3rd - this short story won third prize in the Society’s 2026 Geography Writing Competition. The Competition’s theme in 2026 was “Changing Environments in Queensland”.

Debra Brown - Once I was Beautiful

I remember when this place had a different name. 

Long before your maps and picnic tables, before the neat patches of grass and council bins, the Quandamooka people called these lands home.  The waters of Moreton Bay shimmered then, clear, generous and alive.  Fish flickered beneath the surface; turtles and dugongs fed on sea grass and the shoreline breathed with life. It was a place of balance.  A place where I belonged.

I walked the edges of wetlands, elegant and patient, my reflection unbroken in the still clear water.  Each step was deliberate. My long-curved bill excellent for probing into the shallows looking for tiny fish or worms.  Each meal earned. The world was not loud. It did not smell of rot and plastic.  It was idyllic.

Then the machines came. Progress you called it.

They churned the seabed, tore at the sand, turned the clear shallows into clouds of silt.  Dredging, you call it.  Progress.  The waters thickened.  The fish thinned.  The places I knew, now gone, buried beneath mud and noise. They didn’t see it at first. Not the slow unravelling. Fish stocks dwindling. Seagrass meadows fading and with them, the turtles and dugongs slipping quietly away.  The wetlands were still there, waiting to heal.  Pathways we had followed for centuries simply ended.

So, I followed what remained.  I had no choice.

My food grew scarce as the ecosystem shifted around me. It wasn’t something you meant to do. You trusted that nature would absorb the changes, that it would endure. No one truly understood the chain of cause and effect, the quiet collapse of a home like mine.  They expected a lot from Mother Nature, believing she could carry every burden without breaking.

The irony is that when the sun comes out and the children want to run and play you spread your blankets across the grass in spaces now deemed ‘green enough’.  You laugh, eat and leave with little regard to the waste. 

When you go, I arrive, starving on land that once fed me without scraps.

I pick through what spills from your bins—greasy paper, half-eaten food, the careless excess of a world that forgot its balance. I do what I must, because this is what you have made of my home.

You wrinkle your nose. You point. You laugh. “Bin Chicken,” you call me.

I did not change - you did.  As wetlands were drained, as shorelines hardened, as waste replaced the rhythms of tide and soil, I adapted. I survived where others could not. I became a reflection of your choices.

It will be beautiful again - not because I changed, but because you finally chose to.