‘Adani killed my father’ These words were in Adam’s head when he woke up, but he was unable to remember any dream they were part of It was still daylight:...
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Venie Prize Year: 2017
Journey, the South Coast by Mark Miller
1 This Estuary This morning the mist comes apart before me, like fabric, like ashes – revealing at low tide the craters in sand left by night-anglers pumping for bait...
Read MorePainting Trees at Valla by Brian Purcell
By chance they rise from the dull green floor dappled, pulsating columns uninterested in my measuring gaze their stray arches lowering beneath Autumn’s bright blue dome How can I paint...
Read MoreBlack Swan Polyptych by Stuart Barnes
I am still The black swan of trespass on alien waters. —Ern Malley, ‘Dürer: Innsbruck, 1495’ One percolates java. A season burns. The other spoons ant after exciting banded sugar...
Read MoreHow We Get Through Accidentally by Geraldine Burrowes
like mammoths in tar most of the universe is missing dark matter and noble gasses keep it from falling apart lines of liquid in full solar glare detect soft -ware...
Read MoreTransgression of the Trees by Jeff Guess
after a now lost avenue of Southern blue gums for roadworks (Eucalyptus leucoxylon) all many hundreds of years old In places the road through the valley is complicated by blue...
Read MoreDeath of the Gardener by Gary Smith
(after the death of a Melbourne woman, out gardening in strong winds) We always wondered what it would take to stop you, greenthumb obsessed from going out there, rubber-gloved to...
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Community Bushfire Forum
Designed for households seeking practical, forward-thinking bushfire preparation, this event brings together a diverse lineup of guest speakers. Topics will span how houses burn, bushfire resilient landscape design and management, household and community response planning and post disaster resilience and reintegration. More info and tickets here.

2026 Venie Prize winner
Here is what judge Peter O’Mara had to say about all of the poems entered in this year’s Venie Prize: In such a conjectural, estranged times, this year’s entries arrived, not coincidentally, from a multifarious array of the environmental poetry index — the polemical, the elegiac, the embodied, the observed, the incidental, the expansive, the

2024 Venie Prize winner
Congratulations to Isabella G. Mead for writing the winning poem of the 2024 Venie Holmgren Environmental Poetry Prize, Melt Ice. Here is what judge Tim Loveday had to say about the poem: Melt Ice is a work that speaks back to our colonial inheritance with an acute and painful awareness of how our complicity as