AustLit

'The instructions on the seed packets are clear. Damage the seed with sandpaper, cover with boiling water for a day, plant singly and cover with wood ash. It’s a simulation of a fire. The seed is a couple of millimetres long, dark, with the beginning of a root dry at its side, as long as the seed itself. I imagine its unfolding: the pale root extends, the cotyledons open. Compare these to basil or lettuce seeds, tiny specks that must be sown shallow into moist earth and covered in about a millimetre of dirt.' (Introduction)

'A few weeks after my mother’s death, I left Australia again and returned to my life in New Zealand. My mother had died unexpectedly in an accident, so we were all struggling to make sense of things, but it is true what they say. It is a terrible thing for a parent to outlive a child.' (Introduction)

'If Australia can be represented in three books, there can be little better a genre than crime fiction. European Australia originated as a penal colony, and crime and its representation have been an obsession ever since. It began with convict ballads, then true crime in newspapers, to the gradually developing form of the crime novel over the nineteenth century. Australia was a significant generic innovator here, with Fergus Hume’s 1886 The Mystery of a Hansom Cab being the first crime international blockbuster. Crime-writing in Australia has form, content, swaggering style—and some of the results are outstanding literature by any criteria.' (Introduction)

'1988. It is five years after the Ash Wednesday bushfires, which devastated many parts of Victoria, including the coastline of the Eastern Otways. It is also Australia’s Bicentennial year. A man in his early twenties sits on the step of a small fibro bungalow in the Aireys Inlet riverflat, in the thick shade of two towering old macrocarpa pines. Catching the light at his feet is a loamy brocade of russet pine needles, stretching across the yard to the sunroom of his house, one of the few buildings in the town to survive the fires.'(Introduction) 

'Kurnell is a no-fuss, unpretentious place given that it’s supposed to be the cradle of the nation. Stretching along a promontory that looks like a witch’s finger pointing west from the southern shore of Botany Bay, opposite Sydney Airport, Kurnell is a hotchpotch sprawl of fibro modesty and glass-and-steel ambition, where trailered speedboats rest on the verges and Aussie flags snap on front-yard poles. Nestled in Kamay Botany Bay National Park, Kurnell overlooks a mass of water lacking the frenetic beauty of luminous sails and green and gold ferries, and of some of the international signature structures of modernity, that characterise that other vast nearby inlet that the colonists instead chose as the harbour for their penal settlement.' (Introduction)

'I travel around this beautiful country speaking about issues of law and sexual violence, and I cannot do so without acknowledging that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women are three times as likely as non-Indigenous women to have experienced violence; that despite Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders over the age of 18 making up around 2 per cent of our population, they represent 28 per cent of total prisoner population; that we are seeing absolutely no improvements in the rates of Aboriginal deaths in custody and that half of those deaths are of prisoners not even found guilty.'(Introduction)

'When I was nineteen, my partner, who had the name of an archangel and wore silver polish on his nails, left our inner-city loft early one morning to visit his family in Leichhardt. That night, shortly after midnight, I woke to loud knocking. I thought he had lost his keys. I opened the door to see two police officers, who took their caps off in unison—such an old-fashioned gesture, I would later think—and I immediately knew. They said my archangel had jumped in front of a train.' (Introduction)