Cirrus@Austlit

'This essay is a journey from Wiluna to Kalgoorlie. It is written in a ficto-critical style and draws extensively on Jean-Luc Nancy's thinking of existence as interrelation. Georgina Brown, or GB as she is known, and I are driving to see her dying father in Kalgoorlie. GB has just got back from living out 'my side' as she says, out 'Patjarr way' (half-way between Wiluna and Alice Springs). GB's family was the last family to be living traditionally in the Gibson Desert, and she was about six years old when she was 'brought in' with her family in 1976. Needless to say she's an extraordinary woman. I got to know GB through living with the Jackman family in a little place called Ululla (GB's mother was a Jackman). Whilst there I became attentive to relations, to stories, to movement—to how these things all get caught up in one another. I learnt that what is important is to maintain space and time for others, to enact one's being by connecting with kin elsewhere, a kind of constant interruption of centeredness and stability. As a result this journey to Kalgoorlie is full of fragments, stories and relations; and is marked with imagination, memory and sadness. Thoughts and events take us away. We are moved and forced onwards, elsewhere, by these things that are happening and by what awaits.' (Publisher's blurb)