Cirrus@Austlit

'More than seven hundred years ago a young poet commenced a journey that would define the human condition. Dante’s The Divine Comedy continues to resonate – arguably with new urgency in what many feel are dark times. His journey through hell commenced on the night before Good Friday in 1300 AD, when he was thirty-five, halfway through his allotted three score and ten years – the same age as the oldest millennials today.' (Publication summary)

'Abstract: Generationalism is a complex phenomenon. The concept of a generation is obvious: the social and economic contexts for a group of people born around the same time are going to be somewhat similar. But in addressing lived experience, a number of factors highlight how arbitrary such categorisation is: place, culture, socio-economic standing. In Generation Less: How Australia is Cheating the Young (Black Inc., 2016), Jennifer Rayner identifies this apparent contradiction as the difference between 'cohort' and 'life cycle' effects - that is, between the standard conception of generations as age groups, and the non age-specific commonalities that such designations cannot adequately address.' (Publication abstract)

''Ah, the worst that can happen is someone sending you an angry email. Just don't read it, you will be fine. Don't forget to take your vitamins. Have you checked your iron levels? You know your anaemia makes you tired.'' (Publication abstract)

'The naked woman is only visible when my manager's door is open - when closed it is unclear what the painting depicts. From my desk I can make out the faint outline of a woman's back through the frosted glass wall that partitions her office from the open-plan workplace. It reminds me of the European masters I studied in undergraduate art history, and the ironic way the portraits of high art have been reduced to cheap office furnishings. It's not until the third or fourth time I walk past my manager's office, with her door ajar, that I notice another woman in the image. She is African, and her tall frame hovers delicately over the white woman's plump flesh as she gently sponges her shoulder. Seeing the poster in full view illuminates an unpleasant moment in history, and is like walking in on act you weren't meant to see.' (Publication abstract)

'When we were kids, my sisters and I weren't allowed to watch TV during dinner. The risk of seeing John Howard was too much for my parents to bear. In the months after he became prime minister, Mum and Dad wore their opposition proudly, chortling of his imminent demise and slapping a 'Don't blame me I voted Labor' sticker on our dusty family van.' (Publication abstract)

'The future is always arriving, in one form or another. There is no no future. It's an absurdly simple point, like saying that one plus one equals two. But despite its apparent simplicity, it bears remembering because its corollary has far-reaching consequences: that the future will come regardless of our capacity to imagine and articulate a vision for it. Which in turn leads to another obvious but easily missed point: that any failure of the imagination vis- -vis the future does not prevent the future arriving, but only leaves it susceptible to the visions of others. Or, to put it another way: the future belongs to those who dare to imagine it.' (Publication abstract)

'So you get an urge. Something bristling within you that can only get out through something else. Maybe it was because you didn't fit in; maybe it was because you fitted in too well.' (Publication abstract)

'On a Saturday morning in March 2014, I found myself speaking in front of a crowd of five thousand people on the shore of Cottesloe Beach, Perth. We were there to protest a state government policy to catch and kill large sharks using baited drum lines off the metropolitan coast, a policy announced in response to five fatal great white attacks in Western Australia between 2011 and 2012. I stood at the podium, midway up the stepped retaining wall built against the dune, racked with nerves and aware that I was not a politician or environmental scientist, like the speakers before me, but a student writer who, as I'd come to feel, had been given the job of addressing the protest under a dubious interpretation of my credentials.' (Publication abstract)

'On the way home from Brisbane airport, my older sister Tammy turns to me from the driver's seat and asks an unexpected question: 'So, are you going to marry him?' She says this in a silly voice while pulling a silly face - a mode of speaking we adopted as kids when we wanted to express something serious to each other, like affection or an apology, without having to show vulnerability.' (Publication abstract)

'I am a night-time walker, I prefer dark, dark public parks...'

'I went to a high school filled with smart kids. Kids who had been specially selected because their brains were somehow advanced. But they were only smart in the way they could read books and do tricky things with numbers in their heads. Many of them had no social skills; others were suffering from things that at the time had names like 'attention deficit disorder'; and lots of them popped small pills to calm them down, or speed them up, depending on the time of day and what their parents demanded of them.' (Publication abstract)

'I was born in 1983, the same year as Microsoft Word. It was also the year the first mobile phones went on sale in the US, and Apple introduced its graphical user interface computer, the Lisa. Not quite a decade later, my parents lugged home a Hewlett Packard 360. It came with a specially shaped opaque dust cover, which my mother insisted on. Most of the time it looked as though we kept a plastic camel hump in our spare bedroom.' (Publication abstract)

'In the building opposite mine here in Ho Chi Minh City, still commonly called Saigon, an old man in the top-floor apartment tends his rooftop garden. He climbs there via a ladder every morning, shirtless and holding a plastic watering can, and spends a half hour amid green potted plants. I watch him shamelessly, a 31-year-old Australian Jimmy Stewart in a Vietnamese Rear Window. How old would he be? Old enough to have been in the war. He moves slowly, and pays no attention to me or anything else beyond his tended patch of green - in fact, he appears to be encouraging a wall of creepers to all but block out his view of the street.' (Publication abstract)

'Each day at sunset I sit on my fourth-storey balcony in Oman and look out over the pastel-pink town, waiting for the pigeons. They always come at the same time, a huge flock of them weaving deftly through the sky, each brisk turn harmonious, and perch on the concrete rooftop of a distant building, waiting to be fed.' (Publication abstract)

'Small fires streak the savanna beneath me, as the land is worked and cleaned. The gentle smoke on the horizon is sign of a healthy country. In the distance, disappearing into a soft haze, lies the rugged stone country of the Arnhem Land Plateau. The plane wobbles over the mouth of the Liverpool River, where saltwater meets fresh, and descends towards a thin ribbon of grey on a cleared patch of thick, earthy red: the international airport. On one side of the airstrip, a few dozen houses cluster around a football oval; on the other, a neat grid delineates the newest suburb, called simply 'New Sub'. Maningrida, as our destination is known, takes its name from the Kunib dji phrase Mane djang karirra: 'the place where the Dreaming changed shape'.' (Publication abstract)