Excerpt from ‘A Place to Put These Butterflies’, published in TEXT Journal

I can’t remember if it was the day bull sharks were spotted off the beach and everyone was ordered out of the water; or maybe it was the morning I drove past the river and saw a boy sitting on the rocks not ten metres from a crocodile warning sign, languidly drying himself off after a dip. Either way, there was no going swimming that day, so I’d found myself at the library instead, standing idly in front of a one-twelfth scale replica of a Queenslander-style house enclosed in a glass case like a museum relic. I studied it closely—meanly—for flaws in the scale, and could not fault it: the pegs on the clothesline, a brown glass bottle on the ground below the tank stand, a light switch, window hoods embellished with simple star patterns cut by hand from the sheet metal. It was eerie, uncanny in its detail: the colours, the shadows it cast, the long dry grass growing from the base of its tin-topped stumps. The accompanying plaque said the model was built by the husband of a woman who grew up in the house, then raised her own children there. It detailed how even a pair of red shoes she remembered hiding from her mother once, underneath a squatter’s canvas-backed folding chair—a replica of which sat on the model’s veranda—had been faithfully reproduced and included. I searched and could not see them, until finally they appeared, placed in the seat of the chair rather than underneath, as the plaque had said. I looked at the house for a long time and could not get enough of it—as if a real house had been shrunk down just so and captured behind glass like some exotic butterfly. I want to build a place like that, but all I have are scraps. Splinters …

‘Room to Grow’ — photo-essay in Artlines (Queensland Art Gallery Magazine).

“Ingrid Woodrow weaves a story of losing faith and finding hope in the north – visiting her grandmother’s greenhouse and the local gallery – a place where memories live.” — Artlines

‘Bridge Story’ — photo-essay in Fortitude – New Art from Queensland.

One night when Fergus and I were drunk we decided to walk over the great arches of the William Jolley Bridge. When I first started to climb I could feel the soles of my shoes giving way on the slippery cream paint, so I put my hands on either side of the cold cement slabs and inched my way back down again. I don’t know if he was braver or drunker but he climbed right over, in his K-Mart thongs with embossed dragons along the black plastic V- strap that held his toes in place. I watched him on top of the arch and imagined what I would be able to see from that height …

‘Desideratum’ — catalogue essay in Auto Fetish: The Mechanics of Desire exhibition on car culture at Newcastle Region Art Gallery.

“Ingrid Woodrow’s essay challenges the conventions of masculinised car culture, paying homage to Tamara de Lempicka and the ‘flapper’ aesthetic.” — Artemis Journal

A flame-haired girl in a beaten-up, Amazon Green Lancer cruised past me today, wearing a nurse’s uniform and leather gloves. She stared at me through the rain with luminous eyes and came almost to a complete stop, the corner of her sensuous lips curving in a mona lisa smile. Autoportrait in the Green Bugatti. A steely-eyed goddess of the automobile age …

‘Ivy’— creative nonfiction in Difficult Love: Twenty-Six Intimate Stories by Contemporary Queensland Writers.

Before the earthquake hit Newcastle, Dad used to say, “This house will be here for hundreds of years”. He’d point to the big sandstone bricks of our family home and say, “Look at them, look how thick they are, it’s just like a fortress.” But when the builders came to repair the damage after the quake they stripped the plaster from the walls and all that was left was the skeleton of the house. Dad was upset and disappointed because he saw it wasn’t really made of big solid bricks after all, that was just a façade. The walls were really made of small pieces of rubble, and when the surface was stripped away it was obvious how flimsy it really was …

‘Smoulder’—photo-essay on the end of steelmaking in Newcastle,
in Meanjin

I was waiting in his midnight blue Holden at the BHP carpark while he picked up his pay cheque. Bored, I opened the glovebox and found a wad of pawnbroker's receipts. Diamond and sapphire ring. CD player. Surf ski. Ruby necklace. And my father's sterling silver Armstrong flute. I looked around at the silver smoke curling and puffing from chimneys, the slow-grinding machines, criss-crossed metal and steel-sheeted warehouses, the chugging locomotives and bulldozers …