The Bass Coast Prize for Non-Fiction

Beyond the view: Phillip Island’s landscape of labour and love

2/4/2020

An environment becomes a landscape only when it is regarded so by people, and especially when they begin to shape it in accord with their taste and needs. Nature may offer the raw material of scenery unaided, but to transform it into landscape demands the powers of the seeing human eye and the loving human hand.

George Seddon in Landprints: Reflection on
Place and Landscape (1997)

By Linda Cuttriss

PHILLIP Island’s landscape is gently undulating farmland that rolls away to the sheltered bay to the north and open ocean to the south. Around the edges are cliffs and bluffs, high dunes and sandy beaches with salt marsh and mangrove-fringed mudflats on its sheltered shores.

Patches of bushland are clustered around the centre and northern parts of the Island while hardy shrubs, grasses and succulents drape the open ocean fringes. Eucalypts and swamp paperbark scrub stand in thin strips along roadsides and rows of cypress trees and indigenous plantings follow fence lines, ridge lines and down into the hollows.

Linda Cuttriss was highly commended in the Bass Coast Prize for Non-fiction for her essay Beyond the view: Phillip Island’s landscape of labour and love. Her essay traces the history of the various settlers’ attempts to shape the island to their own needs and looks to a future where islanders are working together to protect and restore what is most precious in their landscape.

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Ed and the birds

17/3/2020

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By Karen Bateman

WE ARE sat at Ed’s table, drinking weak tea. Ed has been telling me about Eastern Curlews, how their wingbeat is slow and deliberate, how these cautious birds are flogged on their route from the Arctic Circle to Australia, and how he believes their melancholy cry is an innate awareness of the decimation of their species. In turn, I tell Ed how my nanna would predict the weather by the behaviour of birds. If swallows swooped low across the backyard she would rush outside and unpeg her knickers before showers came. Pied Wagtails roosting in the cavity of the chestnut tree, or a squadron of geese that flew south before autumn’s end, meant a harsh winter was ahead. A blue-sky day kicking pebbles at the seaside could end up with us all hustled to the car.

‘Chivvy up now before bad weather hits,’ she’d say, with a nod toward the seagulls huddled near the barnacled legs of the pier.

Living in the North East of England there was always a decent chance, in predicting inclement weather, that she would be right. Predicting fair weather days was a little trickier.

Observing birds to take measure of our surroundings is nothing new. In the middle ages, folk would predict the severity and length of winter from the breastbone of a dead, local goose and though this particular practise is not grounded in science, recent studies suggest birds can read difference in barometric pressure, giving credence to some weather folklore.

Karen Bateman was highly commended in the Bass Coast Prize for Non-fiction for her essay Ed and the Birds, a very personal response to local environmental degradation. A dialogue between a naïve narrator and a learned friend, it contains an immense amount of complex information packed into an easy to read format. Ed and the Birds is clear eyed about the enormous challenges but with a vestige of optimism and humour based on the response of one person, “a plodding optimist”.

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Alzheimer Sufferer/Carer Suite

6/3/2020

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By Malcolm Brodie

POEMS FOR FLORENCE
(To Celebrate Her Richness Always)

1 Billy left this morning

'Billy left this morning.'

Words
of an entry in my Mother's diary

26 December 1949.

He is dead now, my Father.
Scottish-born, Second War, volunteer Digger. Died in the 1970s. Cancer.

("Look at me!" he'd said. "I'm down to skin and bone.") I sat staring across the breadth of the blue war-issue blanket,
rolled my eyes with his, shook my head,

before bending over to extract
a further two Matron-sanctioned cans of beer, from the locker beside his bed.

My Mother is hardly able alive now.
In hospital an infirm person, a protected person under law, she is not insane,
an illness, call it Alzheimer's Disease... a research-doctor's name.

"Billy left this morning!" she called out in the ward,
as I left her bedside abruptly, anxious to return home.

Malcolm Brodie has won third prize in the inaugural Bass Coast Prize for Non-Fiction for his poetry collection Alzheimer Sufferer/Carer Suite.
A collection of 56 poems, it covers the period from when his mother was first diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease until her death 14 years later. In the early years, Malcolm was her primary carer; in later years a daily visitor to a succession of nursing homes in which his mother resided.
He describes the collection as a non-sequential memoir since it moves backwards and forwards in time with his mother’s thoughts and his own memories of her.
The poems are colloquial, amusing, honest, lyrical, adding up to a work of great power and tenderness.

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Pittosporum flowering: No wonder they called it sweet

20/2/2020

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By Julie Constable

IN SPRING the sweet pittosporums flowered. The garden was fragrant with their blossoms. One stately, buttressed tree stood in the north-west comer and a younger grove flourished on the eastern side. Thinner trunked, their pale bark was patterned with green lichen.

Mr. G. Matheson, a settler in South Gippsland described Pittosporum undulatum in the 1880s:
'The pittosporum called native orange from its leaves having a resemblance to the cultured variety, was very ornamental ... It had a glossy, green leaf and sweet scented flowers; its seed pods were round and about the size of marbles, and in colour and shape resembled miniature oranges. (i)

Also known as mock orange and native daphne, the sweet pittosporum is characterised by glossy leaves with undulating edges, hanging clusters of fragrant creamy flowers, little orange fruits which ripen and crack open to reveal red sticky seeds.

We moved to the Strzelecki Ranges in the mid 1980s. The raven watched us from the cross atop a Norfolk pine - a man and a woman in their mid twenties carrying boxes from the gate to the verandah, struggling with the piano. The old weatherboard 1930s farm house suited us admirably: a study lined with shelves for my books where I could write and correct student work; sheds and space for Kim to work on sculptures. A narrow 'sun' room, which just fitted our biggest table looked out at the garden and the valley below.

Julie Constable has won second prize in the inaugural Bass Coast prize for Non-Fiction with Pittosporum Flowering, a memoir of an environmental awakening. The author revives an old-fashioned exotic farm garden, learns more about the indigenous birds and plants and gradually becomes politicised. The memoir is interwoven with the familiar, fraught debate about whether sweet pittosporum, long regarded as an exotic weed, is in fact a valuable indigenous canopy tree. Her beautiful memoir alternates the focus from the large scale – the logging of native forests for wood chips – to caring for one’s own little patch, over which for a short time one has some influence. There is also the realisation that a garden, no matter how much it is loved, is only fleeting.

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Jobs that no longer exist - a memoir

8/2/2020

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By Christine Grayden

AN UNCLE and aunt who owned a General Store on Phillip Island and spoiled their nieces and nephew rotten with lollies and great dollops of multi-flavoured ice creams squashed down into cones were definitely adored in my childhood. They both played jokes on us and we all laughed. Uncle Keith's Border Collie dog Kruger carried a tyre in his jaws and taunted us to pull it away from him. Not a chance but it was fun trying. Then, too soon, the visit was over for that year. We piled into our car and drove back to the city to our dysfunctional family life via several pubs on the way.

I came to stay with my grandmother on Phillip Island at my recently divorced uncle's place in the summer holidays of 1968-69 at 15 years old, and assumed I would spend the time with my Nanna, walking, cooking, sewing, swapping letters from family and hearing stories about her siblings and the varied places she had lived and worked. Uncle Keith was then a professional fisherman with a small boat and nets, having lost the store in a messy divorce, and we hardly saw him. When we did he barely grunted and hardly acknowledged me.

Christine Grayden has won first prize in the inaugural Bass Coast Prize for Non-Fiction with Jobs that no longer exist - a memoir. Her story relates memories of the various physically hard jobs the writer did as a young woman with her uncle while spending her holidays and weekends on Phillip Island, and later when living there. Most of these jobs were traditional on Phillip Island until about the 1980s, but are no longer done.

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Memoir of bygone jobs takes top writing prize

6/2/2020

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From left, Malcom Brodie (third prize winner), Don Watson (author and guest speaker), Julie Constable (second prize winner), Christine Grayden (first prize winner) and Phyllis Papps (prize sponsor) at The Gurdies winery following the announcement of the Bass Coast Prize for Non-Fiction.

By Catherine Watson

PHILLIP Island writer and historian Christine Grayden has won first prize in the inaugural Bass Coast Prize for Non-Fiction with Jobs that no longer exist – a memoir.

Her story relates memories of the various physically hard jobs she did as a young woman with her uncle while spending her holidays and weekends on Phillip Island, and later when living there.

Most of these jobs – handline commercial fishing, chicory drying, and collecting kelp and cuttlefish – were traditional on Phillip Island until the 1980s, but they are no longer done, so the memoir is an invaluable historical record as well as being a fascinating story.

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