Homeward Flight single work   essay  
Issue Details: First known date: 2019... 2019 Homeward Flight
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Last year, I fell out of a bathtub. Naked on the floor of a hotel bathroom in a cold foreign city calling for help that did not come, I came a little too close to death. When help finally did arrive, ambulance-men carried me through snow-drifts and crowded streets, naked except for the hotel sheet they had wrapped me in, and a hat topped off with a large purple flower. I would like to say I’m making up the detail of the hat, but I’m not. I don’t like to go out without a hat, it makes me feel naked, so I had called for it as they were carrying me out of the room and someone, obligingly, had stuck it on my head with the flower at full-mast so that it looked like one of those oldfashioned flowerpot chimneys. But I was at least on route to hospital and alive—that is until I arrived at the hospital where a nurse, main-lining a drug to relieve the pain, flipped me back into the death I had just escaped.' (Introduction)

Notes

  • Epigraph:

    ‘Against a blackboard of winter trees, bodies take the shape of letters, a lonely, crazy alphabet a language only the homeless know.’ -Jeanne Bryner 

    ‘Inside, Outside, it doesn’t really matter’ -Don Juan Matus  

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Westerly vol. 64 no. 1 2019 16956937 2019 periodical issue 'There has been much conversation, in the last few months, around the question of what it means to be Australian. This is to be expected in an election cycle, and particularly in the context of contention over policies on various social and environmental issues. When connected to the larger container of ‘nation’, ideas of place become politically loaded. There is a responsibility, in this, for writers. With the power and privilege of voting comes the ethical demand that the publishing writer be conscious of what they are contributing to social discourse.' (Publication introduction) 2019 pg. 109-118
Last amended 22 Jul 2019 12:06:56
109-118 Homeward Flightsmall AustLit logo Westerly
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