AustLit

'It's not what you expect to find in the desert: a rustic sandstone church, complete with picturesque spire, rural gothic in style, incongruous and quaint in the flat, arid landscape. The church, with its picture-book statue of Jesus out front, is the most distinct and unlikely landmark in Balgo, a small indigenous community deep in the heart of Western Australia's Great Sandy Desert, just south of the Wolf Creek Crater.' (Publication abstract)

'A friend in Colombo said 'a trip to Jaffna is emotional', as she described the impact of travelling through the war-ravaged countryside of Sri Lanka's Northern Province - a battle zone for almost three decades, and the site of intense fighting between government forces and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in 2009. ' (Publication abstract)

'The grocer smiled at me then glanced down at his tray of peaches. They were succulent, flawless, tinged with scarlet, the size of cricket balls.' (Publication abstract)

'Three Hummock Island. Standing atop The Nut, I rolled the name around in my mouth. It seemed huge, standing aloof off the coast like a ship waiting to come in, cloaked in that odd, diffused light. Strange, I thought, that I had sought out places like this on the other side of the world, yet this one, just half an hour's flying time from my home, I had never heard of.' (Publication abstract)

'The traditional owner, a senior woman with a tough grace, welcomed us to her land. Her words were plain and her voice was tinged with a sense of pride. Her group was one of the few in southern Australia to obtain a native title determination recognising the members as native title holders. They were now part of the social fabric of this small rural town in Victoria, and before the proceedings had commenced, one of the local dignitaries had engaged her in quiet conversation. I overheard a few of her words: 'next meeting', 'can't see any problem with the proposal', and 'good rain'. Everyone was talking about the rain. There had been more rain since January when the floods had hit, and all the waterholes and creeks were overflowing. It was still raining.' (Publication abstract)

'Eight or nine years ago I found myself thinking about the strangeness of a place in which I'd lived as a boy, strange in several ways, but most vividly because there, in Tennant Creek, unlike any other place in which I'd lived before or have lived in since, there were Aborigines. I knew almost nothing about them, either in general or in Tennant Creek in particular, and I began reading. Early on, and more or less by chance, I came across a slim volume titled After the Dreaming, by a W.E.H. Stanner, and picked it up simply because it wouldn't take long to read. That was a miscalculation of ignorance. Only three or four pages in I was already slowed by the force, density and passion of the argument. Soon I was reading line by line, word by word.' (Publication abstract)

‘In human reckoning, Golden Ages are always already in the past. The Greek poet Hesiod, in Works and Days, posited Five Ages of Mankind: Golden, Silver, Bronze, Heroic and Iron (Ovid made do with four). Writing in the Romantic period, Thomas Love Peacock (author of such now almost forgotten novels as Nightmare Abbey, 1818) defined The Four Ages of Poetry (1820) in which their order was Iron, Gold, Silver and Bronze. To the Golden Age, in their archaic greatness, belonged Homer and Aeschylus. The Silver Age, following it, was less original, but nevertheless 'the age of civilised life'. The main issue of Peacock's thesis was the famous response that he elicited from his friend Shelley - Defence of Poetry (1821).’ (Publication abstract)

‘My first encounter with the work of Sidney Nolan was when I was a boy and was working on an Exmoor farm. An Australian gave me a book on the outback. It was illustrated with black-and-white photographs of a vast silent land that was mysterious to me and which compelled my imagination. Although I didn't know it at the time, the haunting photographs in the book were the work of the Australian artist Sidney Nolan. I came to Australia on my own at the age of sixteen in search of Sidney Nolan's outback. It was the most important decision I have ever made. I still revisit central and north Queensland and have many friends there. That strange and beautiful country photographed with the imagination of Nolan has been a deep and lasting influence on my life as a writer.’ (Publication abstract)

‘At 1090 pages, containing 'over 1000 poems from 170 Australian poets', Geoffrey Lehmann and Robert Gray's new volume is a large collection, dwarfing its rivals The Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry, edited by John Kinsella (2009, about 300 poems) and The Puncher and Wattmann Anthology of Australian Poetry, edited by John Leonard (also 2009, about 450 poems). All three anthologies come at the end of a relatively fallow period when, although there have been many anthologies with a specific brief (contemporary, women's, religious), with the exception of John Leonard's 1998 Oxford Anthology there have been no synopses of the Australian oeuvre since Rodney Hall in 1981 and Les Murray in 1986. Leaving aside the effort involved, and the economics of realising such large projects, one reason for their scarcity must surely be because it has become increasingly difficult to master the variety of perspectives and the sheer number of publications involved in researching recent Australian verse.’ (Publication abstract)

‘ 'You've got to hang shit on the place,' an ambitious journo mate urged me in early 1989 when I was sent to Brisbane to work as the correspondent for the Age. 'Treat it like a foreign posting,' said another who'd been there before me, adding I would 'need a lifeline out'’ (Publication abstract)

‘Kat hope at the akeyulerre healing centre in Alice Springs has organised a trip for the families back to their traditional country so that the angangkeres (healers) can collect herbs and visit places associated with healing powers. I have been invited due to my affection and enthusiasm for these places. The trip that was intended to encompass Little Well and Wyeecha/Uyetye has to be revised. We aren't heading south-east as Dominic Gorey, who was to have led the men, was in court on Friday for bashing his wife, and is currently spending three weeks at Her Majesty's pleasure. So Little Well remains on the cards for another trip when he walks.’ (Publication abstract)

‘Traffic is like nature. Traffic flows and banks up, it weaves and surges. Traffic makes shadows and streams. It hums and screeches and throbs. Traffic glows in the dark. Traffic can be heavy or light, like the rain. You and your car are part of the traffic yet you also observe this phenomenon, 'traffic', as if you were not implicated in it at all.’ (Publication abstract)