FORMER Narooma High School student Jessica Reid took out the Under 21s section of the inaugural Olga Masters short story competition.
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The winners of the competition were announced at the recent Olga Masters Festival, held over the long weekend in Cobargo and Bermagui.
Jessica, 19, is a Bermagui girl and the only local winner, with the senior prize getters coming from as far afield as Victoria, Western Australia and Queensland.
The judges were extremely impressed with Jessica’s work, saying it heralded a career in the literary field.
Her story, The Boxing Day Test, describes what some might call a typical family Christmas in rural Australia, displaying a wonderful sense of humour combined with an uncanny ability to transport the reader into the middle of the scene.
Jessica was unable to accept the award herself as she is currently in the United Kingdom, having just finished her first stint as an au pair in Cornwall.
She plans to continue her travels while writing her first best seller. Watch this space!
This win follows on the heels of her success in the 2013 Written Portraits competition, a national teenage writing event run by the Forming Circles organisation.
She was declared the overall winner of Written Portraits with her work being published in an anthology of the finalists.
The Olga Masters festival was a celebration of the life and work of Olga Masters, a prolific Australian author, playwright and journalist who was born in Pambula and lived in Cobargo as a young woman.
Six of Olga’s children were present at the festival, all of whom have established their own successful careers in various sections of the media and creative arts.
It was superbly organised by Well Thumbed Books in Cobargo and included film, music, cooking and story-telling.
There was also a concert at the Four Winds Festival site, while Bermagui local and former Wallaby Gary Pearse had a pub chat with Roy Masters at the Bermagui Beach Hotel.
Below is Jessica Reid's winning entry:
The Boxing Day Test
by Jessica Reid
My favourite day of the year has always been Boxing Day. It was the big day. The day where all of the family would come out to our farmhouse and have Boxing Day lunch together. It was the only day of the year when my Nan made all of the boys promise not to fight, and year after year they would break this promise. Once, the neighbours even called the police, but when the local coppers turned up and saw who it was fighting, they started placing bets on the outcome and helping themselves to potato salad.
We would spend days preparing for the big lunch. Dad always took pride in the fact that he could point to most of the things on the table and say that they were from our farm. There were potatoes, carrots, corn, asparagus, rhubarb, and every other manner of vegetable to be collected, a beast to be killed and butchered, and every possible variation of Christmas pudding, trifle and pavlova to be cooked. The best bit was always when Dad killed the beast, usually one of the bigger steers, and all of the kids crowded around while he carved it up, with the help of some uncle or other. There would be dogs begging for scraps and alcohol flowing, and the kids were always allowed a sneaky sip of Dad’s rum.
The best Boxing Day ever was the year that I turned twelve. It was a very dry year and we didn’t have quite as much money to pay for stock feed. Because of this, some of the family came to stay in the days before Boxing Day, to help get everything ready, and although I didn’t realise it at the time, to pay for everything between them, as we couldn’t afford it. Dad didn’t get to say that the produce on the table was his as we didn’t have enough water to keep the plants alive. It was still Christmas, and it was still wonderful as all of the family was together for the only time that year, and the uncles still argued and the aunties still gossiped and asked me if there was a special boy in my life. But it was different. Dad had new wrinkles under his eyes and mum had a permanently worried look on her face. At least, she did before the wine set in and she started gossiping away with the aunties.
It hadn’t rained for almost five months and it was a very hot summer. The day started with a drive into town to go for a swim at the beach, trying to fit all of the cousins into two cars in what was probably a slightly less than legal format. Usually we would just set up a waterslide in the front paddock, down the big hill, but there wasn’t enough water this year. Probably a good thing we gave it a miss, as in past years it was affectionately known as the slip and bleed due to the stony nature of the front paddock.
On return from the beach, the various mothers ordered their children into their clean clothes, fresh off the washing line, buttons were done up the whole way, jam and toast and dirt was cleaned off the faces of the toddlers, and we were given our marching orders for the annual family photo. This year, it was a spectacular one, as the aptly named ‘Billy’ the billy goat broke his tether and charged for the fully laden table with malicious intent plainly in his eye. The camera was set on a tripod with a timer. It took about five photos, which gave us a stop motion movie of both of my grandfathers, one of whom is almost blind, leaping up as if they were fifty years younger, to tackle the billy goat and wrestle him away from the table. The food, thankfully, was saved, although Billy did have his revenge on the tablecloth eventually, but that would be in years to come.
Lunch came with the sound of Christmas crackers, bad jokes and an argument about who ate the last of the potatoes that one of the uncles had had his eye on. Chickens were milling around under the table, getting in the way, overcurious, only to be put back in their place by each dog who wanted to be first in line to get the scraps. It was still special, as the Boxing Day lunch always is, but it was missing something. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it until one of the uncles exclaimed that veg just wasn’t as good this year. Woolworths just didn’t do as good a job as Dad did. There were a few chuckles, but Mum and Dad just looked grim. It was about then that I realised that maybe we were in a worse situation drought-wise than Mum and Dad had been letting on. A quick glance at the demoralized look on my brother’s face told me that he had just reached the same conclusion. Grandma, sensing the change in atmosphere, stood up and announced that it was time for dessert. The pavlova was cut and the presents were handed out by a mysterious drunken Santa who looked remarkably like one of the uncles in fancy dress. It was time for the most important part of the day.
Now it is widely agreed in my family that cricket is not usually an exciting spectator sport. However, this all changes when you take away the traditional setting of professional players in pristine whites playing on neatly mowed pitches. We play in the driveway, where the grass is so thick that dad has to slash it with the tractor as the old ride on mower just isn’t up to the task. We abide to the basic backyard cricket rules, no LBW and over the fence is out. We all get to have a bat and a bowl, which gets a little dangerous when the drunker of the aunties are in. The spectator stands had to be moved back onto the verandah after a cracking hit sent the ball flying straight at Poppy, shattering the beer bottle at his feet. There were shrieks from all around, but Poppy continued to doze, oblivious to the perilous situation.
What happened next can only be described as some kind of two part miracle. Part one came when one of the uncles hit the ball with such force that a small crack appeared on the surface of the bat. This particular uncle had been in bat for far too long and we were all out to catch him. The ball went soaring over the fence into the long dry grass of the front paddock and no man’s land, from where, one could safely assume, it would never return. However, we were all mistaken, for at this very moment, one of the aunties had chosen to go and relieve herself in the middle of no man’s land, given that it was substantially closer than the loos. Thus, we were all rather surprised when she emerged from the thigh high mass of brown grass, with her dress held up in one hand and the ball triumphantly in the other. She quickly dropped her dress to protect her modesty, but thankfully not the ball, and Dad stepped in to have a bat.
Now the second part of the miracle came when a freak lightning bolt struck the huge old tree at the end of the driveway. It made contact with a resounding smack, and after a series of smaller cracks, ricocheting down the trunk, one of the larger limbs came crashing to the ground. Poppy abruptly woke up and fell out of his chair. We all stood, open mouthed, watching as flames surrounded the head of the tree. This was not the miracle, this was, in fact, the complete opposite. With the land this dry, a fire would destroy the property and everything on it in a matter of hours. The miracle was when Dad, a man who had been hovering at the breaking point for the last few months, fell to his knees, hands to his face, and wept.
As we stood there, unable to comfort him, the rain came. It was just spitting at first, then sprinkling. And then the heavens split. The fire was almost immediately doused, and Dad removed his head from his hands, looking at the sky in disbelief. Raindrops mingled with the tears on his cheeks.
I think we all cried a bit this day. The rain went on for a week. It wasn’t enough to break the drought. But it was enough to make a difference. It was enough to ensure that we would survive another year. And we did. And the next Boxing Day, Dad proudly pointed out that almost everything on the table had been grown on our farm.