AustLit

'How can we tell the story of places where families with limited means came and went and made a living of sorts, places that act as meeting points between the old and the new, the long established and the newly arrived, where each generation is given the opportunity to understand itself as different from a previous generation and, hence, able to break away? How can we describe the emotions that characterise these places, emotions that contain just enough volition to push a person out into the world in search of something better? How can we convey the manner in which these places remain behind, providing shelter when the noise of all that they had made possible becomes too confusing, or the feeling of strangeness experienced when we return to these familiar places and discover that everything we thought we understood about their nature was simply a product of our wants and needs? How can we turn this unsettling realisation into a story, not just for ourselves, but also for the people who brought us to these places, people that we loved and spurned and whose lives are bound to ours in ways too complex for us to understand?' (Introduction)