AustLit

'Late afternoons in the back seat, being driven home, I fell asleep and woke up again. The gutters were full of shredded bark and slick leaf matter. Streetlights blinked on. I watched the houses pass without wanting to arrive anywhere. In clumps together, or thin and alone, conifers stood in the spaces between driveways, stark against the umber of eucalyptus.' (Introduction)

'Whenever someone plays Dave Dobbyn’s ‘Welcome Home’, my body begins to sweat. The opening acoustics are generic enough—gentle guitar twangs, meandering piano notes—but then the bass comes in, Dobbyn opens his mouth and you hear the harsh grit, a word that tips, teeters, one word, two words, three words: “tonight I am feeling.” When my mother decided to start her own radio program, she chose ‘Welcome Home’ as the intro track. She chose it, I think, because of the chorus, where Dobbyn’s restrained mumble becomes a croon: “welcome home, I bid you welcome, I bid you welcome”. Home; belonging; it was this fraught feeling my mother spoke to in her radio program. In each episode, she interviewed friends, students, asking them about their experiences of assimilation and cost in moving to New Zealand; “you have sacrificed so much,” Dobbyn sings, to be in “such a strange land.” In the first poem I wrote, I end “I do not tell her/ I wrote sacrifice in my book/ but I did not know where to begin.” This strange land has been the undoing of both of us.' (Introduction)

''Why Black Lives Matter Resonates With Black People All Over The World (An Open Letter to Australians)' is a comic created by Claudia Chinyere Akole, originally published digitally on Going Down Swinging in August 2020.

'The comic is an exploration of global Black Solidarity that compares ongoing Bla(c)k Civil Rights movements in the USA and Australia.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'—I am thinking about moving to the country. I have discussed it with Eloise. I have discussed it with my mother. Soon I will be moving to the country. I am going to sublet part of my mother’s house and live with Eloise. Eloise and I already live together, but in the city, where I aspired to be as a terminally depressed teenager that lived in the country. I do not think he would be very happy about my plans, but he was never very happy about anything and in that way we are alike.'  (Introduction)

'It was two in the morning and Eva and I were in a rental car on a six-hour drive back to Austin. It was dark and we were both so scared that we promised we would not stop talking and we would not listen to anything other than the Top 40. Pop songs slide right into your head like butter and they stick like chewed gum. They are metal kebab rods that keep the meat all in one place, hovering over an open flame. Eva told me that our fears, deep down, are of the things we think are incomprehensibly beautiful. She said, deep sea and I said, the dark and then, bridges. It was freezing but it was a nice night and the roads were empty so it was an easy drive and we were in the middle of nowhere so the stars were like, OK, we’ll bite, and took to the sky like termites. The woodwork of my skull was cracked so slightly that anything could come in, but nothing could leave.' (Introduction)