Cirrus@Austlit

'The route to Papunya from Alice Springs, via Glen Helen Gorge and the Western Macdonnell Ranges,, takes you through colour-saturated country fractured with geological upheavalsk sculpted by wind and water, scored and scoured by time. A crenellated horizontal strip of dark red dolomite, in places barely a metre thick, stalks along the foothills of the ranges like a horde of migrating stegosaurs. In the distance is the dark blue bulk of Mount Sonder: the Sleeping Woman likes prone and splayed, a vast fertility goddess with breasts and flanks cleft with indigo shadows.' (Introduction)

'Let’s rewind to 1992. Hey Dad..! and Burke’s Backyard still passed for wholesome Australian family TV. Bruce Samazan and Georgie Parker were big, as were Fast Forward, Brides of Christ, E Street, G.P. and Agro. Effie had big hair, Larry Emdur still had hair and Ray Martin’s was the same. Drawcard guests at the Logies that year included John Stamos from Full House, English actor Dennis Waterman and former prime minister Bob Hawke, who was pretty chipper given Paul Keating had rolled him only months before. The biggest scandal that year? Gold Logie winner Jana Wendt not claiming her gong in person.' (Introduction)

'You know you've read a great book when it changes how you move through the world. That's how I felt after reading Big Little Lies, Australian author Liane Moriarty's sixth and best-known novel (thanks in part to its adaptation as an award-winning HBO TV series starring Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman). Moriarty's creative genius in this book, as in all her work, is to scrutinise a group of ordinary people forced to co-exist in an emotionally and morally charged situation. ' (Introduction)
 

'2019 will see another Australian bicentenary, the 200th anniversary of the first book of poetry published in this country. You could be forgiven for knowing neither the book nor its author; you could probably also be forgiven for not finding the event all that worthy of memorialisation, let alone celebration. Aside from a few specialists in colonial literature and a handful of historically inclined local poets, who in contemporary Australia could possibly be interested in the (exceedingly) minor poetaster Barron Field — yes, his real name — and his First Fruits of Australian Poetry? Would Field's work be of more interest if it were crucial evidence in the establishment of terra nullius in this country?' (Publication summary)