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'This week we’re delighted to bring you an extract from Dani Powell’s debut novel Return to Dust. As the title suggests, it is a novel about grief, but it is also a vivid and intimate portrait of the landscape and people of central Australia. Of long road trips with unexpected detours, and life in remote Indigenous communities. The red dust of the desert spills from its pages as we follow Amber, who has returned to Mparntwe/Alice Springs, still mourning the death of her brother.
'When Amber first arrived in the town 10 years earlier, she’d felt ‘a sense of coming home that made no sense’ as she’d been born thousands of miles away. Now she has come back to take up a job in a remote community and once again feels her connection to this place, ‘the on and on of it. The ground so solid, the sky so sure.’
'In this extract, Amber is still on her way to the job in the remote community, but has been sidetracked by a football match, by giving rides to old friends – including Jennifer and her young daughter Shyanna – and a funeral. She has spent the night in Jennifer’s community, and needs to get moving again.' (Introduction)
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Related Works
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y
Return to Dust
Crawley
:
UWA Publishing
,
2020
18830890
2020
single work
novel
I am calling her Amber because amber is my favourite stone. In truth, it is not a stone at all. Technically, it is fossilised tree resin that has withstood all kinds of weather and woe, the likes of which would normally cause sap to disintegrate. Amber resists decay.
'I am calling her Amber to give her something precious. To remind her of what the world has to offer. She knew this once, more keenly than most. But she has forgotten. I am hoping to remind her that the world’s beauty isn’t gone. That beauty exists inside things, sometimes trapped, often obscured.
'When Amber returns to her home in the Australian desert one year after her brother’s death, her hope is to move on from her grief, to start again. Invited to do some work in a remote Aboriginal community, she relishes the opportunity to return to country she loves so deeply. She hadn’t realised her friend Andrew had a reason to ask her to come back.
'She begins a three-day road trip on unsealed roads that link a constellation of Aboriginal communities. From the outset, it is as if she has been picked up willy willy on a windless day, and must be carried to the end of it —until the wind decides to drop. During this adventure, her composure is undone by a series of encounters, observations, the country itself, and she learns that grief takes its own time.
'Told like memoir, spun like myth, this is a philosophical tale about coming to terms with the death of a loved one. About our way of dealing with death, and the offerings of another culture. It is about home, and how this is found in people as much as place.' (Publication summary)
