AustLit

'I met Mehdi back in 2010. He was one of my students when I was teaching English at the Curtin immigration detention centre. To be honest for the first few months of knowing him, I found his presence unsettling - he'd always arrive late and smelling of cigarettes, sit towards the back of the classroom, arms folded, frowning slightly, and not ever saying much. He's since admitted his first impression of me was that I was a total snob, so I guess we each misread one another's reticence as arrogance.' (Introduction)

'I recently learned about the passing of Mona Akbar Wilson, one of the last known descendants of an Afghan cameleer who came to Australia in the late nineteenth century. I first learned of Mona, or rather of her father, when I read Pamela Rajkowski's book Linden Girl during the summer of 1996. I came across Linden Girl while perusing my father's collection of books stacked on dusty shelves in my childhood home in Perth...' (Introduction)

'This is meant to be a memoir piece. But it is not really. Instead, it is my reflection on the memoir and why I have chosen not to write mine. Well, not yet anyway...' (Introduction)

'On a ship leaving Bombay for Italy in 1965 I met a men who had just met the Indian-born Perfect Spiritual Master of Iranian decent, Meher Baba, (Merwan S. Irani)...' (Introduction)

'Out on the balcony, Sara lifts her arms and rests them on the railing, feeling the air touch her underarms. 'There should be something more to life,' she whispers, feeling light-headed. Exhausted, she remembers the day she walked into the kitchen to be confronted by her mother's dead body lying across the floor. Her bloodshot eyes half open, her mouth agape. Shocked and unable to mae a noise, Sara had remained the for a long still moment, until her father came into the kitchen, the cherries and peaches falling from his hands. The tiniest details of the scene pass through her mind: the dusty brown sheen of her father's hair, the upward quirk of her mother's left eyebrow, the red scar below her right eye, and th epink lipstick smeared around her lips.' (Introduction)

'On a slow Monday in June, I come home to my Persian cat reading the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.' (Introduction)

'His name is Paul or Peter, I forget. We sit together, squashed among a couple of dozen others like the human luggage that we are,  below the deck, where years of putrifying fish have left their stink. No windows. Someone's puked. An infant cries.' (Introduction)

'Oh damn it! I've got odd socks on again. The good thing is navy is so similar to black so it's not so noticeable. Or mamybe I am just comforting myself with thinking that. she appears on the other side of the road and I forget about the socks completely. she stops and looks to both sides of the road...' (Introduction)