The Perfect Diary is in a week-to-an-opening format, with a work by an Australasian artist or writer featured every week.
Below you can find the works by our contributors that appear in April, May and June 2003, along with the quotation that appears on each spread.

You can see works from previous months and years by using the links at the bottom of this page.

 

Wartime

& my unsuspecting armed father captures
what he believes is a German paratrooper
who spits on him, emotes guttural insults
as a North Sea wind bends Norfolk marsh grass.

A Defence exercise & that English officer
who might have envied Olivier
finally owns up in his normal accent,
never to know how near my trembling father
came to squeezing his trigger.

Years later, Australia, & my father
still trembling with the shock of the unexpected,
his heart which he will leave to science
suffusing his face with pent-up emotion,
suffers my smart-arsed colloquialisms.
He works as an armed nightwatchman
losing his days alone in fretful half-sleep
& his Pommie gormlessness pisses me off.

I know now, in my shadow years,
sorrow veiling my own scarred & pitted heart,
my father might have embellished his war story,
yet what if he had been trigger-happy
or just - let’s say it - happy?
Our lives could have been changed forever.

S M CHIANTI

LAMENT

you’re away
I’m listening to
prince and its not
even his cool period
I eat badly
tin of baked beans
for dinner tonite
feeling energetic I added
some curry powder
last nite it was
corn thins
a whole packet of them
with no topping
yesterday I scrubbed the shower
while I was having one
I began to feel ill
now I know why
at the gym they say
not to exercise in the sauna
I’ll get a lot of writing done
I told friends
I haven’t
but I’ve watched a lot of telly
I don’t do any of the chores
I tell you off for not doing
I’m sharing the lounge room
with two geckos and a couple of
what I think are white tail spiders
I’m waiting to see who eats who
like in Russia
I have to drink vodka
to stay warm
I’m worried the cat won’t know you

REBECCA PHELAN

Confessions of a Serial Killer

I kept them
in mahogany cases.
No-one had the faintest idea
what was inside.
Could have been pressed flowers
or erotic prose.
Trekked through dangerous territories
with my lethal butterfly net.
I wore cotton gloves
with the fingertips cut off.
Sewed canvas pockets
into my ankle-length skirts.
Stayed tangled
in the undergrowth.
I became savage
like a feral dog
smashing through rocks
and purple heather.
Spent years chasing those
Italian-lake beauties.
I did it for the squeals
as the pins went in.
I did it for the chase.

*Miss Margaret Fountaine fell in and out of love with butterflies. She collected 22,000 in her lifetime.

KAREN KNIGHT

Drizzle

lt’s taken forty years
to stand in my garage
watching the rain drift down
like hundreds of shivering sheets
of impossibly fine white gauze
shaken by a thousand hands.
•
I was eight or ten
before girls or cars
or guns or jobs or money
were important
when I could still be bothered
doing pointless things.
•
The guy across the road
is standing watching too
he drives a truck
but today he’s standing transfixed;
I wave
and he waves back to me.

JOHN WEST

Inner Journey

I crawled inside my father
the air was fresher
than I expected

his organs
though decaying
smelt like carnival hot dogs

I stretched my limbs inside him
pressed my hands against him
felt the walls that held him

then kicked my legs out
where his were hanging
shorter though than mine

I said, Sorry ‘bout the disturbance,
quietly at first
then louder
when I knew he hadn’t heard me

I pulled myself up
(by the bootstraps of course)
yelled through his anvil stirrup hammer
I’m in here you crazy bastard

He replied
I’ll give you a backhander, laddie!
least I thought it was him
‘ til I saw his father
glaring through the ribcage

I didn’t stick around to see
my father’s beating part;
a scared little shit
I got out of there fast.

PAUL MITCHELL

Do It Yourself Ayer’s Rock Poem
or Demystifying the Rock

Instruction: Complete each sentence by circling the word or words that best express your feelings about Ayer’s Rock

When I first saw Ayer’s Rock it looked big / small / normal / boring /stupid / gay.
and its colour was red /blue / pink / boring/ stupid / gay.
It looked like a whale / seal / pastie / really big witchetty grub / rainbow serpent / two snakes fighting in Aboriginal mythology like they said in the shop / the MCG / a turd from outer space.
Climbing Ayer’s Rock, people looked like ants /gazelles / wildebeest / elephants /wombats / jellyfish.
I climbed Ayer’s Rock because everyone else did / my grandfather did / my uncle said I couldn’t / I wanted to achieve something with my life.
I did not climb Ayer’s Rock because I was philosophically opposed on the grounds that Uluru is a sacred place of spiritual and cultural significance to local Aboriginals / I was stuffed .
At the top of Ayer’s Rock people were kicking a footy / looking for McDonalds / making pyramids out of each other / posing like peasants in a Breughel painting / taking taking taking taking pictures of rock! / treading tenderly while gazing about in a curious and scientific way as if they’d just stepped out of a flying saucer.
I saw other tourists run / skip / hop / jump / fall over / lie down quietly / seem to stop breathing.
They were saying things like
hurrah / I think I’ll just sit down for a bit / look, you goon, I’ll be O.K. / tell my wife I...I...I... / this way to the top (as they pointed to a white dotted line that wasn’t going anywhere else.)
Out of ten I would give Ayer’s Rock lO / 9 / 8 / 7 / 6 / 5 / 4 / 3 / 2 / 1 /0.
I would recommend it because it was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world / a test of my manhood/ a chance to prove there is no glass ceiling above Ayer’s Rock.
I would not recommend it because it was boring / stupid / gay.

ROSS DONLON

Windows

TV where a character suddenly plunges
through an upper floor window to her death.
My thoughts are drawn to the past, as usual.
I crash through a window, fire at my back.
The characters in the TV story behave badly,
like me when I madly lit those flames.
Now, with the TV off, I smell muddy grass
where I land amid splintered glass, sliced open.
I bang on a door, blood splashes in the rain,
& my neighbour, a jockey, tough guy victim
of painful falls himself, calls the fire brigade
then directs a hose through the jagged hole.
My life of pain back then, presaging doom,
a plume of black smoke, soundtrack shrill alarms,
young, scorched, a restless bane busting homes.
How might stories end? We only know they must.
With a past so bizarre who needs TV drama?
In our bedroom, cool & sweet, we talk about
all that matters, & I gaze beyond our windows,
intact so far, though fragile, liable to shatter.

IAN C SMITH