Environment and climate

I need to go back to that daylight encounter in Homer Street and walk up to that fox, and look it in the eye. I need to have a better conversation with that fox, a more honest one.

What I remember is my grandmother teaching me how to draw the wind.

Fungi are integral to the functioning of ecosystems; we ignore them (and it seems that in our environmental legislation we do ignore them) at our peril. But this ignoring, sometimes bordering on outright hostility, is being slowly, partially corrected by a literature on fungi and a culture of fungal regard emerging (shiitake-style) from the woodwork (a woodwork they will perhaps go on to devour, if they’ve learnt anything from the wood-rotting fungi that Pouliot proudly claims have sunk more ships than all the naval battles since 1600).

Every time I see a bird or bee these days,’ a friend says when we are talking on the phone, ‘I find myself wondering if it’s the last.

Do the fish really still care about us as human or post-human? As the oceans fall to our pollution, as the rivers dry up contaminated, will they answer our plea for knowledge? A sun shower evokes a shared moment of renewal, it offers communion and connects us to water as bathed in light, on skin…. Indigenous culture and knowledge is a key to sensing our part in the interrelational cosmology, the multiverse, the inner and outer worlds of perception and action.

There’s ghosts in the reserve. There’s a rusted windmill and water tank, old concrete feeding troughs and burnt out cars that crawl with the living – goannas, stray dogs, panthers. Every life I have knows this reserve and the liminal scrub it spills through the suburbs, which swallows the correctional complex to the west and edges up to the cattle station on the east.

Hooper dug through court transcripts, documents and interviews to recreate the Black Saturday bushfires and inquest and to present a context for her account of Brendan Sokaluk’s crimes. If not handled carefully, reconstruction narratives can turn stories into unsolvable puzzles. This is because they derive their narrative coherence from atomised sources that often conflict with each other. While Hooper does allow her multiple characters many digressions, The Arsonist achieves its clarity through strict linear chronology.

‘Writing ecocentric fiction is relational. Like ecology, like phenomenology. Like a medicine bundle. Like a carrier bag.’

My longing for a baby will seep through my life, but if having a disability has taught me anything, it is that there are limits to my ability to support my art and a child, just as there are limits to the resources of our world.

‘This was the first field trip the researchers had organised together. Everything was, to some extent, tentative and provisional.’