AustLit

'The little boy Chick with big wide eyes would follow his mother into those secret places forbidden to children. Forbidden places like the early hospices standing on the edge of the city where broken-down angels would arrive to recuperate. He would listen to the old lady speak in languages called tongues which he did not yet understand. One angel after another weeping into broken hands and into the hollows of wounded backs laid their turned and twisted wings on the ground. They would then catch the feather and dance. The little boy Chick with big wide eyes would follow his mother into those secret places forbidden to children. It was there he would learn to carve tears from Carrara marble and sapphire glass.' (Publication abstract)

'Chester cried when Sue left, slow burning tears. He clung to her shoulders but she lifted his arms from where they weighed heavily on her. With a nervous breath, she let go of his wrists, letting them fall to his sides, limp. A shadow around her eyes told him she was afraid.' (Publication abstract)

'His dreams of home are dreams of trees. Behind eyelids now modestly creased he summons dense woodland where in waking life there is none. It is in this way he dreams of a lover. Beyond the sudden borders of the town he knew as a child lies an all but treeless plain. Boulders - the bones of an indifferent batholith - crowd the hillsides. In the space between the tribal stones a flaxen speargrass meadow shivers. Of the few trees to be found here, most, now, are dead. Shallow-rooted pockets of candlebark, peppermint and snowgums once cadged bare life from the hollow. Trunk and branch they huddled against the frost, their foliage befouling the slopes in dirty green swathes. From a distance, these sparse stands appeared as something smeared onto the landscape. Now, for the most part, the trees are reduced to ashen corpses.' (Publication abstract)

"Here's an oldie but not a mouldy," says the DJ. "This is for Thom and Victoria on their anniversary. Keep the love light burning, guys." (Publication abstract)

'In the mid-1970s the composer Peter Sculthorpe (1929-2014) acquired a petit, detached cottage in the Sydney suburb of Woollahra. The residence at 91 Holdsworth Street was based on one of the simplest variations of a dwelling: an entrance door flanked symmetrically by windows, its ready emotion reminiscent of a child's drawing, a symbol of a house as much as its reality. The building dated from the end of the nineteenth century, but Sculthorpe enjoyed repeating that it originated in the 1840s with a single room for a shepherd, invoking a distant, rustic past, perhaps a very distant past when gods could disguise themselves as shepherds. Associations between the composer and the house became entwined during the four decades of his residence. Informed passers-by might remark to their companions "That's Peter Sculthorpe's house", and leave them with this compound of ideas.' (Publication summary)