AustLit

'You never make a fresh start. You are always carrying the lumber of the preceding into every new beginning. There is always the hangover of the past evening blighting the freshness of the new morning. So that you start already feeling sick. You have imported a continuity. Even when you don’t remember what it is. Just the dull ache. The consciousness of past bruising, the consciousness of past consciousness. So that waiting for the light plane to take us up and away, fresh seas, over fresh seas to the separation of an island, all that salt water in between, purifying, sterilising and yet also preserving, waiting there I felt the dull throb of the accumulated past. Even if I couldn’t specify it. Trying to focus on it I couldn’t define it, whatever it was, generating that unease.' (Introduction)