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Who is this city for?
A blue light flashes on the automatic cat feeder as a disembodied woman’s voice fills the room.  “Hey Lily! Come get your food Lily!” Kibble dispenses into the bowl.  “Pspspsps!” The cat doesn’t move from Mardi’s lap – doesn’t so much as flick an ear at what I can only assume are the familiar sounds…
Winter Eggs
We wake in a pile of butter-yellow blankets beside a dying fire: me and three dark heads of hair. The world outside is a snowglobe – a beautiful rarity in 逗子 / Zushi / the half-mile beach where the sun was born. In the morning light, there’s a smudge of blue on the inside…
Ingenuity on the Streets of India
Pottering through a lively marketplace in the lakeside Indian town of Pushkar, I was seized around the elbow by the firm grip of a wily old lady. “Hello my baby,” she said. I turned around eagerly: no one’s called me baby in a while. Unfortunately though, she wasn’t referring to me, but to an adorable…
Bhanged Up Abroad
“Dinner, madam?” A small frame stretched up and peered into my bed with inquisitive eyes as the Aravalli Range whipped past through the window behind him. He was a dabbawala – a lunchbox delivery man – and he couldn’t have come at a better time. For several weeks now, I had been traipsing across the…
I Bought an Amazonian Toucan in Peru
I've never really been one to take to guts and gore. I fainted dissecting cane toads at school, cried for three hours when our van in Khao Lak hit a chicken and made a former boyfriend refund an African Safari video game called Big Buck Hunter. But it wasn’t really my fault – I just…
Too Many Dicks on the Beach
“It’s a cock, girls,” Frank announced with glee. Grace and I exchanged eye-rolls – we’ve seen our share of penises; we knew what it was. To be fair though, this one was plastic and hanging from a string around a 70-year-old man’s beefy neck. With oily fingers, Frank gave the nob of the penis a…
Bush Nuts
On the 5th of November 2015, to the best of my knowledge at the time, I died in a small rural hospital five hours south of Perth. I’d been camping in the bush in Karri tree country with my then-boyfriend, Jasper. The two of us had a week to kill before we went travelling, so…

Astray is a storytelling project centred on travel, place, culture and identity.

We’re run by a team of writers who mostly live, work and play in nipaluna / Hobart. With reverence, we acknowledge the Tasmanian Aboriginal people as the traditional and ongoing custodians of trouwunna / lutruwita / Tasmania: land that was stolen and never ceded. We pay our respects to Elders past, present and emerging.