Fraser Gehrig after a dirty bump

About the author

Sam Morley

Sam Morley’s work has been published in various journals and has been shortlisted in the Montreal International Poetry Prize. He is the 2022 recipient...

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Non-fictionOn Saturday mornings his friends would call in to pick him up for the game. Like him, they were broad and tall and humorous, and never still. None of them ever seemed comfortable indoors. Their faces were fevered from sitting in winter stadiums. Even as septuagenarians they continued to refer to themselves as ‘the boys’, and if my mother materialised before them, they’d blush like children.

Intimacies, intricacies, cadences

Non-fictionOver cups of tea, Vince was soon telling me stories. About his grandfather, his Ngadjuri heritage, the Aboriginal boys’ home he’d lived in for seven years, a small town called Curramulka where he’d captained and coached the local Australian Rules football team. He also told a story, in passing, about how his mum had to hide him from welfare after his dad died, when Vince was a small child.

It’s only natural

Non-fictionI often feel that we have landed in the worst of all possible worlds for women when it comes to breastfeeding. We are subject to an ideology that argues for its singular efficacy in generating infant attachment to the mother, making an inviolable and exclusive bond. We are also expected to breastfeed to repudiate the maternal industrial complex that fills our supermarkets with formula in shiny tins.