AustLit

'This morning in Amherst it was minus seven degrees Celsius. And as I walked to campus, I was surprised to find myself feeling grateful that the days were beginning to warm up.

'On the flight from Sydney to Los Angeles, I sat beside a Scottish man. 'If ya don't want to feel the cold,' he told me, 'collect a bucket of icy-water and slush each morning, take it to the bathroom, strip off and throw it over yourself,' his long rusty beard hardly moved as he spoke.' (Introduction)

'The girls swarm towards a cut glass vase overflowing with chrysanthemums, and claim their seats around the central table , leaving Anne stranded and feigning indifference with half a dozen others. The flowers are pink, white and mauve like the Les Sylphides ballet skirts on the tablemats at Anne's home.

 Mrs Richards delves in her bag to retrieve another bunch of chrysanthemums, this time with the russet sheen of hen's feathers...' (Introduction)

'Stacy clenched buttered toast between her teeth, pulled her hair back into a ponytail and stooped to refresh her Facebook page. A string of random shares appeared from her sister Emma, back in Perth. The was also a post from her mum, a photo of a gorilla nursing a snow white kitten.The caption read : Keep you f#%*ing paws off! To encourage her, Stacy liked it.' (Introduction)

Indigenous people lived through the end of the world, but we did not end, We survived by holding on to our cultures, our kin, and our sense of what was right in a world gone terribly wrong (Kwaymullina, 'Edges' 29)

'Young Adult Australian post-apocalyptic speculative fiction carries with it a number of expectations and tropes : that characters will exist in a dystopian, ruined landscape, that a lone teenager will rise up and rebel against institutionalised structures of repressive power; and that these youths will carry hope for the future in a destroyed world.' (Introduction)

'I've been meaning to ask you something.'

'Yes.'

'For quite a while.'

'That's not like you.'

'It sort of welled up.'

'Ask!'

(Introduction)

'Book One : 

I. From the air, Rome pans flat across the costal plain, a mosaic of fragments. Tiny squares radiate in concentric rings around ovals, bisected by vectored roads; patterns of organic growth within the linearity of ancient order. Swaths of green abut the orange , white and grey of clay, stone and concrete. As the plane titles, the tiles resolve into rooftops, piazzas, cars and pavements, drawing me into a smaller. more human dimension.' (Introduction)

'As Sophie said goodnight to the last of her clients, I sent Malcolm out for a half kilometre run. 

'I'm heading off now, Ella,' Sophie said. 'Sure you don't want me to hang around?'

It was our workplace policy not to train male clients after seven pm. If Malcolm had been any other male client, I would have asked her to hang around, or had not accepted his booking request at all.'

(Introduction)

'I'm juiced up on steroids. Awake as fuck in a ward full of sleeping sick people. electrical things drone, beep, hum, drum lightly in my head. In darkness sprayed with glow spots of orange, yellow, green, blue from power-points and devices. I don't even know what the noise is. It's just everywhere. My skin crawls like a mass of maggots.'  (Introduction)

'It was coming to the end of my time in America. PhD applications still ongoing, I didn't know where I was going but the movers were booked, the cars and furniture in the process of being sold. It was back to that space of deciding what is necessary and what is easy to replace. I had done a lot, seen a lot, been twenty-something across twenty-something states, tried out their names in my mouth. I liked the South, the long vowels and how the rusting history on every street hung low, like a flag of a pole.' (Introduction)

'Even as I bring the clippers down towards the soft dome of my head, all I can think about is how badly I do not want to do this.

'I think of Josephine and how tiny she looked, swaddled in mounds of heavy, starched white sheets on her hospital bed. It is the only thing that keeps me from putting the clippers down. Josephine, who as a child, I felt I loved so fiercely that I wanted to squeezed her until her head popped clean off;  who was like a life-sized doll to me and a pain in the bum all at once. Josephine, who I once dreamed had died in a fiery race-car crash, which woke me up screaming, only to remember that neither of us could drive. My tiny, perfect sister, lying bald and infant-like in a bed that was far too big for her, pinned to the spot with the pain of movement like one of Nabokov;s butterflies in a frame.' (Introduction)

'Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence (1996) is the story of three young Aboriginal girls, sisters Molly and Daisy and their cousin Gracie, taken from their parents by government authorities in 1931, to live far from their home at the harsh Moore River Native Settlement. Written originally by Doris Pilkington Garimara, it was adapted as a film under the title Rabbit-Proof Fence, directed by Philip Noyce (2002). The children were part of what is now known as the stolen generations and their story remains profoundly relevant to the lives of a great many Aboriginal children and their families. While there has been significant critical response to the text both itself and in the context of its adaptation, specifically in the realm of Australian Cultural Studies, it is pertinent and necessary to consider also the social context of the story. This is coming from the perspective of Aboriginal human rights and social justice.' (Introduction)