Cirrus@Austlit

'At Macquarie University’s Indigenous Futurisms conference, Gomeroi writer Alison Whittaker speaks about publishing her first book of poetry. She tells us about being in unstable housing, and desperately needing money at the time she made the book deal. She says she was completely unprepared for the experience of writing about traumatic and personal events in her life, and then being asked about those experiences again and again for a year at panels and writer’s festivals.' (Introduction)

'My skin is white, or rather it is a soft, warm pink, which is the colour of the skin of the most dangerous and successful pillagers in recent times. I descend from them. I am them. Nothing is random. I am capable of killing another person but I would prefer not to. I would prefer not to survive an apocalypse.'  (Introduction)

'The car helped enable the suburb to become a widespread landscape format, thereby blurring the previously discrete conceptions of the town and the country. Portable computing technology is having comparable, if yet-to-crystallise effects on the places people live, play and work. Particularly those of us engaged in the so called knowledge economy. We already have the neologism ‘coffice’, a designation that names the practice of people adapting cafes for the purpose of work. But this is just one example of a place—or really two places—being remade through the affordances of mobile computing. The home/office binary is a relatively crude rendering in comparison.' (Introduction)

'Henry Savery wrote the first novel published in Australia and he ended his story by slitting his throat ‘from ear to ear’ in a Port Arthur prison, convicted of returning to forgery to make ends meet. Another famous Henry once advised all budding Australian authors to flee for London or ‘study elementary anatomy, especially as applies to the cranium, and then shoot themselves carefully with the aid of a looking-glass’. When I worked at the University teaching creative writing, my friend and fellow scribbler Martin Edmond, who had the excuse that he was born in New Zealand, used to come in and lecture the wide-eyed innocent undergrads that ‘writers are the true proletariat’, which I took to be a romantic way of trying to scare the smart ones straight, but those sweet babes hardly ever got the message.' (Introduction)

'I’m letting our succulents die. I was the only one keeping them alive. So I’ve forced myself to stop. I read in a book that a vital stage of healing for those who have sustained trauma is letting go of the caretaker roles they find oppressive. I have deleted from my calendar the reminder notification that says ‘water plant’. When I see the pots I force myself to look away, and resist the compulsion to run to their aid.' (Introduction)

'As a writer, I’m always thinking two or three sentences ahead, two or three pages ahead, two or three chapters ahead, and back again, the process of writing much like thought itself, jumping from one place to another, like a chattering monkey leaping from branch to branch: moments and memories and ideas sparking and flashing and rustling like an erratic breeze through the leaves.' (Introduction)

'The bag of drugs is sitting untouched on the kitchen bench beside the cans of diced tomatoes and chickpeas I’d earlier quarantined. They – cans not drugs – may be useful, I think, although in less apocalyptic times, I might prefer to soak dried chickpeas to make hummus or chana masala. The chickpea glut follows a 9pm masked assault of Harris Farm Leichhardt and the fact the ex has recently turned up unannounced with a care package of more canned pulses, organic brown rice and greens than I have room to store. An Amma devotee never known to hug spontaneously, he’d stood at the mandated distance of one Kylie Minogue on the other side of my gate (less gateless gate than gate that never shuts properly, the broken latch, I observed as he handed me the box, one of the ten thousand things now unlikely to be repaired…).' (Introduction)