Cirrus@Austlit

'I was marvelling at a tree the other day. What a splendid thing it is in and of itself, I mused. Quite pleasing to the eye and functional. It can make oxygen, provide shade, be lived in by birds and insects, bear fruit, be scampered tip by possums, hung off by bats and it holds the soil together so it doesn't blow away. It doesn't take much to run them either, a bit of water and some nutrients; otherwise, completely solar powered. Now, I can't make a tree but I can make sense of one. I understand how a tree works from books and Wikipedia but that does not, in any way, make me marvel at it less. In fact, it's even more impressive that it does what it does and is what it is, given how complicated the operation is.'  

'It's a Saturday morning and traffic has snarled the roundabout on Cherry Street. I know why even before I see the train pulling into Werribee Station. There's a Bulldogs game on so the car park is full. I park at the back, near the gym, cursing. I tattoo a recrimination on my thigh.'  (Introduction)

'Ever had the feeling you've been asleep or even dead—and woken to a world that's changed beyond belief? I have died a few times, but only for short spells. The official record is 47 seconds (I have the hospital printout showing the flat-line recorded in intensive care), so not enough to give that Rip Van Winkle Effect. Why is it, then, that I am so shocked nearly every day by a sudden lurch into what seems like Blade Runner Country? Why does being awake now seem like being stuck in a bad dream in 2050?'  (Introduction)

'Yesterday the list clerk asked me to take a case for an Indigenous man who wanted a sentence indication in relation to an appeal he had. He was late, didn't have a mobile phone and I was told he was over at the Magistrates Court getting a food voucher for lunch.' (Introduction)

Two years ago I wrote an essay for Meanjin titled 'A View from a Treehouse' (no. 3, 2016). It was the story of my brush with homelessness. Divorce, debt and redundancy had crashed me out of my comfortable existence and into a chilling moment where I lost my job and was within days of losing my home and my children as well. At the last minute serendipity gave me a sublet on a tiny flat with a jury-rigged enclosed wooden patio on the second floor, sitting just under a huge old tree. I called it my treehouse and it became my workplace and my refuge.' (Introduction)
 

'Escaping from suburbia is the story I've heard many people tell over the years, but it's never been a story that I relate to. For me, the suburbs represent refuge, even precious culture, as they do for many others. After all, the mass migrations of the twentieth century brought with them the multicultural transformations of countless Australian suburbs. So where I feel most at home is Sydney's south-western suburbs; at home as I could ever feel in Australia, anyway.'  (Introduction)

'In the heart of the sleepy Tasmanian town of New Norfolk, half an hour's drive out of Hobart, lies the Willow Court Precinct. As you wander down the tree-lined streets of the township, the crumbling buildings of Willow Court come slowly into view. On the banks of the Lachlan River, right next door to the new supermarket complex with its perfectly rendered frontage, shiny signs and sparkling clean windows, sit three of the saddest, loneliest-looking buildings you're ever likely to see. Not a single shard of glass can be found in any of the windows of the multistorey structures. The tallest of the three, Derwent House, sits at the front, facing the road, with an enormous gaping hole in its side, revealing a glimpse of the emptiness that lies within. Graffiti covers the internal and external walls. It looks like something from a horror movie, a scene from the apocalypse. These particular buildings are kneed off, but this is only a small part of an incredible complex that holds so much of Tasmania's history.' (Introduction)
 

'Biographies OF Dorothy Hewett (1923-2002) usually include a short section like this: In 1944 she married communist lawyer Lloyd Davies and had a son who died of leukemia at age three. The marriage ended in divorce in 1948, following Hewett's departure to Sydney to live with Les Flood, a boilermaker, with whom she had three sons over five years'. That was from Wikipedia. It's just a few sentences, a handful of facts notable for many reasons, working backwards: the quick succession of births, the shift from a middle-class; marriage into a working-class one, the death of a child. He was her first child, named Clancy after the Aboriginal activist Clancy McKenna. Clancy, the child, was born in Perth and died tragically in Melbourne in 1950. The thing that snippet from Wikipedia doesn't make clear—that few biographies explore further than the bare facts-is that when Hewett left Davies, she left Clancy too. His sickness and death came the following year.' (Introduction)
 

'For three years I edited the environment pages of the Conversation website. I published article after article about extinction, bee-colony collapse, the last tortoise of its kind, the last rhinoceros of its kind. I thought I knew how badly things were going for animals. I had no idea.' (Introduction)

'The Deputy leader of the Liberal Party, Julie Bishop, said in 2017 that Aboriginal children should not be taught their own culture and language because it would retard them. Her fellow ministers and advisers weighed in with the opinion that Aboriginal culture was flawed because we hadn't invented the wheel or done anything useful with the land. Some went so far as to say child abuse was one of our cultural traits.' (Introduction)

'In the late 1980s, around the age of 11, I hit puberty with the force of an 80-tonne road train. I became the third-tallest child in my primary school and grew exquisitely painful adult-sized breasts whose entire surface was livid purple scar tissue. When I started high school, at 11 going on 12, I looked old enough to be allowed to buy cigarettes at the milk bar down the street for the year-ten boys who were old enough (the smoking age was then 16) but didn't look it. Despite my school uniform, adult men began to follow me in their cars. Despite my school uniform, adult men began literally to leap out of bushes to accost and proposition me. I wish this were hyperbole. It was sometime in this era—the impossibility of knowing when is scalp-crawling all on its own—that my stepfather began to entertain the fantasy that he and I should have a sexual affair. ' (Introduction)