Cirrus@Austlit

'Dear Australia, My friend is scared. He's one of the most decent and intelligent people I have ever met and his courage and persistence under extreme duress can never been found wanting. He's not a coward by any means, but right now he's scared.'(Publication abstract)

'I live near an ambulance depot. Without exception, I wake in the peach pre-dawn to an orchestra of rising sirens. I imagine all the individual worlds that have ended in the night, every person who has opened their eyes to find a newly minted corpse alongside them. Every day I wake thinking about a thousand deaths and still I reach across to my adults-only drawer and wish myself a good morning.' (Publication abstract)

'We were just starting on our prawn crackers. There was John, a student friend, Ian, now my husband and then boyfriend, and me.' (Publication abstract)

'My dearest beloved Samantha I hope this letter finds you safe and well at home, in the name of our Queen and most holy Empress.' (Publication abstract)

'How do we relate to the body? Recover a sense of dignity and ownership of our body? Acknowledgement: Tony Birch's question from the Red Room Emerging Writers' Festival workshop recently made my insides cringe. A week later, this idea emerged.'(Publication abstract)

'We do not know how many Aboriginal women have gone 'missing' in this country. The archives are filled with the 'missing': the Aboriginal women who are no longer here to speak; the Aboriginal women who do not have names; the Aboriginal women who do not have graves or places where their families can remember them. There is a comfort that comes with the word 'missing', because to be 'missing' implies that perhaps they have left on their own accord; that there are no perpetrators or violence enacted against them. As Canadian First Nations lawyer and activist Pam Palmater says, the term 'missing' is a misnomer: 'It seems to imply that these women or girls are just lost or ran away for a few days.' 'Missing' also comes with the assumption that the case is still active. When the police speak of 'missing persons', there is an implication that the police are still searching for them, and that they will never tire in their search until those who are 'missing' are found or come back. Because they are still 'missing', the police do not see themselves as responsible for failing to find them; but instead, see the women themselves as 'responsible' for going missing in the first place. There is a term specific to this place, in that women are accused of going 'walkabout', which serves to naturalise their disappearances as innate to Aboriginal culture, and not a distinctly settler-colonial phenomenon.' (Publication abstract)

'It was around 4 pm on Tuesday 12 July 2022. I'd been standing by the window for a while now, looking at the dusk slowly stretch itself on the city ahead, gathering courage to look down.' (Publication abstract)

'I first met Reverend Frank Woodwell, rector of the Anglican Parish of Bega (1966-74), when I was writing my history of south-east New South Wales, 'Looking for Blackfellas' Point: An Australian History of Place', which was published in 2002.' (Publication abstract)

'This year I turned 60. It's a milestone birthday I dreaded. I've seen six decades of Australian and world history, from the sunset years of the Menzies era and the clean-cut popsters of Bandstand to what is shaping to be a long period of progressive political and social dominance under new Labor prime minister Anthony Albanese-a world where the likes of Kim Kardashian are the great philosophers of our time, and being an 'influencer' on social media is the life's ambition of Generation Z, just as being a steam-train driver was the career aspiration of my childhood. It has been six decades of torrential social, economic and political change that has been so rapid, so monumental, so comprehensive that the Sydney suburban culture of my 1960s childhood is so remote from Australia today that, to my four-year-old daughter Elizabeth, it will seem as remote and alien as life in ancient Greece, or on Mars.' (Publication abstract)

'A Buddhist monk and Zen poet named Huineng wrote a gatha, or poem, more than a thousand years ago. The poem, 'There Was no Tree to the Bodhi', was essentially about how the purity of enlightenment would not be corrupted by the dust particles of life. The four-line poem ends by asking, 'Where then was the dust?'' (Publication abstract)

'Thirty years ago, my folks migrated to a city half-dipped in ocean. To this day, they are sepia-faced and prayer-shaped, coal soot and cedar hills still rolling underneath their fingernails.' (Publication abstract)