'It has become a bigger cliché than the phrase itself: that in adopting the title The Lucky Country for his 1964 bestseller, which turns 60 this year, Donald Horne did not intend to deliver a compliment. ‘Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second-rate people who share its luck,’ Horne wrote in the rather grand opening to the final chapter, which carried the same title as the book. ‘It lives on other people’s ideas, and, although its ordinary people are adaptable, most of its leaders (in all fields) so lack curiosity about the events that surround them that they are often taken by surprise.' (Introduction)
'I’ve been thinking a lot about ghosts and the different ways we are haunted. A phenomenon often represented in literature as otherworldly, mythical—‘not real’. But in ‘reality’ spirits appear as sensations or experiences that are quite ordinary, generally ignored or misinterpreted when they don’t resemble the ghoulish horrors captured in TV, film, books and religion. I began reading Hoa Pham’s The Other Shore when I started an archiving job at the State Library of Western Australia. While ostensibly a role that requires collecting and analysing photographic materials, cataloguing, provenance, data integrity and preserving history, it’s fundamentally about dead people and what we do with their ghosts. Nations like so-called Australia or Việt Nam—where Pham’s novel takes place—are full of ghosts, yet the governments of both have a sly way of engaging with them.'(Introduction)
'I was surprised when they asked me to write this. It’s been over a year since I got out of the satire game and I’ve got to tell you I am very glad that sorry chapter of my life has been writ, read, torn from its binding, balled up and hurled into the sea. It can bob about in my wake all it wants as I disappear gaily over the horizon. I’m outta there. Sayonara, hepcats!' (Introduction)
'We, as a nation, voted No to the Voice referendum—as we have for most referendums in the colonial history of this colony: because our ‘sacred’ constitution should not be changed, so they say; because of a belief the Constitution, the ‘birth certificate’ of the nation, is inviolable and unchangeable. It makes me wonder.' (Introduction)
