'This happened when I was a young man, just shy of my twenty-first birthday. All my life, I’d lived in a New South Wales country town; I won’t say which one, only that it was within four hours of Sydney and has since been abandoned. The town was a combination of abattoirs and grain and white collars. If you listened hard enough, you could hear the cries of a million cows in the throes of death...' (37)
'In the summer of 2013 I had a nightmare. At that time the cities of Australia were scorching in temperatures in the forties and immense bushfires had come to ravage the southern part of the continent year after year. For months I had been plagued by dreams of pursuit and murder, and in the unbearable summer heat my mind drifted in and out of sleep like flotsam near a desolate shore. I had thrown off the thin sheet covering me and in the midst of a dream in which I was haunted by a fear that I could not place, I heard someone outside of it say the word halal in a sinister tone and I woke up. The room was empty of course, but I was convinced that there had been someone standing over my bed.' (85)
'It is not fashionable to write about ‘class’ in universities, unless accompanied by words like ‘transcend’, ‘post-industrial’ or ‘knowledge-economy’. And yet, academics should have a great deal to say about class, not least because they work in one of Australia’s most insecure work environments.' (Author's introduction)
