'In a phone call followed by several conversations and a string of other phone calls, John Clarke slowly explained to me the concept of the Commonplace Book. Not a diary. Not a journal. Jottings and observations; little notes on the subtle specialness of life. Several emails followed with various jotted musings attached.' (Editorial introduction)
Contents indexed selectively.
'By the time my husband and I realised the garage had flooded, it was too late. Black mould had crept up the sides of the cardboard boxes and dark, stinking fingers had clawed their way into our belongings.' (Introduction)
'The sun bends their bodies across the roadside puddles. Shadows swim out from under their cranks where the playful morning light twists their bodies, bikes and surfboards into a jumble of sharp, angular shapes as they pedal past the muddy sinkholes that border the bitumen leading into town. They are two teenage boys with tangled hair yet their reflection appears like a triceratops come to life; a prehistoric beast waddling down a smooth black sweep of tar, a forgotten curve of the Great Ocean Road beyond the tourist stops and biblical rock formations, brittle like toffee eaten at the edges by potholes and puddles. They reach an 80 sign pocked with rusting bullet holes and follow the burnout marks, reading the tyre tracks, where sunshine dances across the sticky caramel dirt that plasters their wheels and spits on their legs and the arse of their pants.' (Introduction)
'At her pre-kinder orientation session Jasmine drifts around each of the activity areas: a kitchen table with wooden fruit, a bench with bowls of play dough, a colourful array of outside play equipment, and a table with a red-and-white-check tablecloth for snack time. Across the room I perch on one of the tiny kinder chairs to breast feed Evie. Jasmine is on her own nibbling her fruit and crackers and gliding her blue eyes around the room without focusing on anything or anyone. I can’t pinpoint why she looks so vulnerable. By the time I resettle Evie into her pram, Jasmine is outside painting with water on the wooden cubby’s walls. For the rest of the session she dashes the wet brush repeatedly across the surfaces, casting undiscernible images that rapidly dry and vanish in the hot February air.' (Introduction)
'Things that get in through the gap in the pole and sheet-iron fence that separates us from the besser-block compound next door include a clutter of chooks, to scrabble up God knows what from our gravel yard; three mongrel dogs, to sprawl on the old, chewed-up vinyl couch upon our back porch; and seven little Dili girls.' (Introduction)
'The middle class shields itself from the realities of life when you’re poor
'I spent much of my childhood in a northwestern suburb of Adelaide that was, for decades, predominantly white and working class. Waves of eastern European migrants formed the foundation of its settlement throughout the 1950s and 60s, before it underwent a significant transformation in the 80s when the new waves of migrants and refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia and China settled there in large numbers. Mansfield Park also boasted an extensive collection of public housing that ensured underemployed Anglo-Australians, such as my parents, were well represented' (Introduction)
'Swimming in early summer is a particular pleasure. Sunlight through the high windows lasts past eight in the evening. Not too many people around. I'm going well when I see something drifting along the bottom and it could be a bandaid, yet it is not, and it should be anything else but it's a finger...' (Publication abstract)
'It was not a hunch that made Bernard O'Reilly set off into the rainforest in the early afternoon of Saturday 27 February 1937, eight days after an Airlines of Australia Stinson aircraft went missing on a flight to Sydney from Brisbane's Archerfield Aerodrome. A believer, he was comfortable with the possibility that he had been chosen for the mission. Having 'spent most of his life in unwittingly fitting himself out for such a job', O'Reilly thought it 'quite natural' to find inspired within him 'the reasoning and initiative which would send that man out on his own accord', a sign that there was 'a clear purpose behind it all'.' (Introduction)
'Whenever I am up high, looking out over the city, I feel like a character in a movie. Not that I feel myself to be glamorous or interesting the way characters in movies generally are, but rather, when I look down at the lines of traffic and the neon lights flashing in shop windows, and the tiny people hurrying here and there, this experience seems to come to me secondhand. I have had this experience many times before, but at some remove, when watching a film in which a sad female protagonist looks down from a window in a high-rise apartment and observes the lines of traffic and the neon lights flashing in shop windows, and the tiny people hurrying here and there, noting the miniature bustling of the city with great interest because her own life seems to have paused and she doesn't know, for the moment, how to make it travel forwards again...' (Publication abstract)
'Any time you open a door, you never really know what you'll find on the other side. I stuck the key in the lock but could already see shapes moving behind the frosted glass. Swinging the door back, there was mum halfway down the hall, still wearing her dressing gown even though it was well after four. She shuffled down towards me, then past, my stepfather following behind.' (Publication abstract)
'From the breakwater an archipelago of shivered rocks clasps the sea like the bones of a hand. A child crouches at the tip of the index finger. It is winter...' (Publication abstract)
'The first thing to be said about The Schooldays of Jesus is that like its predecessor, The Childhood of Jesus (of which it is the continuation), this new book is remarkably odd. The second thing to say is that like its precursor it is a masterpiece: it comes across as Shakespeare's Henry IV Part Two does, despite naysayers, as the second part of the same masterpiece. And who could ever have imagined that J.M. Coetzee, the celebrated South African Nobel Prize winner who expatriated himself to Adelaide as if its sandstone and the symmetrical grid of its cityscape were the recapitulation of a kindred colonialism, should now be writing what are essentially - or at any rate incidentally - parables about the lost childhood of some chosen child called David, like a teasing joke of genealogy, who is somehow (the title seems to suggest) the Messiah, the Christ Child, whose ego is the sum of all the becauses in the world, and every high priest will rip up his garments in awe either at the blasphemy of it all or because this is the apparition of the shadow of the Most High.' (Introduction)
