AustLit

'My uncle and I stood out the back of our first home - a house my dad designed with a big living room facing out to the front yard. and e design was his own, resembling the homes he knew in a sort of memory, one with a large living space sometimes covered in a sea of mattresses, and other times, a space for parties, welcoming those that found themselves walking through that front door. New arrivals would sometimes opt to stay with us over the migrant hostels the government provided - somewhere that felt more domestic than a camp, a prison, a reminder. and They would take any available bed to sleep on until they found their way, my little body next to my sister's, on a small thickness of foam, we'd lay in our walk-in robes, closing the door to sleep. My uncle and I stood, on a busy night in the house, on a square of grass facing the fence of our neighbours, not looking at each other, speaking softly. I asked him, what animals should I expect to see back home, and he humoured me, describing in detail the lions and elephants, hyenas and zebras that roamed free in Oromia - our lands, our people, country somehow continuing forever, missing some bodies looking back in their minds. It was somewhere around that moment, or maybe in the retelling of my curiosity back to me, that I decided to dedicate my life to animals, or, orient myself towards a type of care, as noble and good. and at, being in care for something in which I saw beau#, to care for something that I could not yet understand but yearned to, was the highest form of devotion. Hindsight is so wild, so cutting.' (Publication abstract)