Johanna Bell is an award winning author of fiction, poetry and children’s books. Her new novel Department of the Vanishing won the 2025 Tasmanian Literary Award for Best Unpublished Manuscript.

For more than twenty years Ava has toiled away at the Department of Vanishing cataloguing species as they go extinct. The pace of the work has been increasing and as is always the case there’s never enough hands.

Humanity is on the brink of a mass extinction event. Birdsong is falling silent and people didn’t even notice it disappearing. It’s Ava’s job to archive the remains, even as her personal life teeters.

But in her dying mother’s confused words Ava finds something. Maybe hope. Maybe a clue to the mystery of her father, long missing, and a song that contains more than any might assume…

Department of the Vanishing is a visually innovative novel that weaves a mystery around just about the saddest thing I can think of. I love the birds that visit my house and as I read I couldn’t bear to think of not hearing the Magpie’s warble, or the chittering of the Galah calling me out to give it some seed.

Casting the end of birdsong as the emotional heart of the novel was effective at getting me hooked on the mystery and serves as an interesting plot point as we come to realise the most versatile call of all may lurk deep within the department. There is a resonance to the idea that silence falling is the advance call of life ending.

Through Ava we get a sense that the world isn’t doing ok. She’s over worked at living behind a massage parlour where the women are wonderful but the ambiance is lacking. Her partner is a dick and now the natural world is dwindling to so-much space in manila folders available to those ready to parade through the archives. Bureaucracy gone mild.

The book itself is crafted as a kind of off-kilter file. Imagine a cork board linked by red twine and you’re on your way to imagining Ava collection. It is through these disparate files, recordings, and police reports that the reader is offered the opportunity to get to the heart of the mystery. Ava’s sure there’s more to all of this death and destruction, and that it’s somehow linked to her family. To the disappearance of her father all those years ago.

As I read I knew that this was something unique. Moreover, Department of the Vanishing wasn’t going to serve itself up to me, I would have to work to figure it out. If you enjoy creative fiction, zines, and interactive texts, this one’s for you.