AustLit

'There is a story my father tells me, of what he noticed when he dropped me off at a horse-riding camp when I was seven. It cost $100, and I remember that distinct lump of guilt when I thanked him – a lump that I came to assign to a larger, more unnameable debt. The word we so often use to describe this is sacrifice, which can sound so blunt, so kitsch. I’m thinking about my friend, who tells me her parents rely on sacrifice to show her their love. It’s not love, she says, when it’s not what you want them to do. I had never thought of this before, the idea of sacrifice as something we ask for. Somehow, I don’t think my parents would agree with it. They wouldn’t see generosity towards their children as a choice, as a deliberation of weighing up the pros and cons – more like something that compels, that moves them through space.'  (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)