'For the last four years Nandi Chinna has walked the wetlands of the Swan Coastal Plain—and the paths and streets where the wetlands once were—uncovering the lost places that exist beneath the townscape of Perth. She writes with poignancy and beauty of our inability to return, and the ways in which we can use the dual practice of writing and walking to reclaim what we have lost. Her poems speak with urgency about wetlands that are under threat from development today.' (Publication summary)
Epigraph:
It is through the lake system. There is a water serpent down there below which is extremely important and the water on the surface is really the marks where the waugle wither wound his way through and came up after making the streams and waterways. It's all part of the ecological system to purify the land and the family. Once it was surrounded by waterways and if they fill them up with rubbish then the land begins to die. –Cedric Jacobs
A lake is the landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature. –Henry David Thoreau
