AustLit

' I lost my religious faith the day I discovered my father was a fifth columnist. I say lost, though it is perfectly possible I never truly had it. But there I was, 16 years old in my school uniform, wearing a paper badge that read 'Jesus Saves!' or perhaps 'Smile, Jesus Loves You!' - something of the sort. It was about five centimetres in diameter and stuck to the lapel of my blazer. The words, whatever they actually proclaimed, were in orange lettering on a purple background. It was the 1970s.' (Publication abstract)

' I didn't understand why I was screaming. The air outside was clear, purified by the trees of outer Melbourne. The sunlight was pale and softly warm and the only formation I saw when I looked in the sky was pastel eucalyptus leaves. It was a promising day of early spring, relief for cold knuckles. What's more, I was on borrowed time, it was the school Curriculum Day, a welcome event as year six was growing stale.' (Publication abstract)

'My daughter has just finished school. I contest this fact most days, driving her to distraction. I keep prosecuting the point - darling, it can't be over - because I'm almost certain that in her private life, in the life she enjoys precisely because it exists outside the orbit of my benign parental suffocation, there are practical tasks she may have neglected. I also keep prosecuting the point because there is no other avenue for me to articulate my own incredulity. I'm not sure how we got here. I find rage brimming in me as I contemplate the finality of the milestone. For some reason our local preschool cops the weight of my animus. I drive past it most days, conveying my teenagers to school, driving with heart pounding to work, to get to that radio interview, to that panel I'm supposedly hosting, to get in to work before the car park at Parliament House reaches capacity, to run upstairs to be at my desk in time for a news conference; or driving in less harried fashion in the direction of Civic in times of leisure, crawling mulishly past this totem of our collective past, this prosaic suburban sacred site, which is profoundly indifferent to my current pulses of irrationality.' (Publication abstract)

'My friend has just separated from his partner of seven years, for reasons that horrify him because they're so seemingly mundane. He's holding together admirably, his ex-partner is too, but yesterday he almost broke down at a medical centre, filling in a form that asked for an emergency contact, when he realised he didn't know, any more, whom he should nominate. It's the little things, he says. I've got a handle on the big stuff, but the little things still kick me in the guts. I tell him this is always, always how we operate as human beings, that the big things are too abstract, somehow, for us ever really to have to deal with, but the tiny details, the everyday occurrences and injuries are our undoing, as much as they are the things that bring us joy. The small transfers of energy that shock us, sudden and electric.' (Publication abstract)

'Everyone here in the waiting area of the Family Violence Court Division of the Magistrates Court is playing a game. It's called Bad Guy or Victim? Women are curled on chairs, glassy-eyed and stunned, their family and friends dozing beside them, while men pace up and down in righteous indignation, or sit texting furiously.' (Introduction)