'Words are weapons. Stories are dangerous, for they define who we are, they define our history; they can be weaponised. Stories and history are tools and weapons of war. Stories can be used as part of genocide, because if you say a people are extinct other people might believe it. Stories can be part of genocide because you can use stories to erase a culture.' (Introduction)
'My life was confusing, I felt tangled as the moonahs, nothing so organised and purposeful as a coherent essay would evince. And yet, the tangle of those trees right there, the copse of moonahs I was thinking of, and writing beside, was beautiful for all its tangle. Its weird and wonderful shapes and sinuosities.' (Introduction)
'You feel the spiral, the tension, the beast grabbing your guts and your upper arms, your shoulders and neck. You are coiled, taut, adrenal-ready for nothing.' (Introduction)
'Recently, during Victoria’s spirit-wearying sixth lockdown, I experienced resentment. As occurs when undergoing an emotional sensation, I was not immediately conscious of what I was feeling. I was aware first of the physical manifestations: a shortness of breath, an almost demonic rush of agitation, an acrid bile in my throat and on my tongue. I was reacting to an article in the newspaper, which I had read when I first logged on to the computer that morning, perusing the headlines on the web copy of the Age. Health professionals were explaining that they were sitting on stockpiles of the AstraZeneca vaccine. Those stocks were in danger of becoming out of date and useless because people were demanding the Pfizer vaccine.' (Introduction)
'We live to the sound of water, quiet water, moving, not much.
'The world was full and noisy and now it is so quiet. We have come here to hide and haven, away from streets of grey and black and steel, whirling colours, particulate vision: the Brownian motion of small various things, from the mosaic world of normal life and an invisible pathogen that dusts it, to this place where I can fill my eye line with only a few things.' (Introduction)
'The Uluru Statement from the Heart of May 2017 was addressed to the people of Australia from 250 delegates ‘coming from all points of the southern sky’. While clearly a political manifesto, it embodied significant assertions about both history and law, declaring that the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander tribes were the ‘first sovereign Nations of the Australian continent and its adjacent islands, and possessed it under our own laws and customs’. This sovereignty, the statement continued, ‘has never been ceded or extinguished, and co-exists with the sovereignty of the Crown’. How could it be otherwise, the delegates asked, ‘that peoples possessed a land for 60 millennia and this sacred link disappears from world history in merely the last two hundred years?’' (Introduction)
'As a child I spent occasional weekends with my grandfather. He was a career criminal and a dangerous man. His convictions ranged from serious assault to burglary and armed robbery. He once threw his partner from a moving bus, a woman he had married illegally after deserting my grandmother and her young children, including my father. He was shot on more than one occasion and came close to death. He was also involved in the deaths of other people, men from the same criminal world he inhabited. Surprisingly, he spent little time in prison.' (Introduction)
'In one essay, Richard Flanagan describes the phone call that alerted him to the death of wilderness photographer Peter Dombrovskis:
'I was driving to Salamanca through black clouds and heavy-dropped rain that sweeps and slaps rather than falls, while Hobart’s higher suburbs were being coated in snow. The radio news said a solo walker had failed to return from a walking trip to the Western Arthurs. I rang a friend who worked in police search and rescue.' (Introduction)
'The challenge was to pick a word. Any word.
'Many came to mind. Words that sparked narratives that quickly became pieces about the pandemic. I really didn’t want to write about COVID-19. As much as I resisted, all words led there eventually. Even the word soar. So be it.' (Introduction)
'Every 30 minutes, the Twitter account Random Restaurant (@_restaurant_bot) posts a randomly selected restaurant’s name, address and four images scraped from the location’s Google listing. Some of the more elegant photos, with balanced colours, clean lines and smooth-looking, if not necessarily appealing, food, seem to be taken by representatives of the restaurant in question, but the majority are taken by diners or passers-by who have decided to upload them. These photos rarely follow any aesthetic criteria, but that does not diminish their fascination. I could spend hours wandering a gallery in which these pictures were displayed, taking slow time with them, imagining the worlds they imply, and the intersecting lives they capture.' (Introduction)
'In the age of COVID-19, ‘working from home’ and ‘home schooling’ have become part of the Australian lexicon in a way that has never happened before. Working parents often have to juggle both of these activities during lockdowns, undertaking the paid work they would normally do outside the home (if they have jobs that make that possible) as well as supervising the lessons provided remotely by their children’s teachers. The domestic duties necessary to keep a home running need to be maintained and, as ever, research shows it is women who disproportionately bear the greater burden.' (Introduction)
'There are paintings one looks at, or perhaps into, and then there are paintings that one looks through—more like a window or portal. On my dining room wall there hangs such an artwork, a watercolour painted en plein air at Lake Pedder’s beach in the year before I was born. It takes me there, to the place in the dunes where Max Angus sat at his easel and mixed on his palette the dusky mauves and pinks of that legendary sand, and prepared the tiny quantity of smoky blue needed to depict the band of lake water on the horizon. It takes me also to that day in 1971 when Max Angus was painting in the hope that capturing the beauty before him might somehow contribute to its salvation.' (Introduction)
'It’s one of the paradoxes of cultural history that we are forever denying whatever is transforming the way we experience the world. Just at the moment (though it’s been a long moment) we’re worried about smartphones—the porn, the bullying, the hook-ups with God knows who to do God knows what, the trolls and the pervs and the endless nervy distraction.' (Introduction)
'It was at a March 2002 camp at the Sydney Academy of Sport and Health where I overheard Steve Jones, who was awarded dux that year, talking about my family.' (Introduction)
'The TV won’t stop jabbering; even while muted, captions blare. The phone won’t stop prophesying doom; the computer is its own cacophony; the Kindle idles; I move between devices like an old dog desperate for reassurance. Take all the power away and still I can’t turn off—not while an invisible killer is invisibly everywhere, which is a feeling I have had for as long as I can remember. It’s on everyone’s lips, this stupid language. I’m a poet and I shouldn’t be exhausted by what fuels me—speech, where it meets song—yet I long for silence or at least an unexpected sound. Anything other than another day of jabs. The metaphor here is a fist. Line up for your quick, sharp blow. Do not duck or weave. Resist a lifetime of conditioning. It was developed in a lab. Get it at the chemist, or your local GP, or pop-up jab hub. Your life, our lives, depend on it. Copping the hit. Coppers everywhere. On horses, in helicopters, heaped around our houses. You know the ones. Go get jabbed. We don’t have enough fists, we don’t have enough jobs. Everyone is essential. Except for the usual exceptions, of course. You know the ones.' (Introduction)
'The apartment had a strange and abiding habit of swallowing noise. It was on the ground floor of a brownstone on a quiet street in Manhattan, and though it was tiny, and lacked doors, we could not hear each other calling from different rooms. The wi-fi password was ‘city garden’ and I believe that’s really what the owner saw. Not the deep layer of dirt coating the floors that turned our socks black as we took our first steps around the rooms, increasingly confused. Not the dust heaped in every corner, fluffy as fleece. Or the silverfish undulating across bookshelves. Or the cracked toilet or the broken air-conditioner or the sink long leaking water into the warped wood around it. There was a compacted stratum of document files and dog toys and ripped books and heavy silver trays and dead cockroaches and photo albums and tangles of wires jammed tight under every piece of furniture. And a mottled grey stripe running along the wall from bedroom to bathroom, a story about the self and how it is steadied in the night.' (Introduction)
'I have been shot. I didn’t feel it, I only knew shortly afterwards.' (Introduction)
