AustLit

'Part memoir, part urgent appeal, Claire Dunn’s new book explores how our urban lives can become more intimate with nature.' 

'Have we done with the man in the open-necked shirt solemnly enjoying his ice cream? It would appear not. For a long time he was there in the flesh, as real as you or me. You could, if you wanted to, examine the hairs on his shins or press your hand to the pocket containing a biro and a small packet of Benson and Hedges. You could breathe in the cigarette and beer smell of him. But then he began to melt along with his ice cream in the sun. The sweetness melts and mingles with skin. You look again and he has become digital, a low-resolution copy of a copy, a little jagged around the edges. He is perhaps blending with parts of the caravan park in the background. Still, we have not done with him. We wait for him to lick again. To catch one more glimpse of that living tongue.'  (Introduction)

'Storyland carries us into new imaginative places – past, present and future.'

'In Understory Inga Simpson invites us to be more truly here than we were before.'

'It’s 1969 and a remote Australian coastal town is poised to play its part in the Moon Landing. An influx of expat NASA employees working at the tracking station on the sand dune just out of town shakes things up. A pink and grey galah cockatoo emerges from a cage at the back door of the Kelly household and uncovers some tightly-held secrets. She threads these playfully through the story of her own rising and falling fortunes in what we call the lucky country.' (Publications summary)