AustLit

'When he left the country, her father's bones remained. He packed them in a wooden box decoupaged with butterflies. Brian from Ballarat - nature photographer, only friend left in Australia - was happy to give that secret box a home. Over time, he took the bones from their butterflied hiding place and displayed those private things on his mantelpiece with cabinets of dead moths and blurry photos of the sea. The butterflies peeled from the empty bonebox. Dust took to the cracks in its wood. It stopped being a memory and started being an object, so Brian put it in the garage with his grandson's bike and other things he didn't want to fix. Spiders crawled inside. The box gave them a home. But the bones remembered their future. Brian was just one thread in their meshstretch of history. The bones remembered their futuregirl - several threads unwound to make a tear. They wanted to speak her onto 'Cassaurina Beach'.' (Introduction)