AustLit

'It has only been a matter of months since the summer bushfires that savaged Australia’s east coast came to an end and a new crisis of untamed proportions emerged with COVID-19. Back to back, these events set an agenda of survival, upping the ante on human abilities to adapt to new social and environmental relationships, exposing fallibility in the scrabble for effective responses. This biological agent brings with it an unmitigated sense of doom that quickly finds the limits of language. Politicians resort to military metaphors of war and defence; the word ‘pandemic’ bears the weight of centuries before unravelling its new histories; social media conversations mutate in threads of remote companionship and shared convalescence as the silences of grief and mourning slowly spread throughout our systems.' (Introduction)