AustLit

'If you want to know the difference between the Black and White Witness, all you have to do is mention the war. The White Witness will often describe it in this way. In 2004, Palm Island was continually referred to as the 'most dangerous place on Earth outside of a conflict zone', following the tragic death in custody of Mulrunji Doomadgee (who died on a watchhouse floor, with a liver cleaved in two and injuries akin to those of a plane crash victim). In 2015 the Cape York community of Aurukun was labelled ground zero, with 'clashes between warring families ... Forcing terrified locals to flee for their safety', and 'children (who) were now caught in a warzone'. The same was said of Wadeye, thousands of kilometres away in north-east Arnhem Land, which in 2006 was labelled 'Not the Third World, just Australia's first war zone' with 'scores of Aborigines' 'fleeing their homes' and 'living in squalid refugee-like camps' due to 'gang violence'. In 2013 the 'Sydney Morning Herald' manipulated crime statistics to claim that the far-west NSW town of Bourke, with its large Aboriginal population, was 'the most dangerous place on Earth'.'  (Publication abstract)

 

 'Crotty!' I had yelled. 'It's back!' Rushing home, I started heaving raw supplies into the back of the car while Suzy hugged her belly in the driveway. For here was Crotty risen - it was risen indeed! - and even though we had never lived in that town, never seen its ruin slumped in the valley's rest, scratching its head and trying to push through the scrub of dementia to its mining past, we knew that we had hung our shirts on its lines, slept in its beds, that we had sat down and skulled beers in its pub past the hours of closing, that we had played for its footy team and pruned its apple trees, that we had shivered by its fires and argued in its kitchens, that we had punched through its midnights and sulked in its sheds.' 

 (Introduction)

I am acutely aware while visiting other places that I am in the home of the ancestors whose stories since ancient times are preserved in the land, seas, skies and atmosphere.' (Introduction)

'In the corridor where the Australian Dictionary of Biography team does its work at the Australian National University in Canberra, there is a gallery of photographs of those who have led the project since 1962. The first is of Douglas Pike (general editor, 1962–73)—rouseabout, shearer, teacher, clergyman and historian. Pike, the son of missionaries to China, looks squarely at the camera, pipe in mouth: a stereotype of the academic. (Introduction)

'As my 20-year working life at the University of Melbourne was coming to its natural end by teaching for the last time an introductory subject on modern poetry during the first half of 2018, Andrea and I were planning to spend the following four months travelling in the far north of Australia, first crossing the Great Sandy Desert on the Tanami Track up from Alice Springs to revisit a community in that desert where we had lived for most of the past two years, and then crossing and recrossing the area of Western Australia known as the Kimberley, a craggy region of spinifex, boab trees and laterite still sparsely populated and still unforgiving to the unprepared. This is the country of the Bunuba, Warrwa, Ungummi, Ungarinyin, Ngarnawu and Munumburra, Walmajarri, Kija and other Indigenous peoples.' (Introduction)

 

'I've just devoured Alex Miller's book Lovesong. Even more than the love affair between John and Sabiha, I'm haunted by the narrator Ken's dilemma - the question of whether he should follow his impulse to write a book about the couple's extraordinary story. John tells Ken he plans to write his own memoir, but Ken has little confidence in John's abilities as a writer, believing the English teacher to be too close to the story to channel the characters effectively.' (Introduction)