Mission Beach

Mission Beach is a book-length sequence of poems that listens closely to a small coastal town caught between the Coral Sea and the Wet Tropics rainforest. In this narrow strip of road, cafés, mangroves, and heat, people arrive carrying lives that have begun to loosen-travellers, locals, those who stayed longer than planned, and those who never quite left. The poems move through daily scenes and quiet encounters: coffee shared before the heat arrives, cyclones spoken about in lowered voices, cassowaries crossing roads as if time belongs to them, and the slow pressure of weather working its way into the body.
The land is not background here but law-ancient, patient, and indifferent to human intention. Neither romantic nor sentimental, Mission Beach observes how beauty, danger, and stillness coexist, and how a place can open people not by offering escape, but by removing distraction. What remains is a careful portrait of impermanence, community, and the subtle ways a life can shift without announcement.