Cirrus@Austlit

'When a novel invites me, as does the title section opening of Scott McCulloch's debut novel Basin — "Figure in Terminal Landscape" — to approach it as I might a piece of visual art or dance or theatre, or even as a piece of music, my whole heart gladdens Yes, and yes! Because this is what happens for me anyway when 1 read a novel, as I have always thought, since it will always be the thingness of the work and how that thingness affects (or not) my being in the world that tells me whether I am likely to keep that novel by me always or not. And so the felt experience of it first, and only later the thoughts. and between one and the other, often a long, slow crawling out into the air — or so I have had to remind my-self. because how else to account for all the difficulty, all the impossibility of working, of writing or even of thinking about this otherwise brilliantly realised novel Basin — all of the long non-writing then (or rather useless writing) that followed my experience of first reading it some time last year? Flow much easier it would have been, as I can only say now, just to have felt what it was like to read this novel — okay, to have felt it with all its force — but then to have wriggled on quick, either into the thoughts and words that most resembled others I have thought or written before — or else into the bliss of some sort of conferred permission to not have to think, to nor have to put into words this damnedest thing that — to stay as close to the truth of it all as I can — led to thoughts not so much about the novel itself but rather to ones that were saying over and over maybe this is it, maybe I will die where this experience of reading Basin finishes in me, wordless, stuck forever as it is inside.' (Introduction) 
 

'Occasionally one encounters a story or situation that seems to reach out of the mass of historical fact and lend an individual shape to its anonymous suffering. In October 1917 one such remarkable incident took place on the battlefield of Passchendaele in western Belgium; it began a search for the relatives of the dead which has continued for more than a century.'

'I'm a storyteller — nothing more. Rather than break stories, I've been broken by them. I've never won a Walkley, or even been nominated for one. But then, I decided to spend nearly three decades of my life in a highly competitive industry driven by ego and the cult of personality, fortified by whiteness and normativity. A place where I have never really belonged, patrolled by those with an inborn unquestioned objectivity — the heritable right of whiteness. The Iie of that objectivity, that anyone can pretend they are without biases or that they can be excised from their work, has been exposed. In the global reckoning with power spurred by the Black Lives Matter movement, the crisis of objectivity in journalism (at least in the English-speaking world) has been experienced as something of a delayed reaction. Perhaps that's because the profession is so blindingly white. In 2023, we have reached critical mass globally in terms of black and non-white journalists, who are largely responsible for the yielding we see in many newsrooms and media organisations. Now, my embedded blackfella subjectivity and my closeness to the subject of my journalistic enquiry — other blackfellas — is considered to be an asset rather than a liability.' 

(Introduction)

 
 

'In his "Terra Australis" (1949), Douglas Stewart problematises the notion of an "Australia" when imagining a conversation between Spanish explorer Pedro Fernandes de Queiros (1563-1614) and William Lane (1861-1917), a utopian who founded the Australian Labour Movement before relocating to set up a "New Australia" (in Paraguay). When writing that " [t]he wind from Heaven blew both ways at once / And west went Captain Quiros [sic], east went Lane" (section 4, lines 23-4), Stewart asks us to consider by which means might we come to define a "country"? His poem asserts the awkward possibility that there is no Terra firma to the Terra nullius and, if looking to locate a place, Australia remains unlocatable. Country as epistemological state? Country as existential crisis.' 

(Introduction)