AustLit

'I couldn't work out who they were, but on days when none of them passed, I missed them: quiet middle-aged women who moved with a light tread along the corridor of the Supreme Court of Victoria, where I sat waiting for the long, sad trial I was following to resume. Sometimes one of them would pause near my bench. They never launched into taxing conversation, but merely offered me a moment of their company. I thought of them as the comforters. Once another of them brought me a spare lamington on a plate. The heavy timber door through which she disappeared was labelled “Court Network”. I wondered if I would ever have the nerve to knock on that door.' (Introduction)

'When I read David Marr''s commanding biography, Patrick White: A Life, the storyteller in me was delighted to find that the young Patrick had been shipped to Cheltenham College in England as a youth, and that there he had experienced an exile from home and family that marked his character and his writing throughout his life. Marr eloquently describes the alienation the young boy felt upon being wrenched from his privileged and cocooned upbringing in rural New South Wales and bourgeois Sydney, to find himself suddenly a colonial misfit in one of the elite centres of English life.' (Introduction)

'History is the present, they say, and every generation writes it anew. Not just generations, but new contestants in the historical narrative of any country - conquerors and conquered, dominators and dominated. The same holds true for the study of the human past through its material remains: archaeology.' (Introduction)

'The opening scenes from The Lebs could be mistaken for speculative fiction, in which ethnic minorities are forced into guarded enclaves, surrounded by high fences and barbed wire, and monitored by surveillance cameras. But Michael Mohammed Ahmad’s second novel is closer to social realism: it is set within the surreal banality of Punchbowl Boys High School in Sydney’s western suburbs and narrated by Bani Adam, a young Lebanese-Australian man struggling to find his place in the world.' (Introduction)

'Gregory Day is a poet, musician, essayist, nature writer, philosopher, critic and novelist. All these accomplishments fleck his fifth novel, A Sand Archive. Day is a regional writer, meticulously documenting people and landscape along the south-west coast of Victoria. Coasts mean sand. There’s much to be learnt from the fact of | sand, from the high culture of Mondrian’s dunes series to engineering Victoria’s Great Ocean Road. Day grasps landscape as an intimate living thing, magical beyond our prosaic imaginations.' (Introduction)