'Anpernirrentye-akerte. Anpernirrentye-arle ampere kantreyenge-arleapetyeme, ampere akngamentyenge-ntyele. Arelhe tyerrye mapekwenengenenge, urrperle mape anwerne anpernirrentye-akerte akwete-arle amangkintyeke, ane intintyeke.
Kinship comes out of the Country itself, it comes from the Ancestorbeings. Aboriginal people have grown up deep inside this from creation,and they live within it always and forever.' (Introduction)
'Rain fell on my spirit and buried it somewhere in the dirt. It's eight days post-referendum. This morning, my mother and grandmother want to walk. This is my mother's doing, I know it. Since 'the night', my mother, being the healer that she is, has been busying herself bringing everyone together. My nana, well, I haven't seen much of her lately. Thinking about it now… haven't left this house since…' (Introduction)
'There is no singular beginning to this piece. To start by telling the story of events that occurred on a single date is to begin with a sense of a specific beginning. Yet history does not have a definitive starting point, and as I am writing about Gaza, about Palestine, about Israel, about war and settler-colonialism and intergenerational trauma, we could place our finger anywhere on the topographical map of our collective pain and say: 'start here', and even then, we would not have the whole story.' (Publication abstract)
'If I must die, you must live to tell my story. As I write, it's hard not to think of Palestinian poet Dr Refaat Alareer and this line of his. I have been thinking a lot of him, of the Heba Abu Nadas and Roshdi Sarrajs, the creatives, the journalists, the truth-tellers; of the archives that were bombed, the universities and the libraries that were bombed, the museums and the cultural centres and the hammam-all bombed to concrete confetti. These aren't just crimes against humanity, they are crimes against history, as Ibram X Kendi writes.' (Publication abstract)
'When Brittany Higgins came forward with her allegations, the nation split into two camps. Those who listened, and those who screamed as loud as they could over her.' (Publication abstract)
'This essay began with another one. One I didn't write about a decade ago. I was asked to write an opinion piece about Universal Basic Income (UBI) for artists. I'd been open about the role long-term unemployment had played in shaping my early life. Unemployment benefits kept me going for most of my teens and early twenties. The incredibly meagre capital of a dollar 500 'dole loan' had seed-funded the early creative projects that led me to where I am today. At the time I started down the UBI rabbit hole, but in the end I delayed and ultimately declined to write that piece-because the more I thought about it, the more I needed to.' (Publication abstract)
'What is the relationship between writing—so often a lonely pursuit—and the nation, that slippery idea that is supposed to contain us all? And isn’t there something missing here, something between writing and the nation?' (Introduction)
'Back in the day-my day, my schoolgirl days, the 1980s-there was no such thing as Schoolies. No debauched gatherings of stupefied adolescents delirious on drugs and newly bestowed freedom, making hay for a week or two, preferably on a northern beach. In my day, there was only one day to let your stress-frazzled hair down. Muck-Up Day.' (Publication abstract)
