Novelists From Australia

"Am I alive? Death seems so hard to pin down in this century."

"As an amateur historian I think it’s the same, century after century: same shit, different flies."

"Read any history of first contact between civilizations. Even if those in power on the weaker side are able to fight back, there are always those who turn traitor and support the invaders. They are the Luministes in the picture, they sell their own people into submission to gain power under the invader."

"Laws are meant to work, not just be kept for their own sake."

"Our ship has sunk and now we try to rebuild it out of driftwood."

"I wonder whether our frameworks are more the hangups of our pre-liberal parents than we realise. In the patriarchal, restricted and desperately sexist world that came before, one can imagine that a woman without children may have been a object of concerned pity – because the old gendered denial of career paths, educational opportunities and independent incomes meant that beyond partnership and parenthood there weren't so many other fulfilling experiences for women on offer. Our biological destiny isn't to reproduce – remember? It's just to die, and find ways to meaningfully occupy our time before we do."

"it was exactly like what the old law people had always said would happen if you look after country, country will look after you."

"The important public officials, passionately depicting themselves as unified people, were obsessed with imagination, narrow though it was in their minds. Well! Aesthetics was all. (p265)"

"[Aboriginal Sovereignty] had become tied into the chosen shame of a continent stolen from his people by a pack of racists, who had turned the argument against the people whose land they had stolen, and whose intergenerational lives have never recovered from so great a loss."

"I've seen that harshness in policies handed out to Aboriginal people over decades, and it doesn't seem to get any better. That's how the politics are played out: not doing the best you can do for someone, but working out how you can beat your opponent. So the swans are a different way of pausing and reflecting on what's happening in the world, and doing it in a light way."

"She remembered Aunty Bella Donna of the Champions once saying that no story was worth telling if no one could remember the lesson in it. These were stories that have made no difference to anyone. Old Aunty was fading away forever. But... even true stories have to be invented sometimes to be remembered. Ah! The truth was always forgotten. (p210)"

"In the Aboriginal world, we deeply understand that all animals that belong to this land are our close relatives. We understand the importance of our close inter-connectivity with everything in our world. This is the ancient wisdom that we must follow. If we care for our country, the country will care for us."

"Truly all it is is commitment, belief and dedication to the task and understanding in yourself that you will do it, even if it seems unbelievable at the time."

"It’s a really important thing for Aboriginal people to remember how stories are told and the power of stories, and make it an important feature in our world again...English is my language because of the history and what I try to do, and I did that in Carpentaria in particular, is to write in the way we tell stories and in the voice of our own people and our own way of speaking"

"All the governments of the world need to act now and act urgently to turn this planetary nightmare around before it is too late, because this warning of the magnitude and acceleration of biodiversity loss is a global crisis with dangerous implications not only for one million species but for human health and long-term survival."

"The Aboriginal caretakers of their traditional country have always understood its power, and why it is so important to care for the land through developing an important system of laws that created great responsibility for caring for the stories and powers of the ancestors. These narratives of great and old wisdom are the true constitution for this country, and urgently need to be upfront in the national narrative in understanding how to care for it."

"Of course we will require a greater workforce in health and technology, but we will also need an even greater workforce with the imagination and passion to improve the health of our combined humanity, and our connectedness with the only planet we can survive on."

"Anyone can find hope in the stories: the big stories and the little ones in between."

"We cannot be guided by an ethos of neglect, brokenness of heart, misery of spirit that will lead us into a future world devoid of joy. The world’s combined humanity must sing the planet up with careful songs, songs of responsibility and respect."

"We are going to need the greatest creativity we can find to work on the ever-increasing complex problems facing our combined humanity. We cannot afford a government censoring education and knowledge."

"This is the only planet we know that supports life. We would do well to see the world as a sacred site that is holy, speak to our planet with kindness, and protect it as such."

"We've got a beautiful country, a beautiful world, why not enjoy it?"

"No matter what happens to you, you can maintain your own control about what you believe and who you are."

"Her mind was only a lonely mansion for the stories of extinction. (p333)"

"We have to think big...'We have to imagine big, and that's part of the problem. We're letting other people imagine and lead us down what paths they want to take us. Sometimes they're very limited in the way their ideas are constructed. We need to imagine much more broadly. That's the work of a writer, and more writers should look at it."

"After clouds, always mist, and another ghost story to tell. (p187)"

"In every neck of the woods people walked in the imagination of doomsayers and talked the language of extinction. (p5)"

"I have felt very privileged to know and to have been able to work with many senior Aboriginal people of great wisdom and intellect. I could name many Aboriginal people right across Australia who have influenced my thinking in a lifelong journey of trying to understand how to see, feel and understand our world, and fight for it. Their perspective and worldview is huge and cosmopolitan in its outlook. Our world is one that teaches the benefits of having eyes wide open, to be attuned to a spiritual understanding of the environment and self-knowledge, and this leads to having an ability to maintain and build internal worlds of visualization and exploration, to hold a vision. Perhaps this helped me to create a novel such as ‘The Swan Book’."

"I think that it is amazing to have a culture where stories were treasured over countless millenniums, and kept sacred to this day. It is a unique undertaking to have a governing system that was built to ensure the sustainability of the country, and built on the idea of preserving peace and cooperation between people. When you look at it in this way, this was a far more sophisticated form of culture than ones that seek to colonise others or create wars. These laws and spiritual ideas about country are known and understood by every Aboriginal person, and I think because there is such emphasis on stories, storytelling is almost second nature to most Aboriginal people."

"The girl convinced herself that only the mad people in the world would tell you the truth when madness was the truth, when the truth itself was mad. (p64)"

"People tell stories all the time: the stories they want told, where any story could be changed or warped this way or that. (p84)"

"Like autumn leaves, bad days fell away as though the genius of the room could not retain them."

"(what is one thing that you want people to take away from The Swan Book?) AW: Just to be kind to the world – it is the only one we have, and to be kinder to each other and to see the beauty and genius in all our cultures, and to see the beauty and right to exist and thrive of the creatures sharing this planet with us. The Swan Book asks for respect and the need to gain greater knowledge and respect for the responsibilities that Indigenous peoples have for the good stewardship of the world."

"Upstairs in my brain, there lives this kind of cut snake virus in its doll's house. Little stars shining over the moonscape garden twinkle endlessly in a crisp sky. The crazy virus just sits there on the couch and keeps a good old qui vive out the window for intruders. It ignores all of the eviction notices stacked on the door. The virus thinks it is the only pure full-blood virus left in the land. Everything else is just half-caste. Worth nothing! Not even a property owner. Hell yes! it thinks, worse than the swarms of rednecks hanging around the neighborhood. Hard to believe a brain could get sucked into vomiting bad history over the beautiful sunburnt plains. Inside the doll's house the virus manufactures really dangerous ideas as arsenal, and if it sees a white flag unfurling, it fires missiles from a bazooka through the window into the flat, space, field or whatever else you want to call life. The really worrying thing about missile-launching fenestrae is what will be left standing in the end, and which splattering of truths running around in my head about a story about a swan with a bone will last on this ground. (first lines)"

"Really, just do it. Many people I speak to say they want to write or illustrate, but they actually haven’t completed anything. Write it, send it off to a publisher and while you’re waiting for a response, get on with the next story. Be determined and resilient, accept rejection and criticism. The publisher and editor are there to help you make the best book possible."

"I read somewhere that all this -the people, the animals, the mountains, the rivers -is just God dreaming. I wish he'd wake the fuck up."

"I love writing picture books. When I get the germ of a new idea, I feel a little shiver of anticipation or recognition. I don’t do anything immediately about the idea. I just keep it there at the back of my mind and think about it now and again and let it ‘brew’, sometimes jotting down bits of the story. Once I’ve got the whole story in my head – I especially need to know how it starts and ends – I sit down at my computer and write the first draft. Then I keep rewriting – draft after draft – until I feel it’s as good as I can make it, which is often not nearly good enough."

"Humans are unique in this world in that, as opposed to all other animals, they have developed a consciousness so advanced that it has one awful by-product: they are the only creatures aware of their own mortality. This truth is so terrifying that from an early age humans bury it deep in their unconscious, and this has turned people into red-blooded machines, fleshy factories that manufacture meaning. The meaning they feel becomes channeled into their immortality projects - such as their children, or their gods, or their artistic works, or their businesses, or their nations - that they believe will outlive them. And here's the problem: people feel they need these beliefs in order to live but are unconsciously suicidal because of their beliefs. That's why when a person sacrifices his life for a religious cause, he has chosen to die not for a god but in the service of an unconscious primal fear. So it is this fear that causes him to die of the very thing he is afraid of. You see? The irony of their immortality projects is that while they have been designed by the unconscious to fool the person into a sense of specialness and into a bid for everlasting life, the manner in which they fret about their immortality projects is the very thing that kills them. This is where you have to be careful. This is my warning to you. My road warning. The denial of death rushes people into an early grave, and if you are not careful, they will take you with them."

"God is the beautiful propaganda made in the fires of Man. And it's OK to love God because you appreciate the artistry of his creation, but you don't have to believe in a character because you're impressed by the author. Death and Man, God's coauthors, are the most prolific writers on the planet. Their output is prodigious. Man's Unconscious and Inevitable Death have co-penned Jesus, Muhammad, and Buddha, to name a few. And that's just the characters. They created heaven, hell, paradise, limbo, and purgatory. And that's just the settings. And what more? Everything, maybe. This successful partnership has created everything in the world but the world itself, everything that exists except for what was originally here when we found it. You get it? Do you understand the Process?"

"Eight hundred million people went to bed hungry today. All right, I'll admit for a while our roles as massively wasteful consumers seemed to be doing us a world of good - we were slimming down, a good half of us had breast implants; frankly, we were looking good - but now we're all fatter and more cancerous than ever, so what's the point of it? The world is getting hotter, the ice caps are melting, because man keeps saying to nature, Hey, our whole idea of a cozy future is to have jobs. That's all we've got planned. What's more, we will pursue this aim at any cost, even, paradoxically, if it means the eventual destruction of our workplace. Man says, Sacrifice industry and economy and jobs? For what? Future generations? I don't even know those guys! I'll tell you something for free - it makes me ashamed that our species, which is so finely ennobled by its sacrifices, winds up sacrificing it all for the wrong things and comes off just looking like a race of people who like to use the hair dryer while taking a bath."

"This is exactly the kind of thing a single man can do at five-thirty in the morning, I thought - this is exactly why people have wives and husbands and girlfriends and boyfriends, so they don't allow themselves to get too creepy. But leave a man alone for long enough and there is nothing odd he won't do. A life lived alone weakens the mind's immune system, and your brain becomes susceptible to an attack of strange ideas."

"Denouncing civilization takes its toll when you continue to exist within it."

"I think that's the real loss of innocence: the first time you glimpse the boundaries that will limit your own potential."

"People carry their secrets in hidden places, not on their faces. They carry their suffering on their faces. Also bitterness, if there's room."

"I have too much free time. Free time makes people think; thinking makes people morbidly self-absorbed; and unless you are watertight and flawless, excessive self-absorption leads to depression. That's why depression is the number-two disease in the world, behind Internet porn eyestrain."

"In truth, his speech made an impression on my mind so deep, a surgeon could probably still make out the grooves. And not just because it planted a seed that would eventually make me distrust any feelings or ideas of my own that might be viewed as spiritual, but because there's nothing more distressing or uncomfortable to look at than a philosopher who's thought himself into a corner. And that was the night I first got a good, clear look at his corner, his terrible corner, his sad dead end, where Dad had inoculated himself against having anything mystical or religious ever happen to him, so that if God came down and boogied right in his face, he'd never allow himself to believe it. That was the night I understood he was not just a skeptic who doesn't believe in a sixth sense, but he was the über-skeptic, who wouldn't trust or believe in the other five either."

"I'm only sorry I was born three-quarters through this self-inflicted tragedy and not at the very beginning or at the very end. I'm fucking sick of watching this tragedy in slow motion. The other planets aren't though - they're on the edge of their suns. The reason we've never had visitors from outer space isn't that they don't exist but that they don't want to know us. We're the village idiots of all the teeming galaxies. On. quiet night you can hear their cackled laughter. And what are they laughing at? Let me put it this way: humanity is the guy who shits in his own pants and then walks around saying, 'So, do you like my new shirt?'"

"After all, memory may be the only thing on earth we can truly manipulate to serve us, so we don't have to look back at ourselves in the receding past and think, What an arsehole!"

"Stupid how we think God only hears our thoughts when we address them to him in particular & not when we think our dirty little thoughts in everyday scenarios such as I hope Fred dies soon so I can have his office, it really is much nicer than mine. The meaning of faith is our understanding w/ Creator that he will not eavesdrop on our mid's whisper to itself unless invited."

"Pity is the awful lost dazed brother of empathy. Pity doesn't know what to do with itself so it just goes Awwwwwww."