Our Judge, Sue Copsey, says:  I love how it ties together the idea of nature renewing itself and the main character, Jane, starting afresh, and how travel, especially when it’s outside our comfort zone, gives us that perspective to look objectively at our lives, to see where we might have gone off track and work out how to move on. The description is beautifully done, the reader is immersed in the rainforest with its beauty and undercurrent of danger. I enjoyed how the character responded to the forest, how she sees her own life reflected back at her in nature and its cycles: ‘once it was gone you could never – no matter how much you might want to – get it back.’ All in all, an empowering story for women, full of emotion and rich description. 

Running Water 

Jane squeezes the trigger. Water arcs out of the spraygun in a shower of droplets. The low sun catches them, gilding everything with the alchemy of late afternoon. She doesn’t usually water this late in the day, it encourages root rot—but how else do you say goodbye to a garden? 

A bold myrna bird alights and enjoys a shower, then flies over the fence into the bush. It’s the drops of water flicking off the bird’s quick wings which transport Jane back to the Daintree Rainforest, where every lush article of vegetation dripped and drooping branches issued tiny downpours when touched. Even the name of the place, when Angela first announced they were going, had evoked something wet and green and fertile in Jane’s mind. Something frightening too if she was honest—which she wasn’t because Angela had already paid for the guided hiking tour as well as Jane’s flight to Cairns.  

‘It’s your fiftieth, Janey, you have to celebrate,’ she’d said over the phone. 

That sense of obligation was the reason Jane got into the cab when it arrived, even though Martin’s fuming resentment seemed to trail her, weighing her down as she boarded first the bus to Sydney and then the plane. But then she surrendered herself to the thrill of take-off and put Martin out of her mind. She’d do her penance when she got back. 

— 

Jane calculated that it had been two years since she’d left Mitchells Flat and twenty-five since she’d travelled on her own. Was it any wonder she felt dangerously untethered—at risk of floating away? But the Daintree was a vast, green cathedral and the humidity settled on her like a weighted blanket, reassuringly oppressive. At home, gardening was her escape, but hiking was truly meditative. Her steps followed one another without conscious thought, the presence of the guide and the absence of phone reception removed all other expectations and after just a few hours, Jane began to understand why Angela loved these hiking trips so much. Their guide, Samuel, took care of everything. The group of seven hikers, all women, only had to put on their daypacks and follow him.  

In the afternoon of the first day, Samuel led them to an expanse of flat rock next to a fast-running stream. The women dropped their packs and sat down with relieved sighs, swigging from their water bottles and stretching out their legs.  

They checked themselves and each other for leeches, which were legion on the track. Before they’d set off that morning, Samuel had shared tips on avoiding and removing them. Neither Angela, a veteran hiker, nor Jane, who often encountered them in her garden, were afraid of leeches, but among the group was a trio of loud friends who seemed terrified of them. Angela had wondered quietly in Jane’s ear why you’d go hiking in the rainforest if you were afraid of leeches. Jane smiled, realising too late that she’d smiled directly at Samuel, who was demonstrating how to tickle a leech with a twig to detach it. He smiled back. 

A couple of leeches were found and dealt with. Conversations petered out; the women knew the routine already. Whenever they paused to rest, Samuel would tell them something interesting about the local environment or the culture of the local indigenous people, the Kuku Yalanji people.  

Samuel raked a hand through his dark, floppy hair as the group’s attention settled on him. The three loud friends had commented on his good looks during introductions that morning. It had embarrassed Jane, but Samuel had handled it deftly, seemingly at ease in his own skin. 

He pointed to the stream. ‘Rivers weren’t only a source of clean water for the Kuku Yalanji,’ he said. ‘They were also important for food preparation.’  

He seemed to have a limitless store of facts which he found genuinely fascinating and his eyes lit up as he imparted each one. Jane wondered how old he was. Probably in his early thirties, technically young enough to be her son but about a decade older than her actual son. Scott was twenty-two and in the final year of the degree he’d moved to Melbourne for at eighteen. Jane’s daughter, Laura, had just finished school and was counting down the days until she too could escape.  

‘There are plenty of food plants in the forest,’ Samuel said. ‘But some of the most important ones are actually toxic.’ He pulled a fruit, the size of a large grape, from his pocket. He held it up, a bright spot of red vivid among all the green. Behind him, the afternoon sun fell in shafts through the trees and sparkled in the water as it splashed over rocks. 

‘This is the fruit of Lepidozamia hopei, also known as the Zamia palm or, to the Kuku Yalanji—wunu. It’s a type of cycad.’ Jane nodded. They’d seen lots of cycads that morning, their circular arrays of spiky fronds easy to spot among the taller trees. They didn’t only grow in the rainforest—Jane had one in her garden. Samuel continued. 

‘Inside the fruit are seeds which can be made into meal, providing a valuable source of carbohydrate energy. But to consume the seeds safely, the Kuku Yalanji had to detoxify them first. They would roast them, crush them, put them in a woven bag and place them in running water overnight to leach the toxins out.’ Samuel pointed to the stream again. ‘Somewhere like this would be ideal.’  

The stream flowed through many small pools, cresting smoothly over the rocks that formed them. Jane imagined Kuku Yalanji women—she assumed it would be the women—standing on the rocks, moving in and out of patches of sun, weighing down their bags of ground seeds with stones, then standing back to let the stream take the poison away.  

Samuel talked about how modern science had proven these methods effective. It was all about solution equilibrium. If the water was still, it would leach out some poison, but not enough to make the seeds safe. Running water was essential: the exact wisdom passed down through generations of Kuku Yalanji.  

That night, Jane lay awake in the twin cabin she was sharing with Angela. It should have felt like luxury, having a bed to herself for the first time in decades, but as soon as the lights went out, the feeling she’d had on the plane returned, that vertiginous sense of having too much space around her body. Too much freedom. She thought about the stream, about the way the water flowed inexorably past and once it was gone you could never—no matter how much you might want to—get it back.  

Laura would leave home soon. She’d won a scholarship, so not even Martin could stop her. Time was flowing around Jane, taking the things she loved and leaving the poison. 

— 

Jane moves the hose, directing water onto the delicate foliage of the westringia shrubs, floppy after the warm day. Towering over them, taller than the house, but too slender to provide much shade, is the lemon myrtle that was a house-warming gift from Angela twenty years ago.  

Martin had just surprised her by buying the house sight unseen. Mitchells Flat was at the bottom of a valley a two-hour drive from Sydney, where land was cheap.  

‘The mortgage is smaller—you won’t have to go back to work,’ he’d said and it had made a kind of sense.  

‘Are you happy here, Janey?’ Angela had asked when she’d first come to visit. They were in the garden, deciding where the lemon myrtle sapling should go. Angela was looking through the skeleton of the fence Martin had begun building into the dense bush that surrounded the house. 

‘I’ve always wanted a big garden,’ Jane said, hoisting baby Scott higher on her hip.  

Jane didn’t blame Angela when her visits became less frequent; it was a long drive and they had no spare room for her to stay in. When Angela met Joel and moved to Victoria, the visits stopped altogether. Angela had invited Jane and Martin to visit, but they never went. She gave Angela different excuses, but the truth was Jane never asked Martin if they could go, knowing that voicing a desire to do so would ensure the answer was no. 

It was hard to pinpoint when exactly she had started taking no for an answer. Harder still to remember when she’d started asking permission. Not at the start, of course. Then it had been flowers and candlelit dinners and walks on the beach and movies and planning holidays and two incomes and ‘I’ll cook, you wash up’. It had happened gradually, after the wedding. Her difficult pregnancies, the bed rest and the endless sleepless nights with colicky babies had worn Jane away until she was hardly there at all.  

But, once they’d emerged from the newborn stage, Jane adored the children. She loved their dimpled little hands, their endless questions and their unpredictable, sticky hugs. She loved the way they orbited around her so that when she was with them, she felt a conviction as simple as gravity itself. When they needed her to hold them they made a little bubble with their bodies and hers that seemed to whisper, ‘We exist, we exist, we exist.’ 

But Scott and Laura grew up and their lives revolved around Jane less and less. The house grew quieter, smaller somehow. The garden became her sanctuary.  

Jane saw Angela less frequently over the years, until only reciprocal Christmas and birthday cards remained. Then the pandemic came and Angela, stuck in interminable lockdown, discovered video calls. Martin didn’t like it, but when he tested positive for the virus and had to isolate in their bedroom for two weeks, the friends were free to talk for hours. Angela made Jane laugh and one day, in that small rectangle on the screen that framed her face, Jane recognised herself for the first time in years.  

— 

The second day of the hike brought rain. At breakfast, the group pulled their rain pants on and zipped gaiters over their boots, pleased to put their expensive wet weather gear to use. Jane teased Angela about it, but her friend just grinned.  

‘Can’t complain about rain in a rainforest,’ she said, handing over the rainwear she’d brought for Jane to wear.  

The sound of the rain on their hoods made it hard to hold conversations, so the group fell into companionable silence. Jane felt that meditative state descend again. Her repetitive, squelchy steps grounded her. ‘You exist, you exist, you exist,’ they said. 

By mid-morning the weather had cleared and they stopped to shed their outer layers. Afterwards, Jane found herself walking side by side with Samuel. Their steps synchronised to the rhythmic clicking of the straps on his pack. Inexplicably nervous, Jane cast around for something to say.  

‘What happens if you eat unprocessed cycad seeds?’ she asked. As soon as she said it, she worried it would seem a strange non sequitur, but Samuel replied without missing a beat, as if he had also been thinking about that very subject. 

‘Ingestion causes stomach pains and upset, vomiting, liver failure at the extreme end,’ he said. ‘Continuous exposure can cause neurological symptoms. But it’s mostly a problem for dogs. People grow cycads in their gardens and their dogs get into them. It’s often fatal.’ 

Jane wanted to ask him what it was like to be so full of interesting facts, but instead she said, ‘I haven’t got a dog, my husband doesn’t like them.’ 

— 

Jane lets her eyes wander over the garden. Curated layers of different shades of green, punctuated with accents of colour. Her passion project, Martin calls it.  

Her consolation prize.  

She turns the dial on the spray gun to mist and the air fills with fine droplets. Sometimes, at this time of day, she can get a rainbow to appear. She manages to conjure one above her cycad plant. She knows now that it’s a Macrozamia communis, called Burrawang in the Dharuk language. Its seeds are just as toxic as those of the rainforest cycads. She turns the dial back to shower and the rainbow disappears.  

In the middle of the cycad’s nest of spiky leaves are two cones. They look like skinny, unripe pineapples, easy to overlook among the kaleidoscope of greens in the garden, but Jane knows that inside are nestled dozens of vividly red, jewel-like seeds.  

— 

On the third day; a waterfall.  

They heard it first, their voices rising in competition and then collapsing into silent awe as they rounded a bend. Before them was a wide, green waterhole from which layers of rock rose in terraced formation. Higher up, the water tumbled in short, splashy cascades, but on the lowest terrace it rolled gently over smooth rock. A group of young people were taking turns sliding down the natural waterslide and posing for photos. Shouts and laughter ricocheted around the clearing.  

‘Let’s go!’ shouted Lani, the loudest of the three loud friends, hurrying onwards.  

‘I didn’t bring swimmers,’ Jane told Angela as they walked. 

‘Why not?’ asked Angela. ‘They were on the packing list.’ 

Jane knew they were, but the only pair she had was at least twenty years old and, when she’d tried them on, she’d discovered the elastic had gone. 

‘I’m not much of a swimmer,’ she said, which wasn’t a lie. She loved to swim, but she couldn’t remember the last time she had, although Mitchells Flat was less than an hour’s drive from the coast. Martin had let Scott take her car when he’d left for uni, which meant Martin’s big ute was now their only vehicle and he didn’t like her driving it.  

The other women held towels up for each other to change behind. Jane busied herself with her backpack, trying to give them privacy, but they only laughed when they accidentally exposed naked parts of themselves.  

Lani, wearing a fuchsia pink swimsuit which barely contained her, picked her way across the rocks to the top of the waterslide then slid down, shrieking all the way. She disappeared under the water for a second and then popped up, spluttering. One large, pale breast had escaped her swimsuit. Her amusement and horror as she realised what her friends were laughing at made Jane laugh too.  

Samuel, who was preparing lunch, paused to see what the disturbance was. He smiled and held up his hands. ‘Nothing I haven’t seen before, ladies.’ 

— 

After lunch, the group had the waterhole to themselves. Angela and the others decided to have another swim. 

‘Sure you won’t join us, Janey?’ said Angela. ‘You only live once.’ 

Jane looked at the water streaming over the smooth rocks and felt a visceral longing to immerse herself in it. Surprised at her own daring, she stripped down to her sports bra and underpants, grateful both were black. She sat down on the rock and put her legs into the rushing water. To slide down, she’d have to relinquish the grip provided by the dry rock and surrender herself to the slippery surface. She didn’t know if she could do it. Then there was movement on her right and Samuel slid past headfirst, whooping. The flat arrowhead of his hands pierced the water cleanly and he swam into the middle of the waterhole. He surfaced, grinning at her. 

‘Come on Jane,’ called Lani. ‘I’ll flash you again if you do it.’ 

Jane laughed, then pushed herself forward. Her body slid over the slick algae as swiftly as the water itself, a euphoric yelp escaping her before she plunged into the waterhole.  

— 

The myrna bird is back. It regards Jane from the top of the fence as if it knows something.  

‘You don’t know me,’ she tells it and the bird flies away. 

Martin is at the kitchen window, watching her. She wonders if he’s noticed the absence of any dinner-making activity. He might have called out, but she wouldn’t have heard him over the sound of the water.  

At last, she releases the trigger. Into the quiet, birdsong spills. She drinks in her garden—the weakening shafts of light falling through the smooth boughs of the crepe myrtle, the grey green of the emu bush and the bright spots of red in the flowering gum.  

She reaches into the spiky nest of the cycad, twists one of the cones off and slips it into the pocket of her cardigan. It balances out the weight of Martin’s car keys in the other pocket.  

It’s taken years to coax the baby’s tears to fill the spaces between the pavers on the side path. The low sun catches the translucent edges of the tiny leaves, lighting them emerald. In the shed, her suitcase waits. She can’t wheel it on the loose gravel of the driveway, so she carries it.  

Martin’s ute is parked under the carport he built to protect its shiny black paint. Jane hoists the suitcase onto the passenger seat and closes the door. She climbs into the driver’s seat and adjusts the seat. She takes the cycad cone from her pocket and puts it on the dash, where it rolls to rest against the windscreen. She turns the key in the ignition and the ute roars to life. Martin appears at the front door. He takes several quick steps, drawing level with the passenger window, his expression incredulous.  

Jane presses the accelerator. The tyres growl and then find purchase on the gravel. The car speeds forward. At the end of the driveway, Jane brings it to a stop. The road—a smooth, black ribbon—flows away through the valley and out of sight. Behind her, in the rear-view mirror, Martin stands in a cloud of gravel dust, one arm raised against the setting sun.  

On the dashboard, the cycad cone rolls away from her as Jane turns the car onto the road.