This Water is Not Still: A Release Day Essay for Wolverine Frogs

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There’s a river behind my childhood house. It is brown, choked with reeds, mosquito-bitten and still—until it isn’t. Once, I saw something rise from it. Just for a second. A shimmer, like heat off bitumen. And then it was gone.

I’ve been writing Wolverine Frogs for years now, though I didn’t always know I was doing it. It began with a feeling—like that shimmer in the river. A warning. Something was wrong in the water, in the dirt. Something old and watching. I saw it in the red eyes of cane toads at night, in the mist over the paddocks, in the hollow bones of roadkill picked clean too quickly.

But the real horror wasn’t the monster.

The real horror was knowing the monster was necessary.

Wolverine Frogs is a book about what we’re willing to ignore, as long as it keeps the roads open and the crops growing and the illusion of safety intact. It’s about girls who aren’t allowed to scream, and boys told to shoot before they cry. It’s about a land that has always been wild and the teeth we broke trying to tame it.

I come from a small town where people remember the flood years the way you’d remember a war. I know how silence stretches between neighbours who’ve seen too much. I know how rumours grow like fungus. I know what it means to love something that will never love you back. That’s where this book lives—in that uneasy space between beauty and rot, survival and sacrifice.

This story was never meant to be pretty. But it is, I hope, true. And maybe that’s why it’s found its way into the world now.

Because the water isn’t still. It never was.

And neither am I.

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Thank you for walking this muddy path with me. Wolverine Frogs is out now. Be careful where you step.

Wolverine Frogs is available for purchase on Amazon!