AustLit

'Whyalla is only four hours drive from Adelaide by way of Australia's Highway 1, but in many ways it exists in a different age to the cosmopolitan boulevards and bucolic hinterlands of the state capital. Some people are born here and never leave until they die. For everyone else there is no seasonal migration, only exodus; sometimes there is a golden year abroad. and e land yields wheat and grain, yet the fields and riverbanks are seeded with heavy metals and contaminants. and e fishing je"y is dilapidated, but it will be rebuilt. A kid can still trade baitfish for snapper among the crowds casting in at dusk.' (Publication abstract)

 

'This is best-case scenario and, frankly, I'm sceptical. and is topic probably requires its own long book, however sincere beginnings are never to be sneezed at. With the trigger ('this' species of trigger), arguably, we have to be happy for any small step forward. The trigger I'll explore here is a tenacious beast. It lives in our house. Leaves the lights on. Steams up the bathroom. Replaces the 'good' bread with cheap bread. Rarely, however, do we quite clock its being there.' (Publication abstract)

In 2008, Foxtel ran an ad campaign for the TV series 'Dexter'. Michael C. Hall, who played the titular serial-killer-with-a-heart-of-brass, sits at an airport boarding gate. A fellow passenger asks him every South Australian's least favourite question: 'What's in Adelaide?' Shark-eyed, Hall replies, "Adelaide has more serial killers per capita than any other city in Australia." It was another riff on the undead idea that SA is 'the murder capital of the world'. (Publication abstract)

'Navotas Port. Trawlers cut through seafoam as they moor. Sun-pruned dockmen swarm the transoms, drawing nets up onto iron decks. The boy could smell the copra and sponge even from here, at the top of the coconut tree he’d climbed. Wind sends the trunk forward and back in loping excursions. Like a crow’s nest, the boy imagines, like the first Spaniards sailing their carracks into the Bay. They’d have followed the southwest trade winds through brothlike fog and known that their wandering had ended. (It doesn’t occur to him that he’s looking the other way. More likely this was what some centuries-old hill-tribesmen saw. What they felt. Bewilderment and wonder and then, well, fear? Despair? The heat of fire, a burial somewhere shallow and unmarked. But he’s only a kid, let him have his fantasies.) Gulls fire slantways across the concrete berm. The boy’s father has materialised, slumped and bird-boned, at the base of the tree. What the hell is Child doing up there? It’s time to work.' (Publication abstract)

'My uncle and I stood out the back of our first home - a house my dad designed with a big living room facing out to the front yard. and e design was his own, resembling the homes he knew in a sort of memory, one with a large living space sometimes covered in a sea of mattresses, and other times, a space for parties, welcoming those that found themselves walking through that front door. New arrivals would sometimes opt to stay with us over the migrant hostels the government provided - somewhere that felt more domestic than a camp, a prison, a reminder. and They would take any available bed to sleep on until they found their way, my little body next to my sister's, on a small thickness of foam, we'd lay in our walk-in robes, closing the door to sleep. My uncle and I stood, on a busy night in the house, on a square of grass facing the fence of our neighbours, not looking at each other, speaking softly. I asked him, what animals should I expect to see back home, and he humoured me, describing in detail the lions and elephants, hyenas and zebras that roamed free in Oromia - our lands, our people, country somehow continuing forever, missing some bodies looking back in their minds. It was somewhere around that moment, or maybe in the retelling of my curiosity back to me, that I decided to dedicate my life to animals, or, orient myself towards a type of care, as noble and good. and at, being in care for something in which I saw beau#, to care for something that I could not yet understand but yearned to, was the highest form of devotion. Hindsight is so wild, so cutting.' (Publication abstract)

In February 2019, Nayuka Gorrie and Alison Whittaker were invited to speak at the 2019 Stella Prize Longlist Party in so-called Sydney. The event was a celebration of women’s writing, a chance to reflect on the stories and women that inspire and shape our world, as well as the announcement of the 2019 Stella Prize longlist. This conversation was a result of issues raised in both their speeches from the night.

'When I write from Narrm or Birraranga, also known as Melbourne, where sovereign and was never ceded, I do so as a settler. My own Blackness and Indigenei and does not change this fact. It is not my intention to homogenise the experiences of Indigenous peoples when I draw similarities between Brasil and so-called Australia. We are diverse in numbers, cultures, traditions and histories. I offer my respects to the elders of the Wurundjeri and Boon Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation, past, present and emerging - on whose unceded land this work was written - and to any other Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people encountering my work.' (Publication abstract)