Cirrus@Austlit

'The street was lined by violet. The beautiful monotone corridor emerged at around the same time each year, lingered for a few days then disappeared. The jacaranda trees remained prominent, but robbed of the ephemeral purple blanket spread across the footpath, the street returned to its usual status as a pleasant rather than breathtaking vista.'  (Introduction)

'Literature is a reflection of the culture that spawns it. As a queer teenager growing up in Sydney’s outer western suburbs, my access to literature was limited to the books we had at home—airport novels—and the small collection at my high school library, mostly classics. So far as I knew, old white men wrote books; Ruth Park, Ursula Le Guin, Virginia Andrews and Danielle Steele were the exceptions.' (Introduction)

'On the Saturday my friend dived into his beloved surf for the last time I was closeted away on Canberra’s limestone plains, landlocked, writing. Over the Christmas break I’d fully disconnected, hoping to gather some thoughts about where journalism had landed, or failed to land, after ten years of constant change, and then massage them into publishable form. That weekend was the last big push to get the words right.'  (Introduction)

'We were waiting at the tram stop on Sydney Road when the traffic light turned red. An old bottle-green Corolla stopped in front of us, a bunch of white guys inside. ‘Informer’ was blasting from their stereo system. I stifled a groan. One of them leant out of the car window, staring straight ahead at us. He locked eyes with Elif, who was standing beside me.' (Introduction)

'Through the thin plaster wall I can hear her breathing in the adjacent bedroom. Most nights it’s a faint hum but occasionally her breath morphs into a gravelly snore that is slightly alleviated by earplugs. Living with my mother triggers intimacies I wasn’t expecting, but also deepens our relationship. Coffees before work and conversations in the courtyard pull us even closer. But there is a small feeling that I am doing something unacceptable. Returning home at 33 is often considered strange, like something went wrong. When the writer Maggie Nelson contemplated living with her mother she wrote, ‘I flashed momentarily upon the ghastly scene in the French film The Piano Teacher in which Isabelle Huppert sleeps nightly with her mother in the same bed’. ' (Introduction)

'If this were a story, it would start with an argument. It would start with Ben and me arguing about something vaguely prescient, something to give the thing that happened a kind of existential echo—a child we wanted to have, or couldn’t have, or used to have. That would work. But the truth is we never wanted children. The truth is that when it happened we were listening to the BBC World Service on the car radio. Two ex-pats and the staticky scraps of empire, the sky heavy with desert grit and dawdling bats.' (Introduction)

'About three months after Black Saturday dad and I drove up to the place where our house used to be. Anything left (and there wasn’t much) was still bushfire blackened or, if not, the dark colours of rained-on rust. The forgotten wrecks of a couple of our neighbours’ cars and burnt-out back-yard sheds lay untouched—dotted like abandoned cicada cases across the ridge. The only green was in the still-standing gums’ trunk bases, sprouting clusters of seemingly out-of-place leaves.'  (Introduction)

'April got out flour from the cupboard, cracked eggs into a bowl. She read the recipe, read it again, although she’d made the dish many times before. Each afternoon when she got home from work she made pasta from scratch, whole-baked fish, slow-cooked tagines with preserved lemon. April had known nothing about searing meat or the right way to chop an onion until well into adulthood. Her own mother hated cooking, and April and Pip had grown up on meat and three veg, Chinese takeaway on Friday nights. But now April found the incremental amassing of basic skills to be satisfying, like collecting tiny nuggets of gold.' (Introduction)

'When my daughter was a baby I knitted for her a pair of woollen bootees in red, green and yellow stripes. I liked them so much I kept them safely and sentimentally for 40 years. But in the end I was defeated by moths. The bootees are now just a tragic bundle of bright, broken stitches, a cluster of airy spaces held together by scrappy twists of coloured wool. They are perhaps also a kind of description of memory, a flawed tangle of broken threads, having the power to stimulate vivid images and deep emotions that have lain cradled in mystery for years and years, clouded by the wash of daily events, day after day after day.' (Introduction)

'My first question to him at six-thirty this morning was, ‘Have you taken your antibiotics?’

'His first question to me was, ‘When I take money out of the ATM in Japan do I choose yen or Australian dollars?’

'Today my firstborn, Dom, and I ran through another of the many crepe paper banners, of parenting for me, and being an adult for him.' (Introduction)

'Late in 2017, just weeks after successfully negotiating the return of Albert’s copyright to the Namatjira family, helping to set up the Namatjira Trust and bringing Big hART’s eight-year Namatjira Project to a conclusion, producer Sophia Marinos and I found ourselves in tears as we penned an obituary for our dear friend Kumantjai L Namatjira,* who had been so instrumental to the campaign.'  (Introduction)