Cirrus@Austlit

'As a young writer in the early 1980s I had the good fortune to come to the attention and into the company of Patrick White. Now, I know not everyone whose path crossed Patrick’s in that period will describe their encounter as an instance of luck working in their favour, but that is how it was for me and still how I see it today. I learned much from him back then and, as far as I can tell, failed him only once.' (Introduction)

'Some people say ‘West’ like it is something wrong, like ice-cream that fell in a gutter. I think West is like my brother’s music, too much bass so you end up dancing like your body parts don’t fit together and laughing all at the same time. That’s what West is: shiny cars and loud things, people coming, people going – movement. Those who don’t know any better, they come into the neighbourhood and lock their windows and drive on through, never stopping before they get somewhere else.

'These are the first few lines of my second book The Incredible Here and Now. I can’t say that I like them very much. I don’t think they work. The rhythm is great, some of the images too, but really what blows the whole thing is that it’s too restrictive, too reductive an image of what western Sydney is to be that useful.' (Introduction)

'I used to think Parra was the centre of the universe. The centre and the periphery. On Tuesday afternoons, my best friend Sivashna and I often skipped Year 8 sport and walked to Pendle Hill station. We would buy a cup of hot chips with chicken salt to share and walk to Platform 1, where we took a train east to go to Westfield. It was only in 2002, when I started going to university, that I realised there was a second CBD beyond Parramatta. Until then, in my mind, Parra was the CBD.' (Introduction)

'There’s a point in Carrie Tiffany’s new novel, Exploded View, where the teenage narrator sits in a parked car with her mother and brother, parked in front of their ‘mission brown’ suburban house, all three people unmoving, waiting, tense. It’s a moment of stillness, but also, briefly, of possibility – ‘She could always change her mind,’ the narrator says, ‘Maybe there is someplace else for us to go?’'  (Introduction) 

'It was a pleasant surprise to hear of the publication of Robert Harris’ The Gang of One: Selected Poems, edited by Judith Beveridge. Harris (1951-93) is an Australian poet of the highest order. He is also a curmudgeon, a contrarian, a nature lover, a working-class Romantic, a navy recruit who detested nationalism, a lyrical memoirist, a historical dramatist and one of Australia’s finest religious poets.'  (Introduction)

'Towards the end of the novella Saudade, as the now teenage protagonist Maria-Cristina, the daughter of Goan immigrants in Angola, sits facing the Mozambican family servant Caetano on the eve of Angolan independence, she realizes that they are both ‘orphans of Empire’. The author, Suneeta Peres da Costa, has given us an evocative language for understanding the liminality of these two characters. They are both orphans or soon-to-be orphans, and also abandoned as Portuguese colonial rule crumbles in the 1970s.'  (Introduction)