Cirrus@Austlit

The story 'tells of a young girl earning her womanhood in an eerie adventure in a strangely deserted city.'

Source: 'Dreams and Illusions Bear Literary Fruit', Canberra Times, 19 August 1989, p.27.

An eccentric family invent for themselves a fascinating aunt.

A blue heeler pup impersonates a unicorn.

'Christobel Mattingley's very short story creates in a mere five pages a moving vignette of the frustration experienced by a young Aboriginal boy trying to find a job in a world which does not want him. So he joins the listless black crowd outside the pub watching hordes of tourists in their Range Rovers, Mercedes, and Volvos as they point their cameras at the nearby ancestral hunting grounds. It is a bitter tale.'

Source: 'Dreams and Illusions Bear Literary Fruit', Canberra Times, 19 August 1989, p.27.

'A boy sits in assembly, daydreaming, while the headmaster drones on about school standards and discipline and littering and whatnot. Young Le Fevre daydreams about the school librarian who, like so many of her ilk, would rather keep all the books and tapes neatly stacked away than hand them out to messy students, and about his family and about his splendid invention which turns your mind off while you continue to look attentive. Here indeed is a schoolboy's dream.'

Source: 'Dreams and Illusions Bear Literary Fruit', Canberra Times, 19 August 1989, p.27.