I will always remember my first wave this morning. The smells of paraffin wax and brine and peppy scrub. The way the swell rose beneath me like a body drawing to air. How the wave drew me forward and...
And though I've lived to be an old man with my very own share of happiness for all the mess I made, I still judge every joyous moment, every victory and revelation against those few seconds of living.
Dirt music, Fox tells Georgie, is anything you can play on a verandah or porch, without electricity.
So you've given away the old good and evil? asked Rose, amazed at all this rare talk from Quick.No. No. I'll stay a cop. But it's not us and them anymore. It's us and us and us. It's always us. That's...
Me? I belong to Jesus Christ. Like it or not. They wet you and get you. Anyway. No other bastard will have me.
The past is in us, and not behind us. Things are never over.
Life was something you didn't argue with, because when it came down to it, whether you barracked for God or nothing at all, life was all there was. And death.
Jesus, I told meself, harden the fuck up. She heard me say that once, Mum. To me little cousin out by the laundry where he was bawling, his knee bleeding a tiny bit. She had that disgusted look on her...
I meant to slip away, he said, busking it now.
God is what you do, not what you believe in.
Wherever I went I felt like the last person awake in a room full of sleepers
The pig winks and rolls in the bog. He kicks his legs up and his trotters clack together. The sun is low over the neighbourhood. There is the smell of oncoming night, of pollen settling, the sounds of...
Purnululu,
In the end he wore me down. Always asking. And the answer I give him is still the only one I have. What do I want? Peace. And it actually shut him up. He didn’t niggle me about it. It was like he got...
Hoping is what people do when they’re too lazy to do anything else. People
He was free and unencumbered. Which is to say alone and unemployed.
But I spose the women and the children was the closest. There’s something about the men just stops them being able.
Wash the black mud from my hands. On a light given off by the grave I kneel in the quick of the moon At the heart of a distant forest And hold in my arms a child Of water, water, water.
Firearm would be a dark presence I can do without under my own roof. Too much sinister potential. Too much unearnt power.
Will you look at us by the river! The whole restless mob of us on spread blankets in the dreamy briny sunshine skylarking and chiacking about for one day, one clear, clean, sweet day in a good world i...