Rise & Shine
Page 18
There was a third reason that would lead her to take to the wall with the sledgehammer: if she completed her work. If she were redundant. If the earth were restored to something resembling habitation.
The central autoscreen in front of Cleave showed Walker half on the bed, half on the floor. She wanted him to roll over. There would be so much more information on his face than on his scarred back. After a long moment, she moved the screen to the left. She shifted her attention to a wild thunderstorm that had just broken over the island of Barbados. She turned the volume up, and listened to the pounding rain, in real time.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I dedicate Rise & Shine to Zoë Gill, Thomas Berg, Millie Allington-Gill, and Laura Allington-Gill. I am lucky to live in a household full of love, tolerance, chat, big and strange ideas, and good and bad jokes. My love and gratitude to Zoë, Thomas, Millie, and Laura, and to my whole immediate and extended family. An especially big thank you to Mum, to Dad and Morag, and to Ros and John for all manner of care and support.
Martin Shaw is an attentive, enthusiastic, and accomplished literary agent. He’s also a ripper human being. Many thanks, also, to Alex Adsett. Martin and Alex are two of the most committed supporters of Australian writing I have met.
For their companionship, moral support, good humour, compassion, and critical pushback, I thank these people from the bottom of my heart: Jane Rawson, Lia Weston, Jill Jones, Amy Matthews, Brian Pike, Gay Lynch, Erin Sebo, Sarah Tooth, Alice Gorman, Jo Butler, Glenn Smith, Gillian Dooley, Rebekah Clarkson, and Celia Painter, and not forgetting friends and colleagues from the College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at Flinders University, AAWP (Australasian Association of Writing Programs), APWT (Asia Pacific Writers & Translators), and the University of Adelaide. And far too many other people to name individually.
Editors are the best, and I’m not just saying that because I am one. David Golding has ushered Rise & Shine into the world with care and precision. He is the most recent of a number of editors who have improved my writing and from whom I have learnt much about the art and craft of editing. Thanks to everyone at Scribe for their expertise and friendly professionalism. It’s an honour to be published by the legendary Henry Rosenbloom.
A shout-out to two late, great creative artists I never got to meet, although I once saw one of them play live. When I wrote Rise & Shine, my soundtrack was Roky Erickson’s great comeback album, True Love Cast Out All Evil (plus an occasional burst of Erickson’s 1960s band, The 13th Floor Elevators). The cover of Rise & Shine features Hilma af Klint’s painting Group IX/SUW, The Swan, No. 17, which she painted in 1915 in Sweden. Over a century later — one or two things have happened since then — and from the other side of the world, I gaze at Hilma’s work and life with wonder and respect.
I wrote Rise & Shine on Kaurna land. The first couple of decades of the twenty-first century have been a frankly astonishing era for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander poetry and fiction. From Marie Munkara to Ali Cobby Eckermann, from Alexis Wright to Natalie Harkin, from Tony Birch to Ellen van Neerven, from Kim Scott to Melissa Lucashenko, and others, these writers are leading the way.
And thanks for reading.