The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.
'A small card dangles from sticky tape on her front door, on which her name is scrawled in swift cursive: Eva Cox. Inside the house, tacked to one of the bookshelves that line the narrow hallway, is a fabric poster. In bright red lettering it reads: FEMMO – STIRRING THE PENIS POT. Bustling around her cluttered kitchen, Eva jams the bunch of lavender I’ve brought into a glass jug. “I love lavender,” she says, and I agree. She fetches napkins and a knife for the cake. She chats and smiles. Other people have written about the affection they’ve felt for Eva when they interview her, but the suddenness of it is unexpected.' (Introduction)
'How does a young doctor, driven out of Iraq by political violence that engulfs the very hospital he is working in, end up in the isolation unit of an Australian maximum security prison? He has committed no crime, under local or international law. Then one day in 2000, after 10 months in Australia’s immigration detention system – 10 months wasted, for himself and the country he will embrace – he is left on the side of a desert highway in Western Australia to wait for a bus.' (Introduction)
'The line, “One day the longing became too great to bear”, appears in “Small Talk”, one of the eight stories that make up Do You Love Me or What?, Sue Woolfe’s collection of longish short fiction. It refers to Diana, an urban Australian who yearns to spend time in the desert and talk – meaningfully, whatever that means for a privileged white woman – with the Indigenous people who live there. She believes it will enable her, a child of migrants who’ve fled some unnamed oppression, to feel as if she belongs here, in this country. She wants this sense of connection deeply. ' (Introduction)
