AustLit

'Returning to my home town again in my mind, preparatory to returning in my body, I find not unpredictably or indeed unexpectedly that I hold off. Is it that having explored it already, thought about it so much when I lived there and knew nowhere else, I have written all I would ever want to write, having recalled all I would ever want to record? Or is it that there are unrecorded but not unrecallable episodes, things I should yet look into? The old familiar tautening of the stomach muscles. But the stabs and jabs of pain, are they just the splinters from scraping the barrel and a sign it’s time to move on, but I have moved on, now I’ve moved back? Or are these the jabs of pain and tenderness of the as yet unrecorded episodes of trauma and angst and ill-repressed horror? Of course I could return looking for happy stories, comic stories, and then it would just be the pain of laughing.' (Introduction)