AustLit

'There are still some hot summer nights when I can tool around Adelaide with the windows down and feel like a teenager on the hunt. It’s 30 degrees at eight in the evening, and down at the beach people are queuing for ice-cream. Henley Square’s pumpin’ and hoons are chuggin’ the strip.' (Introduction)

'Abstract: In September 2016, South Australia was buffeted by the most ferocious storm in half a century. Apocalyptic clouds gathered as thousands of lightning strikes hit the saturated landscape. The nation watched the unfolding crisis as an intense low-pressure system, two tornadoes, flooding rains and high tides demonstrated nature's raw and unforgiving energy. Cyclonic winds felled transmission towers in the north, triggering a blackout that plunged the state into darkness. Meanwhile, torrential rains threatened flash flooding, provoking two days of collective trepidation as swollen rivers broke their banks, destroying crops and inundating houses.' (Publication abstract)

'The argument in the car starts the way it always does. One brother's arm is around the other's shoulders, the two are wrestling, both are laughing and then the eldest uses too much force, the youngest screams and from the front seat I swear. It's as if it has been scripted, except...' (Publication abstract)

'South Australians have a reputation for being a little bit up themselves. They speak with soft-toned vowels. They boast of their free-settler status, pride themselves as being the progressive heart of the nation and proclaim dominance in the arts, viticulture and cuisine. In Queensland, which is Australia's yin to the yang of South Australia, they say there's no snob like a South Australian snob. Through this mix of pride and suffering, the peers down long noses, South Australians don't worry too much, unless you talk to them about their economy. That's when they bristle, because it's always been a fragile entity - always looking for the next big project, the next big thing to carry their social and artistic ambitions into the future.' (Publication abstract)

'Even though I have been lost in the pop-culture megastores of Tokyo, and touched the bronze horns of the Wall Street bull, I never truly appreciated the redemptive power of capitalism until I visited an auction of equipment from a decommissioned coal-power station. It was where I learned there is a legitimate market for 3,000-horsepower motors and semi-used spools of insulated cable. An auctioneer told me a bright-red fire door - ten feet by twelve feet of tempered steel clad with pounded aluminium - was to be repurposed as the entrance to someone's 'man cave'. Whoever had the unenviable job of cataloguing this industrial detritus had alleviated his or her boredom by coming up with sarcastic descriptions for some of the more underwhelming items: 'Divorce Pack' (three fridges, a microwave, two heaters and a cabinet); 'The Trap!!' (a mysterious steel cage contraption); and 'quantity grease tins on wall'. All of this was being sold to clear the way for the demolition of Alinta Energy's brown-coal plant at Port Augusta, a dirty old giant of industry that had sat on the saltbush tip of the Spencer Gulf for six decades. We had come here on a cold Tuesday morning to wander through the carcass of the power plant, which had incinerated enough little brown rocks to power a few thousand homes for something like 65 million hours, and either pay our respects or make out like carrion. One guy, David, whose father had worked at the power station for two decades, had brought his camera to document this piece of local and family history.' (Publication abstract)

'A celebrity chef declares dairy causes osteoporosis, and cholesterol medication is bad. Parents shy away from giving their children life-saving vaccinations. People are stringing crystals around their neck, then necking kale juice on the way to the chiropractors to have their neck cricks cracked.' (Publication abstract)

'Exactly fifty years ago, in the spring of 1966, my family left the Pennington Migrant Centre in Adelaide to drive up Highway 1 to Whyalla. Our destination, BHP's Milpara hostel, was a full day's journey away in a second-hand faded blue Ford Zephyr. As recently arrived migrants from Britain, the drive would take us into an utterly unfamiliar landscape: the red-soil and saltbush country of South Australia's upper Eyre Peninsula.' (Publication abstract)

'I recall very little about myself before the age of six. I possess no photographs to jolt the hidden memories, and those few relatives I see at birthday and Christmas celebrations have only the faintest sense of what I was like as a boy. No baby mementos; nothing of the toddler; no kindergarten tokens or pre-school art works; no school portraits or athletics day medals; no locks of hair, first teeth, first boots; no record of first words or cherished toys; and few revealing anecdotes. As I sit to write these first lines, my inner archive is almost blank as well. There are only a handful of images left over: small, discontinuous fragments, which may or may not be authentic residual traces of an otherwise forgotten landscape.' (Publication abstract)

'Adelaide's golden age began when the Beatles flew into town on 12 June 1964, electrifying the citizenry out of their country-town torpor into a screaming mass on the streets. It ended when a dressing-gowned Don Dunstan resigned office on 15 February 1979, the last day of the most exciting state government Australia has ever seen. I spent most of that period in South Australia's excellent state education system, basking in the glow of a premier who seemingly made the earth move and stars pan gloriously across the heavens in a small city that, for once in its life, felt like the very centre of the universe. No joke.' (Publication abstract)

'Abstract: SOUTH AUSTRALIA'S REPUTATION for progressive reform extends back to its origins in Edward Gibbon Wakefield's scheme for imperial systematic colonisation. Wakefield's grand plans, which inspired followers and shaped several colonies in Australasia, aimed to rid Australia of convict transportation and to assist respectable free settlers. While land policy would limit the expansion of the frontier and regulate class relationships, those who worked hard would be able to acquire land, and settlers would have a voice in the framing of their laws. Wakefield's scheme was born in the milieu of early nineteenth-century British philosophical radicalism. Jeremy Bentham died before South Australia was settled, but he was a keen supporter of its planning, and suggested that it be named to reflect its radical promise: 'Felicia', 'Felicitania' or 'Liberia'. Regardless of just how well the state has lived up to those early rosy hopes, its sense of reformist exceptionalism has been woven into its history. One of its most important political leaders, Don Dunstan, the democratic socialist and nationally influential premier from 1967-68 and 1970-79, self-consciously adopted this tradition by titling his 1981 political memoirs Felicia.' (Publication abstract)

'When Ruby first moves to town she stays with the Miss Wrights on Prospect Road, on the recommendation of her Aunt Maude. Aunt Maude is a frequent visitor, and if Ruby is spending the weekend in town, she joins them in the parlour for afternoon tea. The Miss Wrights have a horror of drafts, of catching a chill on the kidneys, but the atmosphere in the parlour - with the heavy drapes drawn to protect the furniture - is the closest of all. Occasionally a ray of light steals through a gap in the curtains, illuminating the room like a diver's torch. Cat dander glitters and somersaults in the air like plankton...' (Publication abstract)

'In 1842, the mainly British and German settlers who had arrived en masse at the beginning of South Australia's colonial history six years earlier were given a huge economic surprise. The colonists, largely farmers, artisans and public servants and their dependents, learnt of the discovery of copper ore at Kapunda. Kapunda was only eighty kilometres from the colonial capital of Adelaide. Three years later, the world-renowned bonanza copper lode at Burra was discovered. Other South Australian copper mines were to follow, and they gave the economy a huge stimulus by high-yield, low-cost mining within workable distances from a port. Even though mineral exploration was on the colony's drawing board from 1835, South Australia was largely intended to be founded on the steady labour of cropping and pastoralism and reaping the fruits of the sea. Suddenly, luck was a key player too.' (Publication abstract)