AustLit

'It was a random post on social media, but it unexpectedly moved me: a woman asking, for research purposes, what is something your mother can do that you cannot? There are many in my case, but my instant response was: I can’t cook like my mother. Soon followed a deeper realisation: I wish I could cook like my mother.' (Introduction)

'I’ve worked as a teacher of English as a foreign and second language for many years and know how to teach the difference between the word ‘house’ and the word ‘home’. I teach that the former is a structure made from concrete or bricks, mortar or wood, while home is a conceptual idea of place and belonging. I can say with certainty that one provides the protection of a solid and quantifiable shelter, but I can’t be as unequivocal about the other. The longer I live outside my country of birth, the further I move away from understanding. I have become unstuck because I have no useful comprehension of the meaning of the word ‘home’ anymore. I can arm myself with synonyms such as ‘nation’, ‘family’, ‘familiarity’ or ‘being at ease’, but these words are purely academic.' (Introduction)

'The term ‘radical empathy’ found me. I didn’t go looking for it. Seemingly innocuous at first, these two words metamorphosed into a kind of prolonged sliding-doors moment; my thinking changed forever. This is the power of a name, a phrase that offers a beacon of hope, a solid nugget of meaning. It’s a winding path away from all-consuming rage, hatred and violence.' (Introduction)

'Towards the end of last year, a friend and I sent each other emails full of the thoughts you try not to give voice to. If we were going to be preppers, where would we choose to live? If we bought a block of land in the country, where would we buy? Personally, I’ve always been keen on East Gippsland. The conversation continued. Should we be more concerned about rising sea levels, drought or bushfire? Were we planning on growing vegetables? Keeping chooks? My friend worried about what to say to their children. How bad could it be, we wondered. Bad, we decided. When it happens, my friend added, it’s going to happen quickly.' (Introduction)

‘' It’s like the apocalypse out there.’ How many times I heard it said in the summer, in the bushfire season. The exclamatory tone of the early months made way for weariness in January, and desperate humour by early autumn as floods, brown rain, the COVID-19 virus and the great toilet paper crisis of the first weeks of March replaced drought and fire.' (Introduction)

'This is a difficult piece to write. It cuts closer to the bone than most of what I have written; closer to my bones, through my blood and flesh to the bones of truth and country. There is truth here, not disguised but in the open, and that truth hurts. As I caress the truth with my blood and bones I find it increasingly hard to breathe. At the core is a discussion I had with my dad, Graham Coleman, a Noongar man and a member of what some of us have come to call the ‘Hidden Generation’' (Introduction)

'Painting is a silent art, yet so few artists have mastered silence—in Australia, Jeffrey Smart; in America, Edward Hopper; and in Denmark, Vilhelm Hammershøi. If I do not dwell on Smart it is because I sense his debt to Hopper; Smart was born and raised in Adelaide, and though I have wanted him to win my love he has only won my admiration. Hopper, though, crept into my consciousness more than half a lifetime ago, and while I have not spent every moment of those years thinking about his paintings, it is impossible to imagine my life without them.' (Introduction)

'The past is not a fixed object. It recedes when you land in another country, falling back further as you get married, have children, change jobs, move house. I was 23 when I left for Melbourne. I will always be 23 to those who last knew me in the Philippines.' (Introduction)

i.m. Nermin Divović, Sarajevo. 18 Nov. 1994. File photo

'The imaginative literary mind is as boundless as it is borderless and bountiful in its way, finding ways of powerfully creating anew the already imagined with the unimagined or unimaginable. Possibly George Orwell had thought something like this when he explained that the imagination was like certain wild animals that do not breed in captivity, and that writers who denied this fact were in effect demanding their own destruction.1 The dreamlike state of imagining is continuously curious while it shifts and reshapes its positioning and influences. But imagination is never alone. There is a fight going on all day long in the mind of the writer about how to counterbalance the fanciful world of the imagination.' (Introduction)