AustLit

'I’ve been thinking a lot about ghosts and the different ways we are haunted. A phenomenon often represented in literature as otherworldly, mythical—‘not real’. But in ‘reality’ spirits appear as sensations or experiences that are quite ordinary, generally ignored or misinterpreted when they don’t resemble the ghoulish horrors captured in TV, film, books and religion. I began reading Hoa Pham’s The Other Shore when I started an archiving job at the State Library of Western Australia. While ostensibly a role that requires collecting and analysing photographic materials, cataloguing, provenance, data integrity and preserving history, it’s fundamentally about dead people and what we do with their ghosts. Nations like so-called Australia or Việt Nam—where Pham’s novel takes place—are full of ghosts, yet the governments of both have a sly way of engaging with them.'(Introduction)