AustLit

'In the public imagining, many equate Tasmania (Lutruwita) with Truganini – the ‘last Tasmanian Aboriginal’. This narrative of the last Tasmanian is a deliberate one, engineered by the colonial project, to lay claim to the truth. The undeniable and true history of genocide in Lutruwita is not to be conflated with the total extinction of its first peoples. To do so erases First Nations existence and survival in Lutruwita – literally.' (Introduction)

'In the thirties, Ernestine Hill humped a swag from Broome to the Territory, and south to Port Augusta, writing travel features for southern newspapers. About the same time, Daisy Bates had been camped for a decade at the soak at Ooldea, studying Aboriginal people on the edge of the Nullarbor plain. Into the Loneliness is an engrossing portrait of these two women whose vocation led them to live unconventional nomadic lives.'  (Introduction)

'Fairy tales are a running motif in Alice Pung’s new novel, One Hundred Days. Fairy tales can operate on many levels — they can entertain children, warn of dangers, provide heroes or heroines who are able to overcome obstacles; for Jungian analysts, they can be an expression of the collective unconscious. Just as fairy tales can work on many levels, the references to them in One Hundred Days are also multi-layered, from the numerous invocations of the classic 80s modern fairy tale movie Labyrinth, to the plot itself, that draws on the story of Rapunzel, locked up in her tower.' (Introduction)

'I don’t want to alarm you, but if there is something you have thought about doing, whether you thought you should do it or that you might like to do it or that maybe it wouldn’t hurt to do it, if it involved moving through space across a vast distance or even a relatively short distance but one that lay outside the walls of your house, if it involved speaking to, touching or spending any length of time with someone, or touching with a bare hand something that another person may have touched, also with a bare hand, or else breathed on, or sitting in relatively close proximity to other persons while indoors and maybe even eating something while you sat in those crowded surrounds, or being in the vicinity of persons who demonstrate a clear preference for speaking in raised voices or, god forbid, shouting, then probably it would be sensible to defer that desire for now.' (Introduction)