Cirrus@Austlit

'I first met Gillian in 2004 on a sparkling November day. She was staying at a cabin at the Brown Hill Creek Caravan Park in the Adelaide foothills. I’d suggested the location because I knew she’d prefer it to a city hotel room. In the caravan park she would have birds, a creek, fresh air, and rates an artistic writer could afford. Gillian had come over to plan her move to South Australia to write her novel Foal’s Bread. There were several reasons behind the move: she wanted the peace and obscurity of the Adelaide hills and she found the cool winters and dry summers less aggravating to her multiple sclerosis than the steamy warmth of her native Grafton. There was also a guru she was attracted to here – someone who promised an alternative way to treat her disease, or even cure it. With Gillian, there was often a guru in the picture somewhere.'  (Introduction)

'There are many ideas of difficulty and struggle in relation to writing. One that is sometimes forgotten when a writer achieves a level of prominence is the struggle involved in finding a publisher and an audience. With Wayne Macauley some of these difficulties are clearly signalled, with post-it notes helpfully attached to signposts alerting fellow travellers to the challenges faced by writers who write in ways that might be considered atypical or difficult in the industry of Australian publishing in the early twenty-first century.'  (Introduction)

'When I am not writing my novel, In Real Life, I edit tender documents for firms in the construction industry. I am seconded to skyscrapers across the country, writing copy for road pavers, train station constructers, and level crossing removalists. I activate passive sentences and remove dangling infinitives and double spaces left at the ends of sentences. I wear monochrome shirts and a single pair of Versace suit pants that I found, miraculously, for $24 at the Southern Cross TK Maxx.'  (Introduction)

'Most people think of archives, especially big government archives, as either neutral sites of memory and history, or as mundane, boring storage facilities for administrative records, or they don’t think about them at all. But the poet Dr Natalie Harkin (Narungga) knows what many First Nations people know, that official archives are a powerful colonial weapon as well as a site of mourning. They are time capsules and they are also bullets. Created by state-sanctioned surveillance and violence, these archives have the power to sustain and reproduce that same violence. As Harkin says, there is ‘blood on the records’.' (Introduction)

'A Constant Hum (2019) by Alice Bishop and The Glad Shout (2019) by Alice Robinson are new Australian additions to the burgeoning genre of climate fiction – or cli-fi. They depict the impact of a natural disaster – fire and flood – precipitated by climate change. It is the human consequences of such events that are the core of each book. The stories are set in areas around Melbourne where the two authors have lived. Both are narrated in the present tense. Both titles refer to sound: a low reverberation and a rallying cry, which set the tone for each text. Neither book makes comfortable reading. The questions Bishop and Robinson ask are linked: could these disasters have been prevented? But more importantly, how do we keep going?'  (Introduction)

'The Somme, July 1916: like theatrical curtains, a blanket is pulled aside and an introverted soldier, Private Bourne, enters a dug-out. The eyes of all the men regard him: ‘Pitiless faces turned to see who it was as he entered, and after that flicker of interest relapsed into apathy and stupor again.’ Awaiting the order to enter battle, the infantrymen are weighed down with a sense of impending destiny, sitting ‘like men condemned to death’, and in ‘bitter resignation, with brooding enigmatic faces, hopeless, but undefeated’.' (Introduction)

'Just when you think we have finally killed off the idea that writers need to retire Coleridge-style to a lonely farmhouse on the moors to get anything done, another writer notes on their acknowledgements page how the work would ‘never have been written’ without the generosity of this or that writers retreat, giving them a break from the world to do their work. But this must be an exaggeration. As much as I love writing retreats, the reality of writing a book is that the work is not done in a two-week uninterrupted block in the mountains: it is done around other paid work and domestic life, daily or weekly, iteratively, over long stretches of time. Writers who publish also grapple with deadlines, editorial direction, and the affordances and limitations of their economic status in the industry. These things impact creative practice. Far from being separable from the social and the material, writing is always inflected by these twin forces.' (Introduction)