Cirrus@Austlit

'My initiation into psychiatry began decades ago with a map taped to the inside of my best friend Franklin's bedroom door. At the time he was renting an East Caulfield bed-sit he liked to call his 'bachelor pad'. The 'bachelor' part was correct, but 'pad' was a bit of a stretch - the place had all the roominess of a large family sedan, and none of the sex appeal.' (3)

'In school it was very hard for me to pull a sickie. Dad would come into my room and open his black medical briefcase and unfold and slide out the various tools he would need to inspect me: his stethoscope, a thermometer, a wooden tongue depressor to push down my tongue so that he could look down my throat. I hated going to school because I was a shy, scared kid, and I felt like I looked weird because my dad is Australian-born Chinese and I have auburn red hair. Luckily Dad usually left early for work so I could wait to tell Mum about how unwell I felt. She was more amenable to my plight and I usually could get the day off.' (Introduction)

'You’d want one for the scent alone: camphor, menthol, Dettol. Band-Aids and cherry-flavoured cough syrup. The scents of medicines in brown bottles, ointments in tubes, gauze bandages. The tang of discarded bath salts. Fifty other scents that can never quite be named. This medicinecabinet scent embeds itself, no matter where you keep your stash – in the cupboard above the stove, perhaps, or in the shelves behind the mirror in the bathroom. It embeds itself in your memory, too, and activates when you least expect it. Open a friend’s vanity unit looking for floss and you might just find yourself in 1989 or 2002, bleeding or fevered and searching for a cure. ' (Author's introduction)

'A secure hospital ward, one Wednesday morning in March. When the doctor approaches with her trolley, I still have time to tell her no, that I've decided I'm afraid of drugs, that I don't trust the pharmaceutical industry, that I don't want the three comically oversized syringes of what might be 40mg of something called RPH-203, or might be a placebo consisting of saline solution, inserted into my abdomen.' (Author's introduction)

'Abstract: April 2001. A beautiful Autumn day. The sun's rays still hold warmth; the air is crisp and clear. Our family is on a bush walk. Stephen and our two daughters run on ahead. We begin a steep incline, our feet crushing the fallen leaves underfoot. Soon Stephen lags behind. Striding ahead, I glance back over my shoulder and see him slowly negotiating the rough track. I notice that his right arm isn't swinging as he walks. A small flutter of fear floats nearby, but I push it resolutely away. Then I remember other barely perceptible changes - the way his foot sometimes drags a little when he walks, the disturbed sleep when his body twitches restlessly in the night. Above me, the sun passes behind a cloud. The day has suddenly turned cold.' (Author's introduction)

' A strap of bark soaks curled up in a bucket of red liquid beside a man outside the Hospital Adolfo Guevara Velasco. Next to him an old woman sits with a top hat on, beside a blanket piled high with dead cicadas. Their thoraxes glow golden yellow behind papery wings. We step closer. They're not insects but a type of fruit. The woman offers us a stuffed bag full. I shake my head. Through the cement struts of the walkway I can see snow on the distant mountains that surround Cusco: the place the ancients called The Navel of the World.' (Introduction)

'Babies don't drink gasoline, not at first. You have to introduce it slowly, starve them of needed iron until they develop a taste for it, until the searching sacks of their tongues loll over the viscous liquid. A lot of people have trouble remembering what gasoline tasted like that first time. They remember primarily the need, this terrible emptiness that only high octane unleaded can fill. They remember letting the slimy liquid sit on their tongue for the first time, pungent and harsh and utterly foreign, lacking in anything identifiable like sweetness or bitterness...' (Introduction)

'There are some conversations that no one should have with their mother, especially if that no one is a poet, and especially if that no one is a poet four months into her third stint of group therapy.' (Introduction)

'Here we are in the south of Spain, heading for Seville. A city with a reputation for sex and danger - the city that inspired Carmen, Don Giovanni, The Barber of Seville and Don Juan. Clearly the perfect setting for a urinary tract infection.' (Introduction)

' Amiel Courtin-Wilson is an Australian artist and filmmaker. He is the director of five features, and over twenty shorts. His first film, Chasing Buddha (2000), a documentary portrait of his Buddhist nun aunt, was produced at the age of nineteen and premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. Since then, he has made Bastardy (2008), a documentary about troubled indigenous actor Jack Charles, and Hail (2011), a fictional feature inspired by the life of its star, Daniel P. Jones, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival. Courtin-Wilson’s work—in both documentary and fiction forms—is characterised by its combination of realist drama with trance-like poetical interludes, as well as a clear-eyed and empathetic authorial interest in lives lived on the edge. Hail begins as a kind of straightforward narrative about the difficulties of postprison life, but it eventually dissolves into a violent swirl of impressionistic imagery and harsh soundscapes. Its centerpiece image is a mordantly beautiful shot of a dead horse hurtling through the atmosphere toward the earth’s surface. His latest film, Ruin (2013), co-directed with Michael Cody, is a fictional narrative about two lovers on the run, set and filmed in Cambodia. The interview took place in the wine bar Tasman Quartermasters in Hobart, with the assistance of the Dark Mofo festival. ' (Introduction)