Contact Liz via: PO Box 5858 West End, Queensland, 4101, Australia Email: Liz Hall-Downs

About The Author


Liz Hall-Downs has been reading and performing poetry in public since 1983. She has been a featured reader at countless venues across Australia and the USA, and has had work published and broadcast on TV and radio in both countries.

As well as poetry, Liz writes fiction, articles and reviews and has worked as a freelance editor, writer-in-residence, workshop facilitator and singer. Collaborative writing projects include Fit of Passion, a poetry and music show about gender issues which toured regional Queensland in 1997, and Blackfellas Whitefellas Wetlands, a cultural and environmental history project commissioned by Brisbane City Council in 1996. She is currently working on a novel, and living in subtropical South East Queensland, with her partner and an assortment of parrots.

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Order Girl With Green Hair by Liz Hall-Downs online from Papyrus Publishing

About the book


"The poems in this book represent my published output over the past decade, with a few additions. It is a diverse body of work that covers a period of personal change that saw me leaving my native Melbourne and moving north, first to northern New South Wales, and then to South-East Queensland, in search of a more relaxed and rural lifestyle. Also in this period I toured the midwest of the USA as a performance poet, an experience which inspired 'The American Poems'. This collection contains stories, observations, musings on events, and responses to the mostly everyday things that have moved me personally. At times there is anger, as well as joy, and for this I make no apology. Life's like that."

Liz Hall-Downs

"There is grace and wit, pathos and humour and the poet's incisive video-camera eye writ large, in delicious combination with sparsity of language and stylistic elegance."

Douglas Broad, The Westender, Brisbane, 2000

"The [poems greet] their audience with sparkling bite, intelligence and wit. In particular the suite of six poems American Poems - six fragments were for me the exemplar of the evening. Her set was a delightful vacillation between the peppy and zappy, and well placed contemplation. These poems woke my sleeping butterflies and blew goose bumps down my neck."

Carolyn Hughes, M/C Reviews, August 2000

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On the Drag


The girl with green hair slouches
on the street corner, meets my eye and says,
'Spare some change, miss?'

And I don't have any, but know
she sees my shiny Doc Martens my
new Levi jeans.

So she says, 'Spare some change, miss?'
like she just knows
how I'm phased by

the sound of automatic-weapons-fire
at night when gangs
practice drive-bys on each other.

The girl with green hair thinks I feel
guilt easily - I know from
the way she stares at me

as she searches the bin for leftover lunches,
thrown out by the haves who get sent to colleges
and only eat half the burrito.

Now it's always the same
when i think of her; those staring
eyes and lime-green hair,

all of sixteen,
with that look of despair ...

I wish I were too green
to see clear.

from American fragments: six poems

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River Swim

We drag you down to the river
with spasmed legs, impudent
erection; it takes two to take you
over mangrove swamp, to drop you
in the salt silt where you
find bouyancy, float and smile
at pelicans and sky.
This is a blue day,
unlike your grey
others. We laugh, forget,
discuss green things, till the rise
of cold wind draws us back
to your prison, the hard chrome
and sheepskin, the wheelchair,
beckoning.
Next day, in the sea,
you feel thin as a twig in a strong
surfer's arms, say it's been six years
since you've braved the waves. And I
bless my difficult legs, give stride
against the undertow, catch your feet,
and as we rise, lick the salt,
a kiss before drying.

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Order Girl With Green Hair by Liz Hall-Downs online from Papyrus Publishing

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Text and Photos: Liz Hall-Downs and Kim Downs
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