Writing Competition 

State Winner Announced

A Story in Miniature 

Last term, Oxley Senior students had the opportunity to participate in the Victorian Association for the Teaching of English’s Writing Competition called A Story in Miniature. In 500 words or less, students were challenged to create a narrative vignette about an aspect of daily life. 

We are pleased to announce that Darci Rose (11.16) was the State Winner for the Year 11-12 category. Her story will be published in the VATE academic journal Idiom and on the VATE website. Darci also won a $150 book voucher. Congratulations, Darci! Below is a copy of her winning story.

Rebekah Paul

Senior School Teacher

Just a Woman 

Hand raised, shielding her eyes from the sun’s light, my mother gazes out at the four rectangles dug into our garden. Then, they were only a vision of a vegetable patch, but by the end of the summer, they would be overflowing with a flourishing tangle of vegetables. The zucchinis would grow so rapidly that we would have to give the large and often misshapen vegetables away to anyone who would take them, while the caterpillars would ensure the capsicums would never reach their deep crimson shade of ripeness. A jumble of miscellaneous jars and bottles filled with homemade tomato chutney would take up most of our fridge from the buckets of tomatoes we picked. My mother would find the recipe buried deep in our family cookbook, the pages so loved and worn they were falling out, held loosely by the seam. A book that had been passed down through the generations in our family, one mother to the next, a lineage of amateur bakers and chefs but the meals were more than just food. 

The land these vegetables grew from had seen strangers come and go as they created their own memories here, just as we would. I wonder if the land remembers the others and their own attempts at creating vegetable gardens. Had she shown the same success to them that she would show to us?

But as the winter arrived, it would bring with it its death. Each of the towering plants would shrivel down into the soil below, leaving nothing but the bare skeleton of a garden. She would call out for anyone to come and nurture her with the same loving hands my mother showed to the soil. But she would have to wait for the return of the sun to be heard.

Yet, as I stand before my mother, now tucking seedlings into the soil beneath the warmth of the spring sun, she remains unaware of what is to come. She doesn’t know of the chutney and cookbooks and the eventual death of the garden which would in some strange way give rise to a more fruitful harvest in the following summer. Her actions now would create a web of memories for us, leaving our mark on this land for the years we spent in that house. We would eventually be forgotten as just a page in a cookbook, but for now she is just a woman working out how to keep the rabbits off her garden.