Lockie Fellowships

Applications for the 2025 Lockie Fellowship will open later in the year. Please visit the Lockie Fellowship page here for further information

2024

Winners

Emily Bitto 'Reasons to Leave'

Provisionally titled 'Reasons to Leave', the novel is inspired by the experiences of Emily Bitto's father, a political asylum-seeker who fled communist Czechoslovakia after the 1968 Soviet invasion, and the lifelong friends he met in a migrant hostel in Broadmeadows. Made up in two parts the first is set in 1969 and spans the first months of the characters' new lives in Australia, living in the migrant hostel and working in factories in the surrounding suburbs; the second is set three decades later, after the fall of communism in Czechoslovakia, at the funeral of one of the group. Very different fates have befallen the friends since they migrated.

Isabella Trimboli 'Double Negative'

Isabella Trimboli is currently working on a book of essays called 'Double Negative' exploring female doubling and imitation in art.

Selection committee

• Dr Lynda Ng, English and Theatre Studies, School of Culture and Communication, Faculty of Arts
• Professor Peter Otto, Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor, School of Culture and Communication, Faculty of Arts
• Dr Miranda Stanyon, English and Theatre Studies, School of Culture and Communication, Faculty of Arts

2023

Winners

Jennifer Down 'Oubliette'

'Oubliette' is a polyphonic study of a group of sketch comedians from their mid-20s to their -40s, across three separate moments in time: the chaotic, feral beginning of their careers in the early aughts; the dissolution of their professional and personal ties with one another in 2014; and their present-day reunion at a wedding. Jennifer Down is interested in what it means to come of age in, and then age out of, a particular art scene. Who gets to 'make it' and why; the cost of devoting yourself to a job in the arts; realising that the creative economy is rooted after you've invested in a NIDA education; living long enough to become an ABC comedy writer, or deciding to use your Diploma of Education and hoping that no future students will ever see your ill-fated web series; settling into what your younger self would have considered obscure mediocrity; becoming middle–class but resisting the description; the ceiling for creativity and criticism in a creative environment as hermetically intimate as Australia's, and the roles of class, gender and race in all of it.

Dr Jeff Sparrow 'Lesbia Harford'

Born with a heart condition that prevented any strenuous activity and guaranteed her early death, Lesbia Venner Harford studied law at a time when female students remained vanishingly rare. She fell in love with the philosophy tutor, Katie Lush and clashed with Robert Menzies in debates about the First World War, before abandoning the university to organise in a clothing factory with the illegal Industrial Workers of the World. Fortifying herself with heart tonic, she toiled ten–hour days at a power loom and then spent her evenings agitating against conscription and writing love poetry to both men and women. After the war, she and her husband Pat abandoned activism for art, and before Lesbia's death in 1927, they developed a politicised modernism decades ahead of its time. Les Murray describes Lesbia Harford as one of the "finest female poets so far seen in Australia". Yet the absence of a definitive biography renders her work, which often references her day–to–day life, unnecessarily inaccessible. This project presents her poignant but inspiring story in full for the first time.

Dr Claire Thomas 'On Not Climbing Mountains'

'On Not Climbing Mountains' is about books and climate, about insects and trains, about the endless reverberations of art. It is interested in the limits of the human in the mechanistic past and in resisting the predictable ascent. 'On Not Climbing Mountains' is Claire Thomas's third novel and continues her ongoing obsession with the intersections between literature, visual art and the natural world. The novel's protagonist is an Australian woman alone in Switzerland. After the recent death of her Swiss father, she travels to the country she hardly knows and becomes imaginatively immersed in its artistic history. In a series of accumulating vignettes, she crosses paths with a complex range of characters: Mary Shelley and Katherine Mansfield; scientific pioneers in 1800s Geneva; Charlie Chaplin, Patricia Highsmith, and James Baldwin; the Dadaists in early–twentieth–century Zurich; Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary as they summit Everest.

Dr Lucy Van 'House Rules: Australian Poetics of Real Estate'

An emblematic figure of the 'Australian dream', the owner– occupied home expresses a convergence of desire, intimacy and excess. At the same time, this preoccupation suggests deeply held anxieties around issues of ownership. The ritual obsession with home improvements might be read as a rehearsal of owning traceable to the founding moment of settler colonialism, underwritten by a Lockean linking of improvement with rights. Rather than dismiss the rhetorical dominance of real estate as a hollowing out of public discourse (or its displacement by the market), this project asks, how is the ordinary language of housing eloquent as a public discourse? To what extent can we read this discourse differently, as to borrow Erich Auerbach's phrasing, a story "fraught with background"? In its attempt to locate this background, this project will expose the ordinary language of real estate to poetry and poetics, finding a vocabulary around the cultivation of home that is often in alignment. This project will also describe as fully as possible the conditions that determine the appearance of poetry through the language of property and the home.

Selection committee

• Dr Joe Hughes, English and Theatre Studies, School of Culture and Communication, Faculty of Arts
• Professor Peter Otto, Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor, School of Culture and Communication, Faculty of Arts
• Dr Miranda Stanyon, English and Theatre Studies, School of Culture and Communication, Faculty of Arts

2022

Winners

Dr Lachlan Brown 'Little Songs/Long Runs'

Dr Lachlan Brown attempts to combine a sustained interrogation of the sonnet form – literally 'little song' – with a variety of longer and more varied poetic engagements (including but not limited to: sequences of meditations after Du Fu's work; longer poems about running; ekphrastic interactions, and poetry that engages with the textures of digital experience). His first book, 'Limited Cities' (2012), emerged from the western suburbs of Sydney and called across to the banlieues of Paris. His second book, 'Lunar Inheritance' (2017), explored Chinese heritage within the Asian Century. The proposed manuscript will be the first time his work takes into account those more detailed aspects of the Riverina (unceded Wiradjuri country). Following writers such as John Muk Muk Burke ('Happy Wagga') and Keri Glastonbury (particularly her notion of the 'super–regional'), this manuscript explores contested landscapes and saturated experiences. It will exercise a varied and at times polyphonic approach to poetry that tests the limits of contemporary life

Dr Claire Corbett 'The Aquarium'

'The Aquarium' is a tense and beautiful psychological thriller with gothic overtones centring on the destruction of the oceans, empathy with the non–human, homelessness and the neoliberal economy, and the wonders and terrors of possibly beginning to turn into a mermaid. Kate, a woman in midlife made homeless by unemployment and family breakdown, scores a temporary contract as a mermaid with a new aquarium because of her rare free–diving skills acquired while a marine researcher – and because, as in a fairytale, she fits the expensive custom–made mermaid tail. This tail belonged to the previous mermaid, who has disappeared under circumstances no–one will explain.

Dr Rachael Weaver 'Seven Bird Tales'

'Seven Bird Tales' examines human relationships to native bird species in Australia from the beginnings of European settlement to the present day, focusing especially on the question of how species have been valued over time. Taking seven bird species as case studies, it aims to produce a book of seven essays, research–based and accessibly written for a general readership. Each essay opens with a personal or creative component reflecting on a particular species and then moves into a systematic exploration of the ways Australian literary writing and visual representations have mapped human interactions with it. The project embraces a wide range of forms and genres such as journals of exploration, natural history tracts, travel chronicles, newspaper articles, adventure novels and romances, works of poetry, agricultural handbooks, recipes, pieces of legislation, specimens, and museum exhibits, prints and paintings.

Some outcomes from the project so far include:

Rachael Weaver, 'Currawong Days', Meanjin, Spring (2021)

Rachael Weaver, 'Think Fast', Sydney Review of Books (2023)

Selection committee

• Professor Larissa McLean Davies, Deputy Dean, Faculty of Education, University of Melbourne
• Dr Joe Hughes, English and Theatre Studies, School of Culture and Communication, Faculty of Arts
• Professor Peter Otto, Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor, School of Culture and Communication, Faculty of Arts
• Dr Miranda Stanyon, English and Theatre Studies, School of Culture and Communication, Faculty of Arts