Cirrus@Austlit

'It’s always summer in childhood. I remember when we went to see the Peanuts movie Race for Your Life, Charlie Brown for your birthday. Your dad dropped us off outside the cinema and we accidentally went into the wrong cinema and saw The Deep instead. It was 1977. We were nine years old. Lost treasure, Jacqueline Bisset in a wet T-shirt, harpoon guns.' (Introduction)

'In his rich and heartfelt Meanjin essay ‘In Praise of the Long Sentence’ (no. 1, 2016, pages 56–65), the novelist Gerald Murnane disclaims having received any thorough grounding in English grammar during his ‘patchy’ education across a number of schools. Nonetheless much of his essay is strong on, even you might say soaked in, grammatical analysis, particularly with regard to the structure of paragraph-long sentences. Unfortunately, despite Murnane’s confident presentation and his rightly esteemed fine literary record, his own sentence analysis occasionally invites challenge.' (Introduction)

'It was hot and the roads were dusty and at times very dark. We drove for 19 hours along some of Australia’s most isolated roads, our convoy of five cars and one bus carried my in-laws and my in-laws’ extended family, across eight different Aboriginal nations for a law ceremony. We drove for hours without catching sight of another car, and by the time we reached our destination, most of us were in a state of near delirium.' (Introduction)

'The morning heatwave, having grown rampant on the city skyline, overspills into the streets of Phnom Penh. Our tuk-tuk driver drags a veil of dust through the heavy amber spears of sunlight. He wears a wholesome white cotton shirt and brown fisherman’s trousers. The urban musk of petrol, fruit and rubbish billows the fine fabric into a Michelin Man burlesque. He pilots with patient aggression around meteoric potholes and slaloming squads of mopeds. Rusting Ford trucks flaking green and white paint heave across tight corners, chickens screeching and pallets shifting in the back.' (Introduction)

'Charlotte Brontë was 12 and Charles Dickens 18 in October 1830 when Captain Patrick Logan, third commandant of the Moreton Bay penal settlement, was murdered by a person or persons unknown, his decomposing body discovered in hilly country behind Brisbane Town more than a week after his disappearance. All the signs were of ambush and desperate flight, and Logan’s body showed the marks of Aboriginal weapons.' (Introduction)

'Their throats are torn and bellies ripped open.

'Tubes and organs, red and purple. Fat green blowflies crawl and swarm in their low army hum.

'The other sheep are on the far side of the paddock. They’ve all turned away, facing the road...'  (Introduction)

'The ocean’s benevolence raised me; not fishes hauled and eaten in abundance, but its great iconoclast, the whale. This custody was devised by two parents finally decisive about their irrevocable differences, that the Southern Ocean and the Victorian plains do not cohabit. My mother would never declare ‘I am a whale’ as I declared ‘I am a seal’. Her name’s meaning, ‘dark stranger’, is an internalised marker. A name in vogue in the late 1950s, but maybe even at one day old, they perceived her as foreign. If we tend towards the souls of things, then the bookshelf of hardback children’s books, all solemnly illustrated, belies her name. Inevitably they spoke of songs from the great enigma and great comforter, a cappella from the depths of constant night. Before I could read these for myself, my mother thought she’d given birth to an angel. My wings had been misplaced, so on photos and a Chagall collage she drew them in pastel.' (Introduction)

'I took a first look at the secrets of my body during a family camping trip to the Delatite, where we had pitched our tents at the edge of the river down by the willows. Against a pristine landscape, cows grazed on the other bank, the hard grass prickled underfoot and a mangy one-horned goat roamed wild. The goat gave off a pungent stink whenever it passed nearby. Otherwise, we were alone.' (Introduction)