Cirrus@Austlit

'I’ve chosen authors born in the twentieth century, whose work was published over a span of not quite half a century, from 1941 to the year of the bicentenary, 1988. I know: I’ve chosen three books published over some 47 years when there’s almost another 230 colonial and post-colonial years and, of course, 60,000 more with rich stories of continental habitation to choose from.' (Introduction)

'It was Deirdre Emerson’s boy who was first affected. He went off to school at six and a half years old, ready for a day of alphabets and animals, and crept home a man of five feet ten, dressed like a fool in teenaged things from the lost property.' (Introduction)

'This river, banked in forest, carries the fallen sky to the ocean. Where it runs was once a glacial melt, before the first people crossed a land bridge to the island, on land now sea, and made a thousand paths and smokes of their dreaming over a new land, long before the white man’s name; before mineral prospectors broke rainforest tracks; before mud from tin-dish panning and railway bridges built with London money to carry materials for mines and towns, taking copper, tin, gold and silver, all of those towns and camps now gone; before 30 million super feet of Huon pine was cut for timber and floated down-river; before a million tonnes of effluent from the Rosebery mine and mill flowed in grey, steaming silt, smelling of sulphur, into the river from the Stitt; before that stopped, and the banks cleared, hiding sludge; before the 200-metre-high Reece dam, and all the dams behind it, flooding valleys for hydroelectric lakes of the Pieman Power Development Scheme. Before you left.' (Introduction)

'We’re driving up from the Rapid River, a beer-coloured tumult capped with froth and busy with rain; huge myrtles the size of eucalypts were camped on one bank and the blackwood was just coming into yellow wattle-flower, an unexpected sunshine in the dim wet green; on the ground we had spaced our steps around conical mounds rising up like wide muddy candles, the fragile homes of burrowing crayfish.' (Introduction)

'I play that Sia song while I get ready. You know that one where she sings ‘Baby I don’t need dollar bills to have fun tonight’ and when you sing it really loudly and you’re wearing lipstick it kind of feels like you don’t need dollar bills to have fun. Though you bought the lipstick with dollar bills, at least credit-card dollar bills, which are kind of imaginary until you have to pay them back, and then you remember Sia is probably a millionaire and everything is a lie.' (Introduction)

'The loneliness bided its time. Like a dingo lying in its den through the daylight hours, waiting. As I watched the sky turn lemon and the sun rise behind misted plane tails at Brisbane Domestic Airport, as I flicked through the in-flight magazine and failed the Sudoku between Brisbane and Adelaide (and from Adelaide to Alice Springs), as I picked up Monster Truck and took Larapinta Drive towards my first overnight stop at Glen Helen, I was barely conscious of the loneliness lurking. Only after the Englishman at reception had shown me to the bunkhouse, congratulating me on having a four-bunk dormitory all to myself, and I’d located the ladies toilets and changed into togs and was picking my way down the dry part of the riverbed with pebbles tinkling and crunching under my sandals, did I become aware of a nagging wish that someone was with me.' (Publication summary)

'A decapitated carcass is at my feet. At first glance it’s not obvious the head is missing, or what the body is besides some feathers; the chest is pealed back like raw curtains and a nation of ants are at work. The site/sight, while impressive in its own gruesome, practical way, is too hard to stomach for any sustained period. Its missing head, the march of ants on offal, the white feathers scattered among the bark like confetti or the forgotten skin of a burst piñata—I realise all these details slowly, reassembling the bird’s body from the glances I take between curiosity and sickness.' (Introduction)

'The first Grief Code: Grief is passive. Mourning, the process of purging grief, is active.' (Introduction)

'At a time of war and transition, we still strive to “talk poetry”,’ wrote Clem Christesen in his editor’s introduction to the first issue of Meanjin Papers in 1940. His firm belief in the importance of keeping Australia’s intellectual and aesthetic culture alive, even during wartime, would continue to be his central concern. Encouraging free discussion of art, literature and contemporary social problems, his only criterion for publication was what he called ‘quality’.' (Introduction)

'When I fell for the last time the paper published a quote saying that I had lost a tooth. I had lost a lot of things, but a tooth wasn’t one of them.'