Evelyn Araluen

I’ve been lugging a childhood from dad’s shed to Sydney in the boot of my car and it’s getting restless. The little gumnuts are creeping from the pages to play patty-cake with the yuri men on my back seat, tucking themselves under discarded jackets and licking droplets from the blackorg-branded waterbottles collecting under my seat. They want me to write about them – or maybe they don’t, and they just want to be left where and when they are – but in any case, they’re enjoying the ride. With their little faces pressed to the window they watch tree turn to town, and hiss and shudder as we pass the earthmovers stacked at the post-Maccas merge. I don’t take new ways to go to places I’ve known already, and I’m not likely to ever turn early from the M4, but there’s something about those green signed end destinations that reminds me of everywhere else I’m supposed to be.

In Araluen’s work spirits and ghosts speak from beyond, above and below the layers of colonial time to remind us of past in present and present in past intertwined and unresolved.