AustLit

 'Despite what you may have heard, the nightlife of the Deddick Valley—in the deep, green heart of East Gippsland—is quite lively. Even at 2am on this minus-degree night, the hilltop paddocks are a menagerie, the bushes rustling with animals darting here and there, startled by the three dark figures clasping long-barrelled guns. In front, Elias sweeps the shadows with the torch, pausing every few minutes on a pair of faraway pinpricks, glassy-bright in the halogen glow like flickering lights on a distant machine console. Unlike the two amateurs accompanying him, he can distinguish between the eyes of a deer and a wallaby at 400 metres across a dark paddock. Most of the time it’s the latter, so we go on. Walking several paces behind, I’m feeling very Chopper Read-chic, all black hood and balaclava, with a shotgun nestled in my black cotton gloves. Elias has already shot one deer tonight, but—as ‘menagerie’ should imply—the deer, foxes and wild pigs are still awake. So we’re going to stay out too—keep following the trail to the top of the paddock, which slowly plateaus out into an altar beneath the speckled milky sky. It isn’t difficult to stay focused on the simple task of scan, load, aim, fire, but I’m starting to get pretty tired. I’d stayed up reading most of last night at Elias’ parents’ house, trying—somewhat frantically—to make sense of a melee of feelings about our plans for the next few days. Elias—a friend of several years who I rarely get to see as we live in different cities—had asked me a few weeks ago if I’d like to go deer hunting on a small property owned by some friends of his family. The couple who own the property regularly invite him and his father to hunt on their land because, as he puts it, ‘They want people who aren’t bogans to come out and help them keep the feral deer and pigs under control.’ I have never held a gun in my life, let alone been able to shoot a stealthy ruminant in the dark, but Elias says I satisfy his personal criterion of being someone he could spend a few days walking through the bush and talking with. I am flattered to have made the cut and thinking that, if anything, I’d learn some skills that might come in handy through the approaching climate apocalypse, I accept his invitation.' (Introduction)

'In the archives, after a life in black and white, Katharine Susannah Prichard bursts into colour at the end of her life. The ten minute home video lingers reverentially over the white-haired woman. It captures her doing ordinary things at her home in Greenmount in the hills of Perth— writing at her desk, standing outside her writing cabin, posing in front of a blooming wattle bush in her garden, drinking tea on her verandah with friends. All through it she is talking, talking, talking, but her words are lost; there is no sound. Usually things are the other way around—all words and no visuals.' (Introduction)

'The Northern Territory has been without its own literary journal for twenty years. This absence of a distinctive space dedicated to capturing a uniquely Territorian voice has left us on the edges of a national discussion, at the mercy of others’ agendas, and beholden to outsider publishers obligated to markets elsewhere. A quick scan of Australian literary journals finds most located in major cities and largely on the east coast, a situation symptomatic of Australia’s longstanding marginalisation of its rural, regional and remote storytellers. Compounding the blurring effect that this distance from the mainstream can have, skewed and misleading representations of Territorians and their contexts have commonly held sway in the Australian imaginary, and are, more often than is desirable, penned by outsiders. The result has been that for twenty years readers and writers from the NT have suffered displacement from the centre of ‘national’ discourse, and from any empowered position where they might influence the way Australia and the world perceives them. In the process they have come to recognise and clearly understand the gap between a lived experience of a place and its literary representation.' (Introduction)

'At 9.50am in the morning, the heat was enough to make the lawyers take off their suit jackets to walk the short distance from the car park to the Alice Springs Convention Centre. It was the 13th of March, 2017. Merit McDonald and a small group of protestors from Shut Youth Prisons held up their placards as the cameras rolled. Dylan Voller was one of them. People started arriving and entered the building, thankful for the air conditioning. Indigenous elders, parents and grandparents, children, relatives, interested members of the public, senior and junior counsel, representatives of Indigenous organisations and those giving evidence had come together for the Royal Commission into the Detention and Protection of Children in the Northern Territory.' (Introduction)

'According to folklore, there’s two eras in this town: Before Tracy and After. A simplistic assessment—just ask the Larrakia People—but it’s still an accepted ‘fact’. Merry Christmas, 1974. Take that up your clacker, Darwin. Plenty has been said about that mean little system—that bitch Tracy who almost wiped this northern capital off the map. How she snaked across tropical waters, doglegged once she was past the Tiwi Islands, set her beady eye on Darwin and came in, her evil vortex sucking everything out.' (Introduction)

Author's note:

History thus makes use of everything: a merchant’s bill, a cookbook, a laundry list; that is how twenty-seven lengths of green velvet can inform the history of humankind.

-George Sand. The Story of My Life: The Autobiography of George Sand: a group translation. Ed. Thelma Jurgrau. New York, USA: The State University of New York Press, 1991. 127.

'I was most comfortable in my skin on Sundays. Like tea leaves steeping in a warmed pot, Sundays were infused with Yiddish song and verse. On that day of the week, I learned to read and write the alef-beys. Huddled with the other children around a communal table, our elbows almost touching, I paid close attention to my teacher as she crafted perfectly formed letters with smooth yellow chalk on the blackboard. Holding a freshly sharpened lead pencil in my fist, I tried to emulate her skill, laboriously entering each letter, aleph, beys, gimel, daled, into a pristine heft, an exercise book given to me on the first day of Sunday school. After completing the task, our lererin (teacher), Mirele Kohn, would guide our pronunciation: ‘Noch amol, un noch amol,’ again, and once again, she intoned. We repeated the phonic sounds over and over. Each letter seemed to carry its own melody, its own cadence. On my page, they reminded me of black quavers dancing from right to left across thin blue lines.' (Introduction)