Ross Gibson

The dull fact bears repeating: routines of denial are so powerful and widespread in Australia because they are habituated; generation after generation, knowing-but-not-acknowledging gets re-inscribed in almost everyone’s cognition every single day that we live under the charring sun, on the taken ground. The fact is, we are habituated to denial. Denial comes easily, almost automatically, because we have been rigorously trained in the rubber-necked routine of seeing and looking away since the inception of the nation.

In Lew-world the otherworld always presses. There is a valence in Lew’s language, an instilled quality of extra-potentiality, of sinister burgeon.

‘The when-and-where of my initial reading was this wildly unstructured but avidly associative scramble through historical and imaginative space-and-time.’

The Alexandria night-walks give me regular epiphanies, startling little bursts of beauty or revelation that gleam out in sombre-soft places that scowl differently in the day-glare.