AustLit

'What could be more humiliating than to write and be read, to be thought about and perceived by strangers? And then the worst: to be dissected, publicly and openly, for all the things we dedicated ourselves as teenagers to hiding? Time and time again, it strikes me that the worst thing that can ever happen to an author is for people to read their book. That’s when they start to think about it, write about it, ask about it, talk about it, and eventually give it back to the author, chewed up, wet and slobbery like a tennis ball out of a dog’s mouth.'  (Introduction)

'Revenants creates a liminal zone of perception in Adam Aitken’s oeuvre. Drawing on travel, ‘place’, family memories and indeed his own memoir work, literature and an ongoing commitment to trace and critique the impacts of colonialism, there’s also a restive negotiation between the failed diplomacies of day-to-day life and the consequences of living with the dead that are and aren’t one’s ‘own’.' (Introduction)

'I now find it jarring to watch films or television programs which depict characters standing closer than one and a half metres apart, failing to don their face masks, or ignoring the use of hand sanitiser. Their naivety is frustrating and glaring. Literature which sidesteps or ignores the pandemic, the way life is now, comes across as illusory, idealised, or fantastic, as if it is taking place in an alternate universe.'  (Introduction)

'As a part time local to Bundjalung Country and someone who grew up in the flood prone Clarence Valley, I am no stranger to flood stories. As I reflect on recent and historical flood events, it is apparent that First Nations knowledges about the land have been undervalued at best. At worst, they have been flatly ignored. The failure to truly listen and observe has led to the establishment of permanent settlements in areas well-known to us to flood frequently in significant and devastating ways. Humans and livelihoods have drowned and been washed away, literally and figuratively. In the muddy depths of grief that is left behind, there are lessons to be had, opportunities to reimagine and reconfigure settler relations with the land. In fact, the emerging climate crisis, the inevitability of future disasters and the threat of another year of La Niña demands this of us all. And for each flood story, there is an Aboriginal Hero in whom our future navigational path resides.' (Introduction)

'Twelve weeks have passed since I left social media to finish my thesis. Twitter was training my brain to think in short, varied bursts, puffs and huffs of information and comment. I know it has been twelve weeks because I can identify the point in my photo reel where I last considered a shot being anything other than grist for the mill of my singular gratification.' (Introduction)   

'Gerald Murnane’s meticulously self-curated ‘Chronological Archive’ – as distinct from his ‘Literary Archive’ and ‘Antipodean Archive’, both of which he likewise compiled – fills no fewer than ‘twenty-one of the twenty-four drawers in six steel filing cabinets’. ‘In each drawer’, his catalogue stipulates, ‘at least twenty coloured signposts draw attention to items of more than usual interest’. A list of more than a hundred of these signposts follows. None of the items identified will be available for consultation until after the death of the author and his siblings. Murnane’s decision to announce his archive’s contents seems therefore premature, at least until one notices that this choice is clearly of a piece with the grand legacy-securing undertaking that is his curation of the archive itself: the catalogue’s promise that it contains much ‘humour and literary gossip’ is tacitly underwritten by its pre-emptive publication, which for all its idiosyncrasy functions primarily as an invitation to further discussion of its author.' (Introduction)