Cirrus@Austlit

'One of the essential jobs that we had to do on the farm was to kill a sheep so that our family could have some meat to eat. We ate most parts of the sheep; lamb chops, ribs, Mum boiled the sheep’s bones for sheep’s broth and the sheep’s liver. The liver was a prized delicacy carried into the kitchen, still warm and slippery from the freshly slaughtered sheep. Killing the sheep was a job that involved a certain amount of drama; rousing up my brothers and sisters to help catch the sheep or killers as we called them, the heightened moments of trying to grab one and then the slaughter itself. Once our cattle dogs sensed that a sheep was going to be caught they danced around in circles, wagging their tails, looking to Dad for directions before he shooed them towards the sheep paddock a short distance from our house.' (Introduction)

'The sky is dark out of the town: no sign of the moon, stars obscured under the clouds. She soon loses track of the direction the car’s moving in as they leave the streetlights behind and the boy who’s driving starts screeching around corners, the car drifting, headlights shining over the trees instead of the road. The bitumen ends and the car churns up dirt. All turns to black and the girl beside her screams.' (From introduction)

'Freud’s couch

'A horizontal body is sure to daydream, to fragment one’s sense of self and, more dangerously, prone to cultivate erotic thoughts. Lying down = letting your thoughts get away with you.

'Freud thought this to be perfect. His couch was a simple thing; wrapped in an oriental rug, upholstered with springs and horsehair stuffing. Fragments, nonsense, unruly words were spoken from that couch, words that did not, of their own accord, create a narrative.' (Introduction)

'I sat at zero for the longest time, expecting that once I’d started pushing out, once the arterials had been drawn and there was a kind of system of triumphant logic, the rest would fall into place. Most of an entire forest had been cleared and the more severe topographic features had been smoothed out and now here was the city, waiting to be real. I tried to start simply, on cheap cartridge paper so as to say to myself: this doesn’t have to be it. This is a foray, the mind leading itself out in careful arcs to see what’s there to be pulled down from the ideal.' (Introduction)

'There’s a gumtree, an extremely large one, right outside my window. It is so large it gets stuck to all the other trees—it pushes them away, extends itself. Possums live there, or so Helen said. This was just yesterday when she was checking it out. I’d asked her over to put it to her straight—how things stand—but soon we’d got stuck in and things had moved themselves in the other direction.' 

 (Introduction)