AustLit

'When H saw the rock board in the local tip shop, she knew she had to have it. IGNEOUS, SEDIMENTARY, FOSSILS, METAMORPHIC and MINERALS, its 52 specimens displayed in five taxonomic groups, each labelled with red DYMO tape. These were the labels of a carefully arranged mineralogical landscape, the force fields of its specimens tamed and framed. With two gold coins she purchases the rock board, brings home this trophy of small losses and lives with it. She could not have known the hand that had brought these samples, these fragments, together but like so many others circulating the globe, this dispersed collection carries with it the zeal of a geological education – a portable landscape of Tasmania’s idiosyncratic terrain...'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Let me tell you a story. Inside this body there is a heart. Not like yours. A pulsing orb of spectral colour and flow. It's a waterfall. Now a rainbow. Now a snow storm. Splitting shards of light into mist and colour. With every beat of this body. I want things. Regret things. Diminish. Forgive things. Inside this body there is a heart. Just like yours.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'A prospector, he was born on 7 October 1846 at Stuttgart, Duchy of Württemberg, where he was educated. A clerk in a chemical firm, he later trained as an edible-oil technologist with a large chemical manufacturing company in Hamburg, where he worked in the export department as he was fluent in English and French. He was delicate and the bitter winter of 1868 brought on a serious lung weakness, so he decided to leave Germany for a warmer climate. He arrived in Melbourne in 1869 and, on advice from friends, moved to New South Wales. He worked on Walwa station, then wandered from place to place until engaged as a boundary rider on Mount Gipps station in the Barrier Ranges in the far west.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'This is how comets live and die; their sparkling tales are made of melting as they pass too close to the burning stars. The more beautiful the strike, the more damage is done.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'In teeming numbers the eels move through this vibrant world of water. Arriving during the rainy season when the remnant-lakes swell and the volcanic plain swells like a colander in a tub, the eels leave the salt water, summoned to the freshwater by a baffling endocrinal change that compels them landward to furlough as another kind of fish for a while.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'They had pressed through the early discomfort of their slack suburban muscles into true track hardiness, lean and strong, but had then stepped further into a new phase: vicious cramps, the sweat dissolving their joints. The slow, patient wear and tear needling away and sewing them a suit of weariness and strain that covered their whole bodies.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'This is how we move. We break one world to make another. And the remnants of the first world are all passaged, transformed, traced into the new one.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Only one seal remains with her on the rock. Unlike the dark forms that have returned to the sea, her companion is silvery white, and has fixed her in a wide-eyed, liquid gaze. She waits for a movement, when she knows that she must quickly strike. But when movement comes it is her that draws back.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'I, like you, am curious about nature, drawn to its vivid forms, its minutiae and exquisite variation. I see the world more deeply than many and know that when we are sensitive to the breaking waves of sunlight, the force of agitated water or the warm steamy air rising from the forest floor, our consciousness sharpens and bites like a knife upon a stone.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Networks severed and networks tested; or, networks ruptured and networks restricted; or, networks cut and networks cut. Some can’t take the waiting, or the food, or the lights, or the bodies, or the families, or the conversations, or the dead flowers, or the smells, or the tea … and OK, I guess.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'As the log lay motionless, the activity of the past 24 hours was replayed in inertia. The tool marks, falling into the tree from thrown shoulders and a chunk of rock, were suddenly rigid, rehashing each moment in stillness.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'A small clear tannin stream continuously flows around and below the shelf and provides a constant and pure source of water. Apart from the very occasional appearance of large birds of prey there is little sign of other fauna.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'I find myself asking how does an 'age' begin? How does someone living 10,000 years ago 'discover' copper and start a period of weaponry, artistry and utility unlike that seen (or imagined) previously?'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'This country is made of mountains. Some pieces of the mountains have rolled downhill and sit in public squares of villages and cities or at the lake promenades as erratic blocks. They are called foundling or gibber. Very small rubblestones turn into pebbles and they are rarely found in the tidy cities. The stones pictured here have been collected on the streets of the city, where even little pebbles are considered obstacles.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'This country is made of mountains. Some pieces of the mountains have rolled downhill and sit in public squares of villages and cities or at the lake promenades as erratic blocks. They are called foundling or gibber. Very small rubblestones turn into pebbles and they are rarely found in the tidy cities. The stones pictured here have been collected on the streets of the city, where even little pebbles are considered obstacles.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'I commence this roll in the mud account, that sets out to loosely predicate and prevaricate, on the little known shiny pleasures that are sometime observed, in the most boring of all the clastic-ites and shytes ... the much maligned and ill-forgot mudstones.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Shale compresses and covers, yet can erupt and crack and split and reveal what it has held firm, and shows that everything is interconnected, cause and effect. In this sense shale is Tasmania. Layer upon layer. A dark confusion.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'As the route gains altitude, the integrity of the road’s surface diminishes; cracks reveal substrate, edges soften into the landscape and the village dissolves into a relaxed form of agriculture, then a feral fusion of native plants and weeds. The ascent becomes so acute that the Ape struggles to maintain its speed and, suddenly spent, spontaneously gives up, making a sound similar to a baby releasing a slow-motion raspberry from its wet lips.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'To go underground – Penetralia; the innermost secret parts and recesses; to go within, between rock and body, mysteries and doubt. A place of stillness – the black quiet world of fossil.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'There was a whiff of petroleum in the air. He turned and was faced with the towering sight of a cruise ship’s front hull. There was a dead body hanging by one leg from a rope that was attached to the anchor opening, and immediately to the right, in huge capital letters, was written THE WORLD.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Each day I sit on the slab of granite, estrange myself from the surrounding world, to find and spend time with you.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'What comes
next: the long descent.
To let our tired bodies down,
over rock that has weathered
us, under the swift mallet
of light that grinds us
to the ground.
Beloved this world
isn’t even ours.
And it is also,
profoundly, ours.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

' This is not a jellyfish.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'It was an industry that spawned respectable businessmen in the Australian cities, whose names still designate streets and suburbs: men who made their start on the islands off Tasmania.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'These things leach through the unconscious one drip at a time.

'A tube of copper, a tin of coffee, a pair of broken wheels. Timber, always timber and string.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Millions of years of evolution buried deep within the double helix of my body's biologic fabric were on display during those few raucous hours. Rock enveloped in reptile embedded in mammal. Moan.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'It's the hardness that holds no moisture. It's the completeness, the stillness that has no give — no reflection of the other ... In this case at least it's not even a coldness. That would imply disdain.

'No. These are the eyes of someone who does not love, nor even care. These are the eyes, as I remember them, as I looked up as a small child, into the face of my grandmother.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'But there was no implosion. The opposite happened; the hospital partially exploded and before we understood what was happening, great plumes of water rose up towards the sky as the shrapnel arched towards us. Great parts of the hospital flew at high speed towards the crowd in a silent theatre of gravity and mass and the unharnessed possibilities of matter.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'It was Elena who started the conversation. ‘I use зелений, червонийй and синій for my portraits.’ I wasn’t sure I had heard correctly but she repeated it. ‘Green, red and blue to make skin tones.’'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'If one could learn to read the distinctive handwriting etched into each stone, and the sometimes-illegible messages scrawled into its very structure, one might start to understand the history of deep time.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.