Cirrus@Austlit

'WHEN I WAS small my mother gave me a copy of The Arabian Nights, hardback and beautiful, with a cover that swung open like a heavy door. It was the right thing to give a child who had started incessantly telling stories without much consideration for why you would. Back then I thought telling a story was just a way to pass the time, or a way to mash concepts just to see what would happen. I had written one about a forlorn starfish who just wanted an office job, one about a dragon whose fiery breath got funnelled into an oven by a town baker. Stuff happened that wouldn’t usually, the end.'(Introduction)

'WE SCAMPER INTO a warm room full of returned relics and donated artwork. Outside, the temperature hovers around 12 degrees – freezing for a Meanjin girl. The sky is low and grey, a fog shrouds the silhouetted gums. Sheets of rain come and go. Local Elder David King welcomes us into the space, welcomes us warmly to Gundungurra Country. We sit together and he shares stories of his mother and his aunties and uncles. His words are gentle. He tells truth about dispossession and homecomings. He talks about forming a strategy – after the government returned the gully to the rightful custodians in the early 2000s. Of sitting with family to formulate answers to bureaucratic questions. His description of the aunties’ refusal to corral these answers into settler language stirs me. Over a period of years, they formulated four key performance headings: community + belonging + cups of tea + cake.' (Introduction) 

'MOST EVENINGS, WE walk through the wetlands taking shape within a hundred-­year-­old golf course in Elwood in Melbourne’s south-­east. In 2018, community activists persuaded Bayside council that the poorly patronised Elsternwick Golf Club could be rewilded, restoring, in the words of the architectural plan, a ‘native parkland, wetland and urban forest…that echo the beauty of the land before the invasion of concrete and asphalt…and provide refuge and tranquillity for people and wildlife’. Some of that beauty can already be found in the partly completed Yalukit Willam Nature Reserve.' (Introduction)

'AN ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIAN who is a Nyikina woman, and a man and a woman from European backgrounds – all writers and cultural theorists – ponder the meaning and power of a River that has flowed for thousands of years, in northern Western Australia’s Kimberley. We ponder and share understandings about Australia as a colonised nation, the permeable boundaries between non-­fiction and fiction and the interconnected contemporaneous qualities of culture, people, history and the environment. Still thinking, worrying and talking about Martuwarra, regularly known and mapped as the Fitzroy River, Anne Wagaba Poelina tells how well she knows the River from Nyikina stories, experience, cultural life and knowledge handed down to her from family and past generations. Each of us conversationally and experientially understands that stories will always be transferred to those learning about Martuwarra from Wagaba and other Aboriginal people in the Kimberley’s Fitzroy Valley with deep-­time connections to the River. Each of us also knows from individual learning and collaborative research that the realism of the River’s creation and its life-­giving qualities are meant to be for all human and interrelated life.' (Introduction) 

'HOW PREDICTABLE THAT it has taken me such a long time to begin. How brutally predictable. Months after formulating a title, I reluctantly shared it with some fellow travellers by Wangi Falls, in the Northern Territory, when they wondered what name I had for my work. Even then, sitting in the tropical shade after swimming in those sacred falls, I knew I was in trouble. What a lovely title, they said. I agreed then as I agree now. It sounds lovely still when I say it aloud: The Beginning of the Poem. Everybody loves beginnings. And even if everybody doesn’t love poems, people generally seem to love the idea of them, an idea practically and theoretically intact at the poem’s beginning. What a grand and ambitious intention my title seems to express, what discursive evocations it seems to promise. And yet, on that day at Wangi Falls, I had known for months already that it was painful and often impossible to get started on this beginning. How could my work live up to its title? Although disappointing to me, it is perhaps fittingly bathetic that I should struggle to summon the will, and the skill, required to begin a work that is all about beginning.' (Introduction)

'GROWING UP, I never imagined I would become a lawyer with my own law practice.

'I didn’t know any lawyers. I didn’t understand what a lawyer did. But I watched television shows like LA Law, where lawyers argued their cases in front of a judge. They always won, and they wore nice clothes, drove fancy fast cars and fell in love with other lawyers.' (Introduction)

'THIS IS A story of water. Full of courage and determination and with many voices. 

'Seventy-­five years ago, as a newborn, my mother, with half the clans of Saibai Island, migrated across the waters on pearl luggers to the mainland of Australia. I am your connection to this story as I am Amana Kazi: mother’s daughter, the continuing blood, changeless and eternal.' (Introduction) 

'‘I THINK MARRIAGE is between a man and a woman and that the Church shouldn’t be obliged to change that definition. It’s a sacred institution established by God and what God has made man cannot unmake or alter.’' (Introduction) 

'I AM A poet and an essayist, a teacher of writing and a father of five children, who visit like rare birds these days, and I live with my partner and two spaniels and a cat along the Wingecarribee River (one of its many much debated spellings) on Gundungurra land, country never ceded, 125 kilometres south-west of what is now mostly called Sydney, which sits on the stolen ground of the Gadigal. I am, as far as I know, a non-­Indigenous Australian man, a fifth-­generation descendant of Cornish and German immigrants. They settled land that was not theirs to settle, though that’s not what they were told; I live on land to which nothing but love gives me any kind of title, and I own none of it. Who can afford to own it anyway these days, even if one felt one had the right?' (Introduction)