perspective. The ending is perhaps too abrupt in its shift in perspective, and a stronger unifying focus throughout would have helped.
 
“A Terrible Dream” captures the story of how the speaker is separated from her mother due to the mother’s mental problems. The voice of the mother in poetic diary form is rendered effectively, though the regular rhyme scheme of the mother’s story may work against our understanding of her problems.
 
 
 
 
 
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