Issue Details: First known date: 2019... 2019 Reading in the Dark : Australia and the 'Forever War'
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'I was with friends, high up on a range looking west and down through a long and beautiful valley just south of Alice Springs, mountains in the far distance gauzy in the late light. A few cars came and went, windows lit up in scattered houses. It was warm but we made a small fire for company. We'd brought food and wine, music and reading. The best of times, yet as the sun sank, I felt a deep melancholy. It can come at that hour, quietly, but that evening, in that place, it rushed in like a wave. I wondered why, and as I did my mind's eye lifted like a bird over the range, across a narrow valley and into the next, to the military base known as Pine Gap. You can see its white domes against the red earth, like a cluster of giant golf balls or spider eggs, when you fly into Alice Springs. From elsewhere, it is out of sight - and out of mind for most of us most of the time, here in Alice as in the rest of the country. But it has moved to the forefront for me, ever since I followed the 2017 Supreme Court trials of six peace activists who dared to trespass into this prohibited domain.' (Publication abstract)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Griffith Review The New Disruptors no. 64 30 April 2019 16455005 2019 periodical issue

    'There is something seductive about aircraft vapour trails, those long streaks – ice, carbon dioxide, soot and metal – that slice the sky. I’ve often wondered what the first person who noticed one thought it was, or what they’d look like to someone who didn’t know airplanes existed. Perhaps magical: linear clouds being drawn straight onto the blue; a symmetrical interruption to the random shapes of clouds. Or perhaps they’d be so unheimlich as to be cause for alarm.' (Ashley Hay: Introduction : Seeing through the digital haze : New perspectives for a new age)

    2019
    pg. 143-150
Last amended 8 May 2019 16:24:33
143-150 Reading in the Dark : Australia and the 'Forever War'small AustLit logo Griffith Review
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