Cirrus@Austlit

My daughter's daughter, you have come? She stretched to her toes and reached out to kiss my cheek, but she could only manage to reach my neck - I was too tall, no longer the child she once held in her arms. (Introduction)

'The day before my fourth birthday my mother made a magnificent cake. She had found the design in one of her magazines - the witch's cottage from Hansel and Gretel. I watched, entranced, as she carved the vanilla pound cake into section. A fat square for the base, and two triangles for wedged above it for the roof. The layers were glued together with thick butter icing; not ideal for engineering, as by the time my party came around one-half of the roof was listing badly in the Brisbane humidity. The entire production was on the verge of collapse, and a hasty fix with toothpicks would be needed to prevent it from toppling, minutes before our gusts arrived. Family and friends might be impaled by the lurking infrastructure, but the star feature of her party table had been saved.' (Introduction)

'There have been many moments in my life when I've had to take control of my own identity. I think in many ways, some more subconscious than not, I've always wanted it to be left up to me.'  (Introduction)

'After many years of travelling from town to town and living in tents, paddock shacks and rented houses, we were finally going to get a home of our own - one that was stable, one we could call home. Our house in Condo had burnt down many years ago, and since then we had been travelling fro one paddock to another, one place to another.'  (Introduction)

'Mum always finds it hard to talk about him. One day, around age five, I come home from school and ask her why I don't have a father. She isn't prepared to answer at the time, yet she's been expecting this question for a while. The next day at work, she calls a friend in tears, trying to find ways to broach the subject with me.' (Introduction)