AustLit

'In the spring of 2003, a person from Hilary McPhee’s past got in touch with her. McPhee did not remember the woman’s name but recognised her immediately when they met for coffee. At high school they had played hockey together for a team called the Colac Battlers. The woman had been working for years as a personal assistant at a palace in Jordan, and her purpose in contacting McPhee wasn’t merely to reminisce. At one point in their conversation, she lowered her voice, glanced around the busy inner-Melbourne café and said that McPhee might hear from someone in Amman, the Jordanian capital, about a writing project.' (Introduction)

'Gillian Triggs is a pearls-and-perfectly-cut-jacket person these days, so it is thrilling to learn that she was dressed head to toe in motorcycle leathers when she had one of the more instructive experiences of her life. It was 1972, and Triggs, the future president of the Australian Human Rights Commission, was in the United States working as a legal adviser at the Dallas Police Department. She and a colleague took a motorbike trip through rural Wisconsin, twenty-six-year-old Triggs riding pillion as they sped through forests and open countryside. When they pulled into a backblocks petrol station, the attendant took one look at them and refused to fill their tank. ‘I remember vividly the shock of realising that we were not welcome and, worse, we could not refuel,’ Triggs writes in Speaking Up. She adds that her colleague was less surprised. ‘He was a black American.’' (Introduction)