Cirrus@Austlit

'Picture it: Bay Z, ACME Robotics Testing Facility, Melbourne, 2240. A Manager of Robot Quality Assurance stands in silence, gazing upwards and all around at the chassis frame for a completely new type of robot. That Manager of Robot Quality Assurance is me and that chassis frame is for an unnamed robot that has become our company's top robot development priority.' (Author's abstract)

'I'd always been ambivalent about the celebration of Australia Day. Being of the inner-city, bleeding-heart leftie brigade, for me it conjured images of flag tattoos, Kochie in a Southern Cross barbecue apron and Cronulla on a bad day. But then I was asked to be an Australia Day Ambassador, a program run in New South Wales to send people with some sort of public profile out into the community to help officiate at regional celebrations and give a speech to the new citizens. I have no idea why they picked me - when I arrived in Speers Point it was immediately apparent that no-one had a clue who I was. The local mayor and I did a circuit of the park, and my only consolation was that even fewer people knew who he was.' (Author's abstract)

'The notion of an inner life - just like the idea of an inland - has long been equated with emptiness in Australia. Terms such as 'dead heart' to denote the red centre and 'outback' to describe regions outside coastal cities suggest that, in Australia, the inner is on the outer. Even in the metropolis there is, as D.H. Lawrence noted when he visited Sydney, a terrifying vacancy. Australians, he wrote in his novel Kangaroo, were 'awfully nice but they have got nothing inside them'. For Patrick White, this was the Great Australian Emptiness, an environment in which 'the mind is the least of possessions, in which the rich man is the important man, in which the schoolmaster and the journalist rule what intellectual roost there is ...' (Author's abstract)

'We let the human stream carry us, sensing that all roads would be leading to the divine lake. The mythical image of white temples reflected on mauve water had lured me, but I was now starting to question my presence in Pushkar - one among nine of the holiest Hindu sites of pilgrimage in India. In the late afternoon the main street was dusty and strewn with detritus: plastic bottles, cups and food wrappers crushed into soiled origami beneath the feet of thousands - the overflow from the five-day Camel Fair that had officially concluded in the out-of-town fairground, and to which a sense of carnival had been brought by lingerers like us to expire in the town. A short distance ahead walked our newlyweds, somewhat unwillingly, each hanging onto the other. Once we had held our daughter's small hand in crowded places. Her slender fingers were now braided into her husband's hand, the back of which was marked in blue ink with the Om symbol, a tattoo Deepak acquired at the age of ten with the money his father had given him to buy sweets at a fair, in his native land of the Punjab. By way of this matrimonial bond, India was now a part of our daughter's destiny, and in that roundabout way also a part of our own destiny. And for the moment, this was India.' (Author's abstract)

'Like many who will be reading this, I write. I always have, even before I knew how. When I was four my mother would find me filling notebooks with infinite cursive 'e's, line after biro line of them, pages of stories that could never be read. 'That's very good practice,' she would praise me, but my face would burn with the embarrassment of not yet knowing how to properly do this thing that seemed to me the key to all understanding.' (Author's abstract)

'I fell in love for the first time when i was fourteen. Not a mild love. Not the sort of minor skirmish with passion that can be dismissed as merely a crush. This wasn't the pop-star-poster frenzy of pubescent fantasy. This was serious: inescapable, life-shuddering, palm-itching, shameful, passionate, hateful, total desire; Eros and Thanatos copulating in my imagination long before I even had words to articulate such thoughts. This was a passion that would last.' (Author's abstract)