You can preview the full text online with a Membership
Female | 30s | 3 to 5 minutes
Starts on page 7
EXTRACT: A landscape...from a long time ago...I’m walking in the scrub. Mallee bush. Melaleuca. Red dirt and lizard trails. Flies. I don’t tell anyone where I’m going, because I’m five years old and my mother has told me that the scrub is forbidden. But I decide to go further than I’ve ever been, so I keep walking. Gradually...I get the sense...that I am being watched. Yes. Someone...or something is definitely watching me. I want to cry and run home, but I can’t show the watching ones how afraid I am. So, I sing.... as loud as I can. It’s a song my mother sings to me. Strange child, child of no land Child without a home.
Female | 30s | 3 to 5 minutes
Starts on page 21
EXTRACT: The ecstasy.... of weightlessness. A gorge of ancient rocks, streaks of red and black with folds of ochre. The ranges tumble away below. All the names of places disappear. A spine shudders and a lizard raises its dark head towards me. It has the horrible face of a tortured old man, though he is smiling. He winks and cranes his twisted neck, puckers his lips and his hot breath hits me, sending me higher and higher. I am alone in the darkness of space. And here...suspended beyond gravity ...I see his enormous body... the old lizard of the mountains, with the long spine of his withered back curving down to the coast.