AustLit

 (Introduction)

'Occasionally I go bush with a friend, and as we walk she will—with little apparent effort—take in the lie of the land. When we break to catch our breath, or to check our ankles for leeches, or to fix an undone shoelace, she will have counted how many creeks we’ve crossed, will have noticed how the steep cliffs and undulating valleys correspond to the contours of our map. With a swivel of her head along the ridgeline, she’ll be able to establish roughly where it is we now are. As though thumbing back through the pages of a just-read chapter, she might trace with her finger the passages we’ve covered: ‘that must be that section of blue gums’ or ‘that’s back where that landslide was’ or ‘here’s when we made a turn for the east’. I, meanwhile, might have noticed globules of blood-red resin weeping from the base of a tree, or have been startled by a black cockatoo winging itself across my path and scoured the ground afterwards for its feathers … but I will mostly be oblivious. The overall shape of the land we’re passing through will remain a blur to me.' (Introduction)

'My village is blue and green. It consists of eight houses, one watermill, six wells, two streams and a river. I grew up playing with the neighbouring kids. In summer, we lived in the river. We swam until we could no longer feel our limbs and then rested on our body boards, laughing and eating chocolate bars until our trembling lips were no longer blue. In spring and autumn, we built dams across the streams. Our masonry skills were rather poor. I think we were too eager and often rushed the job. We used algae to caulk breaches. It flowed through our precarious constructions like fairy hair glittering in the sunlight. In winter, we gathered around the wells. We threw stones down their shafts to gauge how much water they held. We had a technique. Like for storms where the time between lighting and thunder indicates the numbers of kilometres, we counted the seconds and analysed the loudness of the echoes to estimate water mass. It was always great.' (Introduction)

'On the morning of 18 February 2021 Australia awoke to find itself at war. While the nation slept, powerful digital saboteurs cut the cords that bind the nation together, severing connections to its most popular and most important sources of factual information. The majors—Seven West, Nine–Fairfax, News and the ABC—all suddenly went dark. Fortuitously, radio and television broadcasters escaped the carnage, or the nation may have had no way of informing itself about the surprise attack.'  (Introduction)

'At an author event hosted in 1947 by the Fellowship of Australian Writers, Ruth Park met head-on the polarised reactions stirred by her novel The Harp in the South, as it appeared in instalments in the Sydney Morning Herald just prior to its publication as a book. Amid the raucous was one particularly belligerent man, as Miles Franklin recounts in a letter written after the event, who ‘kept on and on till people tried to laugh him down. He said he did not want to read stories about pregnant women and slums, that that was not literature.’' (Introduction) 

'In the early 1950s, the writer Hal Porter, then in his early forties, lived for a couple of years in the Tasmanian village of Fern Tree, halfway up kunanyi (then known as Mount Wellington). The scattered settlement was home, he would later write, to ‘a community of city-eschewers and suburb-disdainers’, ‘escapees from what they call The Rat Race’. These proto-hippies favoured ‘cabin-like weatherboard houses of singular unsightliness set, with a view to views, in what much resemble the crude clearings of early settlers’. Undeterred by ‘built-in snowstorms, visiting bushfires, and resident soggy clouds’, Fern Tree’s residents showed a decided partiality for ‘flagons of claret, political leftism, bellicose pacifism, the taking up of crazes and causes: palmistry, immorality, astrology, starving children (far-off and coloured), air-conditioned cells and caviar for criminals, preservation of murderers, carte blanche for abortionists’.'  (Introduction)

'This year marks 30 years since Paul Keating became Australia’s twenty-fourth prime minister. Keating’s time in the Lodge is often remembered for the eloquence of his ‘big picture’, a reconciled, republican Australia finding its security in, not from, Asia. Keating brought to the top job not only a record as the most reforming treasurer since the war, but a coherent view of Australian history that distinguished him from his predecessors in the job. His speechwriter as prime minister, Melbourne historian and author Don Watson, helped to craft many of Keating’s most famous public addresses, from the Redfern Speech of December 1992 to his moving eulogy for the Unknown Soldier on Remembrance Day 1993 and his landmark address on an Australian Republic to the Commonwealth Parliament in 1995. Watson’s account of his time working as Keating’s wordsmith was published in 2002 in the award-winning Recollections of a Bleeding Heart: A Portrait of Paul Keating PM.' (Introduction)

'Tucked in the bay of Teralina/Eaglehawk Neck is a checkerboard of rock carved from the land by the tide’s ebb and flow. The sea chemistry is eroding the stone bed and inscribing a mosaic of polygonal shapes that look almost man-made, as time falls away against the elements, slowly dissolving into the ocean. The Octopus and I, a debut novel by Tasmanian writer Erin Hortle, emerges from these shifting layers of memory, immersing the reader in a keen sense of place that emphasises the interconnection between humans and animals. It explores ideas of surface, touch and depth with an intimate and personal voice; challenging the stories we tell ourselves and the way we fit into the landscapes we inhabit. As its characters are placed in the context of the intersecting violences of colonisation, climate change and extinction, the novel reflects on the Tasman Peninsula’s bloody history and interrogates our responsibility to a warming world.' (Introduction)