Novelists From Australia

"The boat sat well in the water, evenly hipped and clean painted. In their rowlocks, the oars knocked and creaked with business. The working, operating feel of things pleased Quick Lamb. There was nothing more warming than the spectacle of something proceeding properly after a due amount of work. He was like that with rifles, with motors, drum reels, or some fancy roadhouse's new flushing toilet. If you didn't know how they worked, then things weren't worth having - something the old girl used to say."

"I only believe in one thing, Les," Sam solemnly uttered. "Hairy Hand of God, otherwise known as Lady Luck. Our Lady, if she's shinin that lamp on ya, she'll give you what you want."

"I should have known earlier to always live like that."

"The past is in us, and not behind us. Things are never over."

"Sam followed [his father], loved him, listened to him talk. He believed deeply in luck, the old man, though he was careful never to say the word. He called it the shifty shadow of God. All his life he paid close attention to the movements of that shadow. He taught Sam to see it passing, feel it hovering, because he said it was those shifts that governed a man's life and it always paid to be ahead of the play. If the chill of its shade felt good, you went out to meet it like a droughted farmer goes out, arms wide, to greet the raincloud, but if you got that sick, queer feeling in your belly, you had to stay put and do nothing but breathe and there was a good chance it would pass you by. It was as though luck made choices, that it could think. If you greeted it, it came to you; if you shunned it, it backed away."

"You've got mean, Oriel." She sniffs. "It is the war that's done it to you?" "It's all war," she said. "What is?" "I don't know. Everythin. Raisin a family, keepin yer head above water. Life. War is our natural state." "Well, struggle maybe," said Lester. "No, no, it's war."

"She held the needle to the light. It was a wonder how something sharp came down to nothing like that. She looked through the needle's eye. So that's the Kingdom of Heaven, she thought. So that's all there was."

"You spend your whole life trying to work out where you fit."

"Over the years Ida had fattened up. She sort of spread, like a garden gone wild."

"She wished her mouth didn't run on ahead of her so much. Her mouth was never any use to her when she needed it."

"It only takes one thing to make you unhappy."

"Oriel looked at the potatoes in her hand and thought of the things she'd like to tell the spud growers of Australia about taking a little time, a little pride and a little care."

"Can you shoot?" "I s'pose you mean can I hit anything?"

"Why was it that he didn't know a thing about the underlying nature of people, the shadows and shifts, the hungers and hopes that caused them to do the things they did?"

"And you know someone's special when you never get enough of them."

"Nanna was the first dead person I ever saw. Her hair was blue against the pillow. And when me hand bumped her cheek she was cold and heavy and a kind of spark went through me, like a terrible familiar feeling. And I understood it then. She was meat. That's what dead things are."

""Sometimes it's a mighty struggle to know what's real and what's just . . . a mirage. You understand?" "Yeah," I said."

"Mum said school mighta been different for me if I only give a damn. Maybe it was wasted on me like the teachers said. I didn't have any philosophy in me then, so I didn't know what to listen for. Most of it was pointless crap. Don't reckon I met a single wise person all the years I stayed but like I say, I wasn't paying close attention. And the thing is I miss it a bit. That's something I never thought I'd hear myself say. I didn't know what I was, what I could do. Except the lame things I did do."

"Thing is, I'm not the surrendering type. Anyway I'm looking up and down that track. It was the highway or the wildywoods. That was the decision. Between something that's real and something you hope is real. I was banking everything on this call and maybe I wasn't fully right in the head by then but I went east. Roll the dice, that's me."

"I wondered what I woulda done if I'd missed that euro. But that was like wondering what your life'd be like if your dad wasn't a douche."

"I didn't even know why I liked her. She was just there. I was used to her."

"I think Australia’s sense of itself is very insecure, very shaky. And what I see around us is constant simmering tension and some kind of violence beneath the surface of this country."

"People think of hip hop as a very angry art form and in many ways that’s true – there is a certain type of danger and aggression – but there’s also a coolness and a funkiness from back where the breakbeats started. I was drawn to its ability to allow you to let free the tempestuous emotions within you, whether they be anger or pain. All of us have those emotions and feelings within us and there was something about the chunky, bodily beats of hip hop that drew me into expressing myself in that way…"

"I am not writing to make people feel warm and comfortable. When my readers enter the world of my book I want them to feel like they can find a place to belong in my story. But it is not their story, and the language is familiar but it is not their language. It is a novel about belonging and it is a novel about difference, too.'"

"Aboriginal lore is vast and it is inclusive. Bitterness comes from loss of culture and loss of lore. And we have lost those things to some degree. But if you actually understand the old culture then you understand that we are all in it together."

"This bloody bullshit about the forgotten white working class – if there’s any forgotten people in Australia, if there’s any battlers in Australia, it’s brown and black people."

"It is like having double vision. We see the world that white people see but we are also seeing a mythic landscape at the same time and an historic landscape. White people see Rotary parks and headlands, we see sacred sites."

"We try to portray ourselves as a very egalitarian society, the land of the fair go…But I think that we are quite segregated. And class exists in Australia – it’s much more slippery and hard to get your hands on than in other places where it’s more structured and stratified. But it’s there."

"I’ve always grown up as an in-betweener…Malaysian hyphen Australian, between really a working-class town, ‘struggle town’, and a really privileged private school, between secular and religious – even Queanbeyan is known as part city, part country."

"“Spider!” Mr. Patel said, coming up to him, taking his hand, pumping it hard. “You’re a hard man to find!” “Evidently not hard enough.”"

"You going somewhere with this, Spider, or can we just take it as read that you’re a bit cranky today?"

"“What about your art?”... “I gave it up.” “Gave it up? How could you give it up?” He was shaken at the news. Molly no longer an artist? He didn’t know artists could even do that; he thought it was a lifetime thing, like a sentence."

"Spider had to keep that firmly in his mind. It was a lesson he had learned on the job: things are not always as they seem. Sometimes, even most times, they are far stranger than you’d imagine, and most likely more perverse than you’d care to consider."

"“Okay, then,” Spider said. “I have the D6. I have the wicked power of pseudo-random number generation right here in my hot little hand.”"

"“When Dickhead was a little kid, he had this, hmm, ‘religious experience’, I suppose you’d call it. For all we know his little wee brain might just have had a stroke or some damn thing. Upshot, though, was he thought an actual angel appeared before him, and told him all kinds of neat but apocalyptic stuff about the universe, about God’s decision to start over, and that only the very few, the Chosen, could be part of it, and thus find out about the Final Secret of the Cosmos.” “But that’s bullshit, surely.”"

"“Spider, please, sit. I will explain everything.” “You’ll explain everything. Fine. Great!” Spider said, but inside, in his mind, he was thinking, Bag and cat have now parted company."

"“The bloody future,” Spider muttered. “What’s it ever done for us?”"

"You up for it, or am I going in again? Please note, by the way, there is only one correct answer to this question."

"It was a hard thing to contemplate, even harder to accept, the inevitable tide of technological progress, which even as it created careers for some, also destroyed careers for others."

"He’d lived with a mad sculptress for long enough that he knew (believed, really) that much of what passed for art these days was bullshit, all naked emperors and nobody commenting on it. In any case, as soon as he registered, “ah, sculpture”, he lost interest and looked away."

"To change the subject, he said, “I’ve been thinking a lot.” “What about?” “Free will.” “Free will?” “Yeah,” he said, trying not to fidget, a weird feeling in his head. “I reckon free will is bullshit.” “You need to get some sleep, Spider.” “No, no, I feel okay, more or less.” “Free will,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s an illusion. That’s all it is. Everything is already sorted out, every decision, every possibility, it’s all determined, scripted, whatever.” Iris was looking at him as if she was worried. “Where’d all this come from?” “I’ve been to the End of bloody Time, Iris. From that perspective, everything is done and settled. Basically, everything that could happen has happened. It’s all mapped out, documented, diagrammed, written up in great big books, and ignored.” “You’re a crazy bastard, you know that, Spider?” “Maybe not crazy enough,” he said. Iris was still struggling for traction on the conversation. “You think everything is predetermined? Is that it? But what about—” “No. You just think you have free will.” “So, according to you,” Iris said, looking bewildered, “a guy who kills his wife was always going to kill her. She was always going to die.” “From his point of view, he doesn’t know that, and neither does she, but yeah. She was always a goner, so to speak.” “There is no way I can accept this,” she said. “It’s intolerable. It robs individual people of moral agency. According to you nobody chooses to do anything; they’re just following a script. That means nobody’s responsible for anything.” “I said free will is an illusion. We think we’ve got moral agency, we think we make choices. It’s a perfect illusion. It just depends on your point of view.” “It’s a bloody pathway to madness, I reckon,” Iris said. “I dunno,” he said. “Right now, sitting here, thinking about everything, I think it makes a lot of sense. Kinda, anyway.” “Think you’ll find that’s just an illusion,” she said, and flashed a tiny smile."

"It was hard to just sit and relax. Everyone he saw somehow looked suspicious, especially all those people who appeared perfectly innocuous: nobody who looked that innocuous could be anything but guilty, Spider thought."

"The coffee, when he tried it, was strong almost to the point of being unbearable, but not quite. In short, it was divine."

"“But that...” Spider paused, “is a fine piece of movie magic.” From a time when movies were magic, the last days of the old Hollywood studio system. These days if a film called for a prop like that, it would most likely be rendered digitally; if it had to exist in the real world at all, it could be whomped up in a 3D printer, sintered from various powders, fused together with lasers—and utterly disposable, like most of the films that came along these days. Nobody would preserve such a thing; nobody would see the point in keeping and restoring such props. It was a sad thing, at least for people Spider’s age, who remembered better times."

"“So what is this Final Secret? Any Ideas?” Spider asked, trying to sound reasonable. “We don’t know. We just don’t know. All we know is what the Vores have communicated to us so far.” “Right,” Spider said, nodding, hating every moment of this nonsense. “And when you say ‘we’ and ‘us’, what you really mean is ‘you’, yes?” “They communicate through a living channel, yes, and that is, of course, me.”"

"Maybe he was crazy, he thought. It would explain everything. Insanity was good that way."

"He swore, pissed off, trying to keep the past in the past instead of stinking up the present."

"The future was not what it used to be."

"And in that moment, Spider noticed a strange thing. He found to his surprise that he did not dislike Mr. Patel. Which, obviously, was a long way from liking the man, but who knew? Maybe that would come in time."

"He felt a trickle of cold fear in the depths of his belly, a dread that he was going to get his wish."