'My mother was a piano prodigy. She started playing as a child in Vietnam, and by the time she was a teenager, she was giving concerts. That’s how she met my father – he was in the audience watching her perform, and by the end of it, he had to know this girl. It was the early 1970s, not long before he went to war.' (Introduction)
'Ordinary matter is what we are made of – everything we can see or detect with telescopes or microscopes or our own eyes. Such a wide descriptive ambit makes it an apposite title for this second collection of fiction by Brisbane-based Laura Elvery, which ranges far and wide, across decades and geographical spaces, and occupies the nexus between arts and science, writing and innovation.' (Introduction)
'At my desk in the Mitchell Library Reading Room I picked out a small cardboard folder from the pile of books and boxes beside me. Opening it I carefully removed a thin envelope, an item I had been curious to inspect after finding it listed in the library catalogue. ‘The ‘invisible hair net’: fully sterilized / made expressly for David Jones Sydney’, was, according to the catalogue summary, a ‘Specimen of a hair net packaged in an envelope. The packaging includes a black and white illustration of a woman with styled hair, presumably the result of wearing the invisible hair net.’' (Introduction)
'Australia has a long history of epidemics. In 1983, Noel Butlin went so far as to argue that colonial Australia was constituted on the consequences of epidemic. Butlin was referring to smallpox, which had catastrophic consequences when encountered on the east coast by Indigenous Australians with limited or no herd immunity. This was ‘our original aggression’. Australia’s history prior to the twentieth century is punctuated by the introduction of diseases which took a heavy toll, especially on vulnerable segments of the population. Until the years after World War Two, infectious diseases were commonplace in a way that has generally been forgotten in the sanitised and healthy twenty-first century.' (Introduction)
'For two years, I kept track of how many days it had been since we’d last had sex. If it had been more than seven days, I told myself I had to put out. If it had been one or two, my body was my own. The first time I realised this was not normal was when I posted about it on Facebook.' (Introduction)
