Cirrus@Austlit

'In this episode, a conversation with Manisha Anjali, a writer, artist, and teacher, and author of 'Naag Mountain'.

'This book is a journey across oceans, from the Asian subcontinent to the South Seas, a journey about human trafficking on sugar plantations in Fiji and Australia. Anjali brings to life the histories and events, the stories and myths of a displaced and exploited people, that have been lost in time or forgotten or hidden from view.

'Anjali was joined in conversation by Izzy Roberts-Orr, a poet, playwright, broadcaster, arts worker, and a Creative Producer with Red Room Poetry.'  (Publication abstract)

'Izzy Roberts-Orr's debut collection Raw Salt explores contemporary elegy and writing the environment—excavating and engaging death and its aftermath, lineages both ancestral and intellectual. Responding to the sudden death of Roberts-Orr's father a decade ago, Raw Salt is a work of mourning and memory, healing and consilience. The collection is raw with lived experience, the complex history and inheritance we each receive with the death of a parent. The ongoing presence of her father, a horticulturalist, shines through Roberts-Orr's deep attention to the natural world, rendered in poems of extraordinary clarity and precision, offering a kind of healing we might all attend. A complex and deeply human work, this debut collection explores with nuance and generosity the darker undercurrents, the cycles of growth, decay and destruction, sustaining us and the ecosystems from which we have evolved and, as with the departed, are always a part. Izzy Roberts-Orr's Raw Salt introduces a remarkable new voice to Australian poetry.' (Publication summary)

'At night, I can hear the foxes screaming. Nothing is wrong, this is just what they do, particularly during mating season. The first time I heard it, I thought something was seriously wrong – that a small child was being chased through the bush, or that I was at the epicentre of a B-grade horror movie. That I might be next. There’s always something a little disconcerting about seeing a fox on this continent. They have been here longer than my ancestors, but they don’t belong here either. Introduced in 1855 for ‘sporting purposes’ (i.e. ‘to be hunted’), foxes had become rife across the mainland within just 20 years.' (Introduction)