A Tolerance for the Middle - Nonfiction winner of the 2025 Hachette Australia Prize
Congratulations to Georgina Lewis (NSW), winner of the Nonfiction category of the Hachette Australia Prize for Young Writers in 2025!
Read Georgina’s winning piece below, followed by the 2025 prize showcase.
A Tolerance for the Middle
Airports have always felt like nowhere and everywhere at once. The lights are too bright, the coffee is burnt, and no one can agree on the time. People nap on carpet squares under coats. Kids loop around chair legs. Someone always wheels a suitcase like it’s a reluctant dog. I sit with a backpack that’s heavier than it should be and eat because eating gives me something to do. These buildings exist only so we can wait and leave. They’re not destinations; they’re the hallways of the world.
When I was fourteen, I boarded a plane in Sydney by myself for a school exchange in France. The night before, my mum labelled everything with my name as if identity were a problem of stationery. We checked my passport so often it became muscle memory: unzip, pat, zip. At the airport, the check-in desk printed a boarding pass with a barcode that decided whether I belonged past a glass wall. Security asked me to remove my shoes. I stood in socks on cold tiles and pretended to be used to it. At the gate, I held my phone, my passport, my water bottle—the trinity of travel—and tried to look like somebody who knew what she was doing.
The thing I remember most is the sound the machine made when the attendant scanned my boarding pass. One clean beep. Permission granted. I walked down the jet bridge and felt like I was walking through an x-ray, every part of me lit up and examined. On the plane, everything had a pattern designed to calm: the safety video, the trolley, the lights changing colour to suggest time moving when it really wasn’t. The seatback screen said the flight would be fourteen hours and then some. “Then some” turned out to be the important part.
Air travel stretches minutes until they’re thin enough to see through. We took off into darkness and flew toward more darkness, and still the captain said we were heading for morning. Meals arrived at the wrong times with foods that didn’t belong together—scrambled eggs beside a bread roll beside a square of fruit that tasted like a memory. A baby cried, then another answered like a relay. My seat neighbour took the armrest by simply existing with confidence. The map on my screen drew a red line across an ocean and made the world look manageable.
Somewhere hours later, the cabin dimmed. I pushed my forehead to the window. The wing blinked up and down like it was thinking. The map said we were crossing a desert, but it could have been water or cloud or nothing. The feeling mattered more than the geography. I hung between where I’d been and where I was going, contained in a vessel that moved forward while holding everyone still. I didn’t have words for it then; I just knew that flying wasn’t only transport. It was a kind of rehearsal for every moment in life where you’re not one thing or the other yet.
Charles de Gaulle met me with grey light and too many signs. A woman at the information desk spoke quickly. I caught every third word and smiled like that helped. The airport air smelled like coffee and rubber. People moved with the kind of purpose I didn’t yet have. At passport control, a man stamped my booklet without looking me in the eye, and suddenly I was someone who had arrived. Baggage claim was the same choreography everywhere: a belt, a crowd building a quiet faith that their belongings would appear, a suitcase that looks like yours until it’s not. Mine finally thumped onto the carousel with a scratch it didn’t have in Sydney. It felt like a message: you’ve been somewhere.
The train into the city shook like it was remembering something. I sat with my suitcase between my knees and pretended I knew when to get off. Out the window, graffiti stitched itself along concrete walls. I texted home: landed. The message went through at a time that made no sense in either country. Time zones make you feel like a lie you’ve told well. At the station near my host family’s apartment, a sign asked me not to run. I wasn’t going to.
The apartment smelled like butter and clean laundry. There were different bins for different kinds of rubbish and no one put bread in the fridge. My host sister spoke slowly to me, then faster to her mum, then slowly to me again, and I felt grateful and six years old at the same time. At dinner, I misheard a simple question and answered with my favourite fruit. Everyone laughed. I laughed too because if I didn’t, I might cry. My brain was a pocket with a hole in it. New words fell through before I could hold them.
School was a test of endurance disguised as ordinary days. I found classrooms by recognising the backs of people I’d already followed once. In lessons, I caught verbs the way you catch a ball—sometimes cleanly, sometimes off the chest, sometimes not at all. Understanding arrived like weather, in patches. Teachers wrote dates on the board and for a second the numbers anchored me. At lunch, I learned how to order without pointing, how to say please without sounding apologetic, how to laugh on purpose. The hallways smelled like wet coats and printer toner. Between periods, students leaned against lockers and switched between registers I couldn’t hear yet. The corridor—between classroom and classroom, between one version of me and the next—was where I felt the most okay.
Nights came with a lag. Jet lag isn’t just sleep; it’s the part of your brain that refuses to move countries as fast as your body. I would stare at the ceiling and think in two languages that both felt like borrowed shoes. When I did sleep, the dreams were busy. Airports with moving walkways that never ended. A departure board listing cities that weren’t real and a voice announcing flights I’d already missed. Conversations that began in English and finished in French, which sounds clever until you remember you don’t understand either half in the morning. I woke up tired and a little proud: clearly my brain was doing push-ups.
There were small recognitions that felt like stamps in a passport you only show yourself. Buying stamps. Navigating the Metro by knowing where to stand on the platform so you exit near the stairs. Finding a bench by the river that belonged to me at four in the afternoon. Realising I didn’t need the map for a street I’d only walked twice. These weren’t big moments. They didn’t deserve a photo or a post. They were the slight shift from performance to ease, from guessing to choosing. Every day brought a tiny check-in: Do you know how to be here yet? Not fully. But more than yesterday.
On weekends, my host family took me to museums and markets. The audio guides spoke like they were saving breath, and cheese sellers had opinions I respected but couldn’t absorb. We walked a lot. Paris rewards the stubborn walker. One foot in front of the other and suddenly the shape of the city starts to sketch itself in your head. A bridge becomes a habit. A café becomes a landmark. A set of steps becomes a countdown to the bus stop. Orientation is a language that asks nothing of grammar.
Train stations joined airports as my favourite non-places. Gare de Lyon with its clocks. Gare du Nord with its constant stream. Platforms that turned people into a before and an after in a single step. I liked watching the moment a person saw the person they were meeting: posture lowered, pace slowed, and then the shoulder-drop of recognition. I liked how transport demanded clarity. This platform or that one. This direction or the other. Life rarely offers such a clean fork.
My French improved by becoming less careful. I stopped trying to sound perfect and started trying to be understood. A teacher once said my accent sounded like I was swallowing something hot. I decided that meant I sounded alive. At the bakery, I learned the lines everyone uses to be gentle. At school, jokes landed on purpose rather than by accident. The day a classmate mocked an exam we’d all failed using a reference I understood, I laughed before anyone else, and the relief felt like finally being allowed to sit down after standing for too long.
Of course there were days when nothing worked. The Metro stalled between stations and the lights went off and a voice said something calm that sounded like a command. Rain soaked the bottom of my jeans all the way up to my knees. I misread a text and stood on the wrong corner for twenty minutes. On those days I wanted to be from somewhere again, to speak the version of myself that didn’t require subtitles. I bought a hot chocolate and sat by a window and wrote down what people did with their hands. If I couldn’t fix anything, I could at least pay attention.
Paying attention turned out to be the only reliable cure for being unmoored. Counting the number of stops. Noting the colour of the ticket machine that never worked. Learning which door opened closest to the exit. These facts are junk to anyone else and golden to the person trying to live a day without asking for help. They made me braver. They also made time pass in a way that felt usable.
Somewhere in the middle, I stopped keeping track of the middle. Routines arrived without ceremony. I knew the bus routes that would be crowded and the ones that wouldn’t. I had a favourite boulangerie and a backup for Mondays when it was closed. The city grew familiar like a sweater you didn’t intend to wear that often. This is the quiet trick of any transition: the temporary becomes the way things are.
Leaving snuck up on me, the way arrivals do. I packed my suitcase slower than I unpacked it. Packing feels like translation backward. You have to turn a life into weight and volume. Every object is a decision: worth the kilos or not. A scarf held the smell of the apartment. A folded receipt inside a paperback proved I’d been somewhere on a particular Tuesday. I knew I’d be stopped at security for something minor; I was right. Rituals are rituals because they repeat.
Back at the airport, I recognised the choreography. Join the line. Unlace your shoes. Tray for the laptop. The same fluorescent lighting that makes every face look like it’s been awake too long. This time the waiting felt less like a test and more like a room I knew how to sit in. I ate at the wrong time because I could. I watched the screen until my gate earned a letter and a number. When it did, everyone stood at once like the second act had started. I walked to the door with a calm I wouldn’t have believed on the trip over.
On the flight home, the red line on the map crept back across the world. I watched a movie I forgot two days later. The cabin smelled like fabric cleaner and compressed air, a scent that now means you are between lives. I slept in short loops and woke with a dry mouth to the metal-foil sound of breakfast trays. Somewhere over water that might have been the Indian Ocean or anything else that reflects sky, I understood that going back wouldn’t make me who I was. Planes don’t reset you. They deliver you to the next version with whatever you’ve learned still attached.
Home was familiar and not. Streets looked wider than I remembered. The air after rain smelled specific in a way I couldn’t describe to anyone overseas. Hearing English everywhere made my shoulders drop without permission. But I hesitated before crossing roads because I felt like I should look the other way. I called bread the wrong name and then corrected myself and then kept the wrong name anyway because it tasted better. Friends asked for stories and I told them about cheese and museums and getting lost, but the real story was made of small changes that don’t perform well. How I didn’t panic when the bus broke down. How I could wait without deciding waiting was failure. How I could ask for help without it feeling like an admission that I didn’t belong.
After that, airports stopped feeling like interruptions. They became training grounds. Plastic chairs, long queues, power outlets that work only if you hold the cable at an angle—none of it glamorous. But I know what I’m doing there. I’m practising. I’m sitting in a room designed for the hour before you become the person who walks down the jet bridge. I keep my ID somewhere I can reach it. I choose a window seat if I can. I drink too much water. I set alarms for times that don’t exist where I am yet. These are small acts, but they build something: a tolerance for uncertainty, a faith that the sign will change to “boarding” eventually.
The lesson travelled home with me. Whenever life puts a corridor between versions of myself—new school, new job, new city—I treat it like an airport. Make a list. Overpack snacks. Tell someone where I am when I’m scared. Take the train one stop past where I meant to get off and learn the route back. Keep going even when the lights are harsh and the announcements sound like a language I don’t quite speak. Trust that I’ll know to stand when it’s time to stand.
Not all thresholds involve planes. Some are as ordinary as the pause before a school bell rings, when the hallway chatter drops and everyone waits for the next part of the day to start. Some are the hush in a cinema after the trailers, when the room is suspended in darkness and the story hasn’t yet begun. Some are lying awake your first night in a hotel, listening to pipes rattle and footsteps above, waiting for sleep to catch up. The body recognises the pattern anyway: you’re not there, not yet, but you’re pointed. You learn to live in that angle.
If you asked me what the exchange to France gave me beyond the ability to order a baguette properly, I would say this: a tolerance for the middle. The ability to sit in the boarding area of anything and not mistake waiting for nothing. A respect for small evidence—ticket stubs, muscle memory, the feel of a metro card in the right pocket. A practice of attention. A version of courage that doesn’t look like leaping; it looks like staying until the door opens.
I used to think the important part of any story was the arrival. In some ways it is. Paris changed me in all the obvious and subtle ways a new place can. But what I return to when I’m unsure are the hours between: the gate in Sydney where my hands shook and the scanner’s beep sounded like a blessing; the long dark stretch over a map that called itself the world; the platform where a train door opened and I stepped inside without drama. Those are the pieces I use now, quietly, when life asks me to start again.
I still arrive early. I still carry a pen for forms. I still keep a scarf in my bag because planes, trains, and new days have their own weather. When I feel the ground shift under me—the email that changes a plan, the decision that rearranges a calendar—I find a window and look out at whatever strip of sky there is. It doesn’t make me better. It makes me steady. The middle isn’t a pause; it’s part of the route. You wait. You learn. You move when it’s time. Then you board.
Watch the 2025 showcase video: