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WINNERS

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2024 Winners

2024 Winner - Judith Rodriguez Open Prize

Stephanie Powell|the infinite and the in-between

the modem is in song an un-luxurious birdcall:

ba ding ba ding ba baaahbaaah

your mouth is a sticky trap for TV catchphrases, early noughties

chatroom abbreviations, slang –

conversations with children who turn out to be grown men

these years, a strange house, taking their rent, burying

your cats in graves soon opened by roots

and when Dad has cancer, it eats up the soft tissue, leaves only

computer sounds –

I back-track and lose myself in The Simpsons

the upstairs bathroom is covered in hair

a powered-down screen is unbearably cold,

doing nothing

to cure anything but too much time

(ii)

In Sidney Nolan's Constable Fitzpatrick and Kate Kelly, the policeman

is putting a girl to his knee

(a dog is dragged to heel

and made to sit until learning to stay)

Kate’s hand has disappeared into his trousers –

She has a short, amputated girlhood

In the next century:

Nolan raises Welsh black cattle in England and lives

like landed gentry

In Australia he’d worked this scene over and over, in different versions

It’s cheery brutality never lessens

Kate died of suspected suicide at the age of thirty-five

In Herefordshire, steam belches from nostrils

above a quiet, painterly earth

In a dam outside Forbes, NSW in 1898, they find a body, borne from it

four children

breasts swollen still for an infant

(iii)

we take the afternoon off

the highway is surrounded by dead volcanic plains, the

tea service offers mini sandwiches, instant coffee and hot water in urns

we dress in black only to find everyone in muted brown, maroon and purple –

our ideas of mourning are out of fashion

his widow is frail but stops in the rain before the hearse

eases onto Geelong Road

a column of daughter on each side

a slideshow remembering his surf coast bronze, the big hands scooping

fish out of the Bellarine

the grey and blue painted tinnie

I recognise my chin in a dozen faces

above point danger we share an ice cream with mum on the cliffs

we talk about dying, as you do when surrounded by people

with the same, perishing bloodline –

below, a handful of surfers’ shine in and out of the sea

always pushing and pulling, shore to expanse

It’s spring, our dead children are lacing their shoes;
we walk, fleeting, through bush. A shadow
on the memory-shaped hill; the same birds singing,
broken hearts in chorus. Tangle of bushland,

a bridge, the weathered frame. Past an old house
near the mouth of a mine, wood and weatherboard,
dirt roads. The aura of dust. We picked wild berries
in the ravine. Bleached chassis breaking back to nothing.

Everything earthly concealed in sediment and wind.
Your face has changed, lines I don’t understand. Somebody
has said the wrong words, they’re hidden in the crease
beside your smile. We always return

to this town. There are four wheel drives parked
out the front of our house, utes with tool boxes, metal glinting.
These shapes are not our children, no one in the house
knows your name. The new owner is converting

the veranda into bedrooms, replacing the malfunctioning
air con that blew icy or not at all. These strangers
mustn’t know how we slept on the floor, mattresses overlapping,
uncles snoring, aunties shaping pillows. There were so many

beating hearts, not a space to spare. The best of me
believed it was everlasting. All we are
starts to fill the empty streets, we stand in starlight,
hands reaching for the contour lines of our loved.

For the shortest time we hear the night’s syllables,
a phonics of trust, our only lucid knowing — almost words
used to remember. When our children finally flock
near we are able to see all they have loved. We listen.

We enter their nine secret rooms, riddle-nights, move with them
through terrains of water, ice and mud. Until morning,
their secrets fill us, surround the last things
we will know, and for the binding hours

we are with them. Birds invading
a chapel, streets and their wise syllables.
We feel what it is to bear a tremble; the fragile fear waning.
We learn new words to name what we love,

sounds with unfinished meaning. Our last
steps are through the dream of grass, ankles clutched
by undergrowth. We fall, syllables audible, trusting,
into the spinifex of sound, fingers curled against forgetting.

2024 Runner Up -Judith Rodriguez Open Prize

Rico Craig |A Saturday in Nundle

2024 Judith Rodriguez Open Prize - Commended

2024 Judith Rodriguez Open Prize - Highly Commended

A second skin, a third eye - Shey Marque

aroha - Eartha Davis

A Winter Passage - Jo Gardiner

Two brothers, a dune and a beach near Burleigh - Bob Topping

Whipbirds - Greg McLaren

Basic Training - Ellen SHELLEY

Essendon - Gareth Morgan

Hijra (Seekers of the Sacred) - Sara Saleh

Mambenha Paaka: Crying the River - Brenda Saunders

The Laugharne Poems - GLENN BEATTY

Note: Highly Commended and Commended poems will be available in the Woorilla Poetry Prize Booklet 2024

2024 Winner - Louise Rockne Youth Prize

Cloris Shi|nocturne to grande odalisque

CW: The ekphrastic poem is inspired by a painting of a nude figure.

“Grande Odalisque” (Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, 1814) is an oil painting of a reclined odalisque, or concubine, found in the Louvre Museum. The painting has been criticized for the figure’s anatomically inaccurate proportions and elongated torso.

So I’ve done it: drank enough milk, collected extra vertebrae in my spine. Two million years ago, I slithered out of swamps, severed my thrashing tail. Today, I exchanged my claws for that coccyx. On the divan, I stretch my full length, watch my limbs roll off frame and fossilize. The line between girl and fossil is this languid reclining, forgetting to pull taut the leash wrapped around a dangling foot. Even now, a tag still tickles my neck, claims a return address and a price. Each day, I forget more; how to roll over, sit up, shake. my paws erode to glossy nubs, stinking cores.

With us fossils, it’s never too early to think of resell, our bodies now up-priced memorabilia, catalogued inventory of assets: eye, mouth, adipose, moles, split ends, eyelashes. For the decomposed, evolution is economical, not unforgiving. It’s hard leaving the old home, the package,
no matter the wreckage, or the submerging. I hold my scarf tight and pull back my bangs.

Beside me, there’s a painting of fruit tumbling onward from the basket, smooth-skinned, rupturing with each bite. I twist flabs of my neck around my finger, flushing ambrosia. I try flexing, limbs springing open and close. I burrow headfirst, mouth filled with mud. Cracking my knuckles,I pluck all the feathers off a peacock, assemble a fan, stroke my crescent white meat.

Lately, the market has shifted, wheeling in me, the new still life, fresh slice of moon, fat and ripe; on sale. What a feeling: cheap harvest planet. Who else but the moon knows to be held like an eye, offering just its cold orifice. Who else but the eye knows how to overfill with shadow, holding something big and blinding, whipped by light.

I do. Over my shoulder, the expanding stars shuddering behind me, blaze into street lamps, into the spotlit faces of museum visitors, arching necks holding flash-lit screens pushing closer and closer

So I’ve done it:

swivel and aim.

2024 Runner Up -Louise Rockne Youth Prize

Bella Majam|Blood Cartography

It’s summer and I am trying to shape my native tongue

into poetry. Native, from born of. I imagine language
like the shell clinging to a mother’s umbilical cord, the vowels
smeared on a newborn’s

paint water skin. I imagine words slanted
like window sills when Mama confuses strike

for dye, wound for mouth.
I’d fold home into a paper bird

if I came from somewhere chillier, but it’s summer
and I am trying to teach my family to read

poetry. Draw a line. Mind the gaps,
the way paradox shifts staircase

to sunlight. Refuse to think it’ll keep you above ground,

I say, but my family does not hear.

Family, from house—

As a child, I could not read directions.

I knew avenues by the crunch
of my father’s knuckles and home

as the clank of my sister’s
teeth. I knew summer by the arrival

of a box I mistook
for a coffin. We called it balikbayan:

back to the country.
So unlike the sender it left

behind. When my father split the cardboard
I pictured Mama crawling from the slits

the way a baby pushes
itself away from womb and into
the world,

but the only thing to spill out were the yellowing
pages of another secondhand

dictionary, so forgive me when I linger on the words, this stanza.
Because summer is the last time

I teach them to write poetry.

Think of the poem as a map you can fold
into threes: femur, vein, foot

.
Think of it like an invitation for a wedding composed only of widows.
Think of it as the last whole thing you will leave
besides your body.

I open my palms to show my Mama the letters, ask—
do you understand?

But she doesn’t hear me. She’s gazing at two
sparrows huddled on the ground

like they’re countries she’s only read
about in books, smiling quietly at those soft,

tiny things I know someday
she will learn
to name.

2024 Winner - CALD Section

Genevieve Watson|Eldest Daughter

The Date of Issue on the Taiwaneese ID card:
2023 nian, 3 yue, 22 ri. March 22, 2023.

My mother watches the slow countdown of red
tumbling to zero, waiting to confirm her daughter’s

new identity and certify her mother’s death. Distant
lightning waits for the government-issued click

of a camera, a spring storm draped over Taipei’s
crowded skyline. I watch lightning reaching to illuminate

tarnished stone tiles for whole blocks, the streets flooding
below the skyscrapers, a forward current of bodies

drenched with stale warm air. From our perch
in this office, I imagine bottling up each silent spark of lightning

exploding from the wash of dark clouds, commanding a city
with such grace by blending its crowds. Mother tells me

to bridge, the way her mother once bridged — one hand
outstretched, holding her children in the American mountains. The other

keeping her siblings hidden in Taiwan’s peaks. Can you be
but half a bridge? Even when you forget the sound, the years

thunder on, tumble away. Are you allowed to call a land your own
before you bear the winter of its cruelty? When the humidity curls

your half-American hair at its ends, lightning’s spotlight explodes
in your obnoxious American eyes. Dui bu qi

wo de zhong wen bu hao. I’ll tell my cousins tonight. Sorry, I don’t
speak the language well. When our own numbers begin

their tumbling countdown and a laminated card flashes
characters I struggle to read, I become more of a citizen in this

foreign land than at home. Am I a fake pioneer holding the name
of this place like light to my chest? Kan Kan, Ama would say, Look

at the lines on those buildings. How straight and tall, stand like them.

the youngest victim of the Triangle Factory Fire

I.

I needled two pieces of fabric together.
Sometimes, if the stars align, three—
lavender, gold, then milk white.

A dark black billboard nailed
to the edge of the factory building.
The words sewn in red:

HIGH STANDARD CLOTHING.

Then, ten weeks of staring, finally
squeezing my body into the letter
O—not realising the iron was peeling

my skin from my bones.

II.

Under the billboard, living
where no brim of sun could soak—
shadow coated every inch of truth in dust.

Three or four rows of footprints
traced to the corner
where the boss tossed cigarettes—

flicked on top of one another like days
between paychecks. Like girls
we were quiet, unmoving.

III.

March 25th, 1911. 9 am. The other girls’
heavy steps drifted with the scraps
tucked in the wind

of twirling skirts—the skirts twirling
with panic.

IV.

Fire! The red letters, their rows of neon teeth.

The shirtwaist only needed two more
stitches, lavender scorched to brown. The rusted

sewing machine crackling—hissing

through the extension cord’s burning snake—
the dust multiplying its thousands
of knives—licking our eyes, haunting

our voices. Blurred, Annie.
Michaelina. Julia. Jennie. Millie…

2024 Runner Up- CALD Section

Minnie Wu| Kate Leone

2024 Awards Ceremony

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Competition Opens | 1st June 2025
Competition Closes | 30th September 2025

Awards Ceremony - Hybrid Event:
November 2025

Competition & Award Dates

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Woorilla Poetry Prize is a not for profit poetry competition run by volunteers who are passionate individuals, that believe in the power of poetry and supporting existing, up and coming and especially young emerging poets. Any assistance you can give will help grow and sustain this annual competition