AustLit

'IT WAS ONLY recently that I learnt about aphantasia, a condition in which people cannot conjure up or visualise mental imagery. A friend explained that if she asked her children to imagine seeing an apple, they could describe exactly what they saw in their mind’s eye. She, on the other hand, could think about an apple, but could not bring an image – of an apple purchased, an apple eaten, an apple in a picture – to mind.' (Introduction)

'At the end of the first day of spring, the clear sky is dotted with as many stars as the city’s faux dark lets through. The blue, red and yellow lights of skyscrapers, far enough away to be decorative, flicker in the night. The Brisbane River gives an illusion of solidity beneath its polished surface. Two willie wagtails pass calls around the reach; a boobook owl sits in a branch overhead as a fruit bat lands in a tall, straight palm and pulls its leaves towards the ground.' (Introduction)

'As Europe is thrown into sharp relief by a devastating pandemic, Griffith Review 69: The European Exchange explores the deep and complex relationships between Europe and Australia, and discusses how Australians of many backgrounds have contributed to a longstanding dialogue that enriches both continents.' (Publication summary)

'From our first experiences to our last, institutions structure our world – through education and medicine to politics, justice, civics and religion. But in recent years even the most entrenched of institutions are seemingly on the edge of implosion. Either through deliberate political attacks or as an effect of wider disruption, new social forces have issued a comprehensive challenge to the established order.

'Does this new uncertainty mark a profound loss of trust in how our society is organised and how it operates? Might this be an opportunity for thoroughgoing reform to regain lost legitimacy, or does it mark an end-point for a social structure that is no longer tenable in the twenty-first century? Can institutions adapt? Can trust be rebuilt? Or will new forms of social organisation eventuate from this gathering sense of crisis?' (Editorial)

'This morning, I was up at 5 am. The city sky was a layer of pewter rather than darkness, too sparsely starred, and every living thing was the shadow of itself in different depths of black. What lights I could see were streetlights, pools of orange on the main road nearby, and saucers of bright whiteness in the park that runs between that road and the smaller street that goes by our place. It was cool, twelve degrees, a Brisbane winter, and two kinds of birds were already talking: here comes the morning.' (Introduction)

'The perimeter of  the New Gaol on Norfolk Island features imposing walls set with three archways, one high and two low. The setting sun throws long shadows onto vivid green grass and the light bleaches the view through the arches to a gentle haze. This is all that remains of the pentagonal panopticon built during the third phase of convict transportation (1825–1855) to this island situated some 1,500 kilometres off the east coast of Australia. And though the prison’s buildings are long gone, these arches were once a gateway into the architecture of Great Britain’s global penal system – the ‘ne plus ultra…of convict degradation’, as Robert Hughes put it in The Fatal Shore (Knopf, 1986). What is now an elegant, slightly surreal parkland – a landscape that is picture-book perfect – is also preternaturally silent: a remnant of the comprehensive system of colonial justice and punishment that first brought the authority and might of the British Empire to this part of the world.' (Introduction)

'Imagine an airplane flying north from Brisbane to Cairns. In just over two hours, it will cover nearly 1,400 kilometres of Australia's eastern coastline and add 340 kilograms of carbon dioxide to each of its passengers' personal carbon footprints.'  (Publication abstract)

'When I was in my middle thirties, I abruptly abandoned a long-term relationship and impulsively moved from Sydney to Melbourne, having accepted a job as a senior policy advisor on affirmative action for which I was manifestly unfit.' (Introduction)

'In 2017, Australia said ‘Yes’ to same-sex marriage – a momentous event that confirmed the nation’s appetite for change and equality.

'Griffith Review 62: All Being Equal marks that event with a selection of stories that predate, anticipate and celebrate that historic moment: stories of love and despair; stories of families, protest and war.

'Edited by Ashley Hay, it features the winners of the sixth novella project, and maps the richness and complexity of Australia past and present.' (Introduction)

'I was never brave enough to visit Pompeii, partly due to an overactive imagination that combined a sense of the ferocity of Vesuvius’s blast in 79 CE and the volcano’s ongoing muttering with thoughts of the city’s Roman residents, cauterised in the eruption: outstretched hands; a dog expiring mid-roll; a mother and her child.' (Introduction)

'When I lived in Sydney, one of my favourite places was Mrs Macquarie’s Chair, a stony seat cut into a promontory beyond the Royal Botanic Garden with a view from the Opera House and Harbour Bridge past Fort Denison and on towards the harbour heads. The land’s edge there has no boardwalks, no neatly set seawalls.' (Introduction)

'Brace yourself : Amy Witting throws her first punch hard, fast and almost immediatly.

At the moment which became history, Ella Ferguson was wearing nightgown, dressing gown and slippers...

Her husband, Professor Bernard Ferguson MB, FRCS, was knotting his tie. That was why she was watching him. For thirty-two years she had taken pleasure in watching him knot his tie, handling the rich, dark silk, sliding the tightening loop under his shirt collar, where it settled into a firm, precisley placed knot. He was still extremely handsome, having stiffened more in mind than in body, but that movement recreated for her the beautiful,earnest young man she had married. buying ties for him, which seemed such a sedate occupation, was for her what the young people called a turn-on.

And then, halfway down page two of  A Change in the Lighting, Witting floors-unmoors- her main character entirely...'

(Introduction)