Cirrus@Austlit

Has history another places, we’ll see OK.

— Lionel Fogarty, ‘1788 to the Gates of 2028s’

'My father’s love of snorkelling began at a place called Erewhon. Or perhaps it began with a book. It’s more than sixty years ago now, so details can be hard to pin down.' (Introduction)

'Recently a new English translation of Chateaubriand’s Memoirs From Beyond The Grave was published. In his translator’s introduction, Alex Andriesse comments that:

'While the French are satisfied by a well-told tale, we Anglophones can’t help but fact-check. Given a choice between beauty and truth, we prefer the truth, ideally unvarnished. Just consider the colourless titles the Mémoires have been given over the years by English publishers and translators … : in doing so they belie the very thing that distinguishes Chateaubriand’s scribbling from the hundreds of other memoirs composed by his contemporaries: its artfulness, its architecture, its phrasal flair and seduction of style.

'Unvarnished ‘truth’ in literature is of course only relative to the position of the speaker, often used as a bludgeoning tool which is limited to a locale, a sense of national recognition and belonging. In writing, one is continually contorting and distorting it. This has always been my motivation for writing: to write in a state of contradiction, paradox or revision in order to challenge the dominion of plain-speaking, which like fake news, appears to map truth in the bluntest terms. These so-called ‘facts’, employed together with biographical resumés, have always acted as an exercise to neatly box in complexity, multilingualism and non-identitarian literatures. Another term for it is ‘provincial empiricism’.' (Introduction)

'Ours is a very particular moment in cultural and media history. Traditional ‘gatekeepers’ of ideas and culture are being disintermediated as we transition away from hierarchical forms of cultural organization to a system that is in some ways more open, where old approaches are in crisis and under siege. And where new approaches are emerging alongside rearguard actions that hope to keep traditional structures in place.' (Introduction)

'Leaving the train at the sliver of Engadine station I find a changed topography. The chicken shop has turned into a café slash hair salon, and there’s a fifties America-themed burger joint. A sign on the Princes’ welcomes us to Dharawal country. The people milling through the streets are younger and more diverse, some of them have fashionable hair and are accompanied by children in paisley. There’s an Aldi and a Coles, a Japanese restaurant and a Thai. I’m told now there are markets on weekends – when I was growing up here it was a charred sausage on white bread from the soccer clubhouse. The light has the same slant though, it stains the exhaust miasma from the highway in the same way, it drifts into the same wiry scrub, and vanishes into the same barbed warren of banksia and scribbly gum. Someone’s put up a rail fence, and there’s fresh gravel crunching beneath my boots.'  (Introduction)

'During my childhood in Castle Hill, a western Sydney suburb of housing developments, colonial weatherboards and bush blocks, I walked each week from school to piano lessons. The route took me down Showground Road where Patrick White and his partner Manoly bought six acres and a bungalow—‘a bit of Strathfield in a paddock’—in 1948. They named their house Dogwoods, and lived there for eighteen years.' (Introduction)

'I am on a crowded bus heading into the wilds of China. It’s ten degrees Celsius. The driver is swerving all over the place, seemingly for his own entertainment. I feel more than a little travel-sick. As I stare out the window to steady my stomach, I catch a glimpse of a disturbing scene unfolding by the roadside – a cobra is in the process of swallowing a large toad. The toad’s hind legs hang limply from the snake’s jaws. It is finally too much for me. Overcome with nausea, I throw up all over the shrivelled woman on my right, who has been plucking a live chicken on her lap. She and the bird look at me with disgust.' (Introduction)