AustLit

'Every morning I would press my nose against the glass and try to imagine what this place could be. A bare room with white walls and beautifully polished floorboards in a shopfront next to a laundry and a bus stop. As I waited there for the last of the three buses to my new school, I saw pictures on the walls which were routinely replaced by others. Nothing else changed. What was this place for? What did the simple, hand-lettered name on the window-glass mean? There was no furniture, nothing obviously for sale, nothing to indicate a function. I was nine years old, and I had no idea that public places existed for experiencing and discussing art.' (Introduction)

'During my doctoral fieldwork researching Islamophobia from the point of view of the ‘Islamophobes’, I spent many weekends in the town of Bayside on the Central Coast of New South Wales, where my parents had bought a holiday house. I had detected that Bayside’s unmistakable Anglo-Australian majority population was ‘disrupted’ in the holiday season and long weekends when many ethnic and religious minorities from Western Sydney descended on the town. Among the crowds was a highly visible and growing Lebanese Muslim tourist population. One evening I was walking with my father when a car slowed down beside us. One of its occupants, a young Anglo guy, leant out of the window, yelled, ‘Go back home you bunch of pumpkin seeds!’ and promptly sped off.' (Introduction)

‘Straylya’. That's how I can remember first hearing it – stray-lya – as if it was a place filled with strays. I wasn’t aware at that very young age of paying too much attention to the origins of the country’s name. But later I recall a growing sense of satisfaction that it suited the place my small family had decided to make their home. My parents had been dedicated strayers well before they got here. They’d ridden motorbikes all across Scotland and the north of England in the postwar years. Proud owners of a BSA Golden Flash, they were members of a club that set off each weekend to rumble through the Royal Mile and head out beyond the Edinburgh boundary lines, into the moorlands and hills and glens. When I came along there was a sidecar added, and I became the club’s baby. Lots of pictures of me being passed around – all rugged up with fat, wind-chafed cheeks – to members posing proudly by bikes lined up against backgrounds of fairly grim grey landscapes. Looking back at those old photos now, I realise the club was training me in the art of straying.

'Swinging in my hammock, it’s hard to get to sleep. Beside my head the sea bounces between hull and wharf – a hollow liquid sound, repetitive scrape and gollop. The rhythm hauls up lines from a sea shanty:

'Oh the anchor’s onboard and the sails are unfurled
We’re bound for to take her halfway round the world.'  (Introduction)

'On a dusty corner just before the Oodnadatta Track begins to unfurl across the centre of Australia, there is an unassuming mud-walled building on the edge of Marree, a town with a population of one hundred and fifty. Grey nomads pull up outside the general store across the road in their four-wheel drives to stock up on beer coolers and meat pies, and they barely notice the humble thatch-roofed structure. Behind them, young families clamber over the platform of the old Ghan railway, paying no attention to the building. The only identifying mark next to the dirt walls and old wooden beams is a small notice stuck on a stick in the ground, which looks like it is stencilled on in pen. It proclaims that this spot is ‘Dedicated to the memory of the pioneering Muslim cameleers and families of Hergott Springs (Marree)’. It is also the remains of the first mosque in Australia.' (Introduction)

'What I want is for three people to speak to you. Merlinda Bobis, Julie Koh and Mammad Aidani. You may know one of them, three of them, none of them. Whatever. I will speak to you too, I guess. So it’s one of you and four of us.' (Introduction)

'On Australia day in 2016, artist Elizabeth Close was at an Adelaide shopping centre speaking to her young daughter in Pitjantjatjara, when a woman approached and said to her: ‘It’s Australia Day. We speak English.’ Close was shocked, and replied, ‘Pardon?’ The woman slowed down her speech and repeated herself. Close retorted that as she was speaking a native Australian language, she ‘could not get more Australian’. The woman walked off without another word.' (Introduction)