Featuring 24 exciting new authors and alternating in pace throughout, this collection of 25 prize-winning stories has something for everyone. Some will make you laugh, some will make you cry, but all will delight as they take you on a journey through South East Queensland, highlighting the many faces of this proud corner of the Sunshine State. Travel with us from the ocean to the Outback, experiencing cities and the hinterland in an eclectic mix of modern and old.

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Jack Barnaby Robertson gripped the top rail of the fence. The fence was almost as old as he. Jack was twelve years old when he heaved the posts, struggling to drop them into holes dug by shovels and his stamina of youth. He was his dad’s right-hand man – but that was before the war.

Over the decades, the fence and Jack aged together, both softening to grey and warping slightly. It was a slow undermining. Jack’s spidery hand, knotted with arthritic knuckles, gripped the splintered rail of a fence now wonky. Jack had spent much of his life repairing that fence, which had kept safe many generations of his beloved herds. Even now it sheltered his three pet cows in the paddock, so everything was still okay at his rolling acres in Beechmont.

Jack looked at his brother. ‘So why would I want to do that?’

Bill Robertson sighed. ‘Because I can only recall one time when you’ve left this bloody place. C’mon – just for a few days. Then you can come back and think about it.’

Jack looked beyond his twin brother. The plateau of his mountain pastures dropped dramatically into a deep valley which rose again into a series of lower forested ridges before flattening into the coastal plain. Over his eighty-nine years on top of the mountain, Jack had watched the rise of a line of broken teeth edge the Coral Sea. Since the 1960s the teeth had sprouted, and each year they’d grown taller. From Jack’s perspective, many of the towers now bridged the gap between beach and horizon. On days when the sea and sky were the exact same colour, either blue on blue or grey on grey, Jack still knew where the horizon would be. It would be half an inch lower than that whopping skyscraper that glimmered in pale green.

In a racy, no-holds-barred exposé delivered to you by a donor who shall always remain anonymous, Vietnam veteran ‘Slipknot’ Muggins allows us to peer through a porthole into the lower deck of Australia’s Navy of the ’60s.

One Wave Short of a Storm contains the scattered thoughts, memories and opinions of an ex-R.A.N.’s twenty years in the grey funnel line.

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This is the story of my time in the Royal Australian Navy. Naval historians, self-appointed or not, tend to trim the belly wool and dags from what really went on. Not all historians were there. They stayed at home with the gunners in ‘B’ company – they were ‘Gunna B’ here when you left and they were ‘Gunna B’ here when you returned and they knew everything. Many ‘official’ histories didn’t mention where we’d been, but put us in places we’d never heard of.

My story is of the funny, the sad, the borderline insane and the certifiably insane. It is the efforts of enlistees to rise to, and often above, the occasions when Navy brass and/or civilians got in the way of our doing our duty efficiently; proficiently.

In the ’50s it wasn’t uncommon for kids to leave school at thirteen or fourteen after Scholarship – the scholar part did not appeal to me but the ship part did. In those years many kids joined to escape unsatisfactory home lives and backgrounds and abusive families. They escaped only to be sardined into sleeping space for over fifty, which caused conflict through overcrowding, especially when the much talked about ‘aircon’ failed to work in the tropical heat.

I’d read a ‘Doctor at Sea’ ditty which said ships were designed by geniuses only to be sailed by idiots. Not so – almost the opposite. We had a situation when one locker – highly polished, of course – was open, eighteen other sailors couldn’t reach their lockers. These sleeping quarters were designed by persons best known as LC P/L for their own protection: Lubbers and Civvies Pty Ltd.

Many were glad to accept Navy life with no thought of the future. Not me! I always kept names, places and events in my diary, hoping I’d be able to sue one day.