Cirrus@Austlit

'Screens really are everywhere these days; Forbes reported last year that we spend up to 12 hours a day looking at them. When they were those chunky cathode-ray tubes, it was just one, maybe two, per household, and the idea of a portable telephone with a mini-TV on it was unthinkable. Then came personal computers, chunky to begin with as well, and that heralded the end for us all. Maybe Y2K was never about a glitch that would cause the entire digi-world order to collapse, but a failsafe we needed to activate—and, now, we’re two decades too late.' (Introduction)

'On morning before any of the rest of us are up, Mum hears a report on the radio that at 2 am tomorrow there will be a rare meteor shower. Over the course of the day, she mentions it aloud to no one in particular several times.  I hear my sister explaining that she really needs her sleep because she has an essay due. My dad is hard of hearing, and today that seems to align neatly with these mentions—although I’m ‘not hearing’ it either. Finally, around bedtime, Mum corners me and asks me directly whether, if she comes and wakes me up at two, I’ll come out and walk up the nearby hill to look at the meteor shower with her. I sigh heavily and mutter that I suppose I don’t know what life is for if it isn’t for looking at magical meteor showers.' (Introduction)

'The exhibition has been on at the National Gallery of Victoria for months, but here I am as usual, on the final weekend, waiting with my e-ticket in a long line. If I’d had to join that ticket-buying queue in the great hall, folding over and back on itself like a giant Viennetta ice-cream cake, I would’ve turned back for home.' (Introduction)

'Woman is a debate, a discussion about what makes woman a person. Woman can only ever be what men have made her. She cannot make herself, learn by herself, create herself. She is object not subject. She is categorised, labelled and cut away into smaller and smaller margins. This is woman. That is not. Woman is flat, one-dimensional and always too large. Woman is defined. Men just are, as they have always been.' (Introduction)

'In times of crisis I take comfort in the words of black women in whatever form, whether it’s poetry, fiction, memoir, academia, journalism or a Twitter feed. When a white police officer killed an African-American man on camera in May, and ignited the fury of the world, I found strength in the activism of Aboriginal women who continued to break through the stifling silences to shout black lives matter on our own shores too. The writing of black women is powerful because, as Distinguished Professor Aileen Moreton-Robinson writes, although we come from a diversity of backgrounds and circumstances, we also share common experiences:

All Indigenous women share the common experience of living in a society that deprecates us. We share the experience of having different cultural knowledges.

We share in the experience of the continual denial of our sovereignties. We share experiences of the politics of dispossession. We share our respective countries’ histories of colonisation. We share the experience of multiple oppressions. We share in the experiences of living in a hegemonic white patriarchal society.

(Introduction)

'On 3 April 2020, US Democrat and presidential hopeful Joe Biden—or more likely one of his team of social media minions—tweeted: ‘Now more than ever, we need to choose hope over fear. We will beat COVID-19. We will overcome this. Together.’ It’s hard not to appreciate the banality of this little squitter. Its kitschy burble so manfully yet sagely seeks to convey the urgency of the current situation; the starkness of our choices; the clear and present danger of a named enemy; the necessity and value of our solidarity. Behind Biden’s thumb-pumping bumpf lurks a lineage of inspirational North American wisdom literature, from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Maya Angelou. ‘Hope and fear cannot occupy the same space,’ Angelou announces. ‘Invite one to stay.’ Exhortatory, buoyant, on-topic, what could be more uplifting than such clear-eyed, courageous messages of triumph-in-togetherness in these terrifying times?' (Introduction)

'On 16 January 2005, John Silvester, Australia’s most respected crime reporter, published an article in the Age titled ‘Police braced for bikie crime rise following Mohammad Akbar Keshtier’s release’. Keshtiar (correct spelling) was due to face the parole board the following month, having served the non-parole period of a 12-year sentence for a double shooting.' (Introduction)

'I raised the scalpel to make the first cut into that crenulated piece of flesh and found I couldn’t do it. Here before me was the brain of a sheep, nothing more than a hunk of meat, but I couldn’t help think of sheepy thoughts locked inside those dead cells as though they were exhibits in a museum. Year nine science class, and the brain sat on the desk in front of us on a chopping board—similar to the white plastic one we had in our kitchen at home. It was pinky-grey, a dead sort of colour, mottled with ink-blue veins. The room smelled frightful, formaldehyde but underneath it something earthy, a meaty smell of the kind that wafts from the fridge at the butchers.' (Introduction)

'Viruses and colonialism are hand in glove, to posit an unsanitary metaphor. As Jared Diamond writes in Guns, Germs and Steel, his bestselling global history, European colonisation, particularly in the Americas and Australasia, cannot be understood without reference to the terrible, at times genocidal, ravages of disease on indigenous societies. Yet at the same time, and in a bitter irony, anxieties about disease and dirt were used to justify invasion, racial discrimination and paternalist colonial laws. While European germs wiped out indigenous communities, it was colonised subjects who were constructed as the harbingers of disease. The colonial project was imagined not just as a religious, moral and economic mission, but as an exercise in public health.' (Introduction)

'In the months before my first book—a collection of personal essays—was published, I dreamt a series of painstakingly literal nightmares. The return of the repressed? I wish. These were unmediated renderings of my base fears about a book I had written coming into the world.' (Introduction)

'Picture it: Celtic Britain, circa 60 CE, in what is now Norfolk in eastern England. The unstoppable Roman Empire is consolidating the conquests begun 17 years earlier by Emperor Claudius. Its capital Camulodunum and vibrant settlements of Londinium and Verulamium lie forebodingly to the south-west. King Prasutagus, ruler of the Iceni and client ally of Rome, is nearing death without a male heir. Aware that Rome will likely seize his small kingdom and with it the nominal freedom of his tribe, Prasutagus, in a fit of wishful thinking, bequeaths half his kingdom to Emperor Nero and the other half to his two daughters. Nero has other ideas. He orders Prasutagus’s widow, Queen Boudica, to hand over full control of the kingdom, stripping the Iceni of their ally status for good measure. Boudica refuses. No self-respecting empire would tolerate such an insubordinate move: she is punished with a public flogging and the gang rape of her two teen daughters.' (Introduction)

'Happy Valley, Patrick White’s brooding, dystopic portrayal of small-town life in the high country of New South Wales, builds to a crisis: a shocking spousal homicide. A bored woman, saddled with a dull, sickly mate, takes up with a virile overseer and she pays a fearful price for her infidelity when her husband explodes in rage. The future Nobel Prize–winning author drew on his experience working as a jackaroo in the region to evoke the setting and characters of his first novel. But the plot twist was true to life, then as now, when intimacy and violence, desire and despair, intertwine.' (Introduction)

'There is a famous legal principle, usually attributed to eighteenth-century English jurist William Blackstone, ‘It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.’ How does that sit with historical cases where a cleric is accused of child sexual abuse?' (Introduction)

'The first thing you see of Broome when you fly in is Roebuck Bay. If you’re coming from the south you’ll circle low right over it; from the north it’ll still make its presence known by virtue of the fact that it defines the peninsula on which Broome is built. The colours of the bay are a postcard cliché, until you see them in person and you realise that they’re real: low rust-red cliffs fall to a vivid turquoise sea. The only time I’ve seen water that colour before was in Queenstown, Tasmania, and it was caused by copper sulphate, the waste product of mining. But the colour of the sea around Broome is natural. The red soil—called pindan—is so fine and soft that to walk on it barefoot is like walking on carpet.' (Introduction)

'At first we laughed at ourselves. The way people looked disapprovingly at a bulging shopping bag. The moral agony about whether to take the last tin of kidney beans. The jokes about toilet paper.' (Introduction)

'I’m not too concerned at first, not really. I make jokes, like I do in any difficult situation: about how I’m an introvert anyway and can’t think of anything better than staying away from other people, how I’ve more than a decade’s experience in working from home, how this is my time to shine. I roll my eyes when my parents cancel their overseas holiday.' (Introduction)