and soft hands and hatred. The hatred. There is no hatred here, in
her dream, only a tired age and an echoing silent blessing in stone,
and Ki-in-jara.
The sun strikes through the new, heavy clouds, strikes hot despite
them. A kangaroo lopes in the distance, golden as a coin. She hears
the caw of a magpie. Can this be the Dead Heart? At the edge of the
world the snow-capped Hogan runs forever, and the drum m ing of
the turbines comes to her shoeless feet through the hard ground.
‘A giving,’ she says.
He stands naked, made for the desert. She removes her light
garments, stands as he gazes on her.
‘And the longing to be wanted,’ he agrees. ‘Here, you’ll get
burned.’ He reaches into his pouch, sprays her shoulder, her
breasts, her flanks, her trembling limbs with sun-screen. The
insect repellent in the spray bites her nostrils, makes her sneeze and
laugh. Beads of spray glisten in her blonde pubic hair. T heir gaze is
a deep, shared pool, mysterious as the place he will take her.
He gains from me, she thinks in revelation.
She runs after him, the new grass prickly under her bare feet.
The place of stones lies ahead. They will dance there, in the ways
ancient to the land, if he shows her how.
In her dream she could not recall it, not in its reality. Shimmering
The Interior
233
white lace of stone. The strong dark beauty of the man beside her.
‘It is here,’ she says. ‘I feel it. How strange . . .
Ki-in-jara’s face, looking at her, flames with the imagined
colours of stained glass, with the reflected radiance of the old, old
wall paintings.
‘I . . . love you.’
And the bull-roarer: ‘H hhhrruuuuum m m m , thhhhhhhrrrhhh-
uuuummm.’
And the didgeridoos: ‘Booooonnnnnmmmm, ggggarrrrooo-
mmmmm.’
Oh, the dreams they have, the people of Restitution and the other
forty-seven cities of the inland.
All their dreams come true here, if they work at it.
This is Laurie Hogan’s epitaph, written in letters of gold recycled
from the Roxby Downs plant, written on the titanium slab high in
the snow above the Bight, gazing down toward the useless icy
wastes of Antarctica. (We’re melting them.) Laurie taught us the
way to go:
Sure, it’s a Utopia thing.
But if we’re capable of building it,
why don't we build it?
Notes on contributors
Carmel Bird teaches CAE courses in short story writing and the
continuing relevance of the Folktale. She was a founding member
of the now defunct feminist performance collective Faceless
Woman. Fler short fiction collection is Births, Deaths and Marriages;
her novel is Cherry Ripe, and is about blood.
Russell Blackford, a Ph.D. in English, is an authority on the postmodernist fiction of Barth, Vonnegut and Pynchon, and is currently an industrial advocate for the Commonwealth Public Service Board. With D r Van Ikin, he is writing a scholarly history of Australian sf. His novel is The Tempting of the Witch King, an
avowedly deconstructed fantasy.
Damien Broderick is a writer, editor and caustic reviewer. His
chief work to date is the still-incomplete The Faustus Tentacle
sequence, comprising The Dreaming Dragons, The Judas Mandala,
Transmitters, The Black Grail, and a fifth novel in progress.
Timothy Dell, a prize-winning new writer who studied creative
writing at Victoria College under Gerald M urnane, is a trainee
computer programmer.
Greg Egan, a computer programmer recently transplanted to
Sydney from Perth, has written a surprising num ber of films, short
235
236
Notes on contributors
fiction and novels, not all of them published. An Unusual Angle appeared in 1983, when he was 22. He is perhaps the most promising of the Australian sf newcomers.
David Foster is a polymathically gifted former research oncologist, with a doctorate in chemistry, and a bravura literary stylist.
His major published work includes The Pure Land, North South West,
Moonlight, Plumbum and Dog Rock. ‘The elixir operon' is adapted for
this book from his ABC stereo radio play.
Gerald Murnane, while strictly sui generis, is often linked with the
‘new fiction’ school in Australian letters. His elegant, intricate, cool
yet deeply felt ficciones place him with M urray Bail and Peter Carey
at the forefront of innovative writing. His important books include
Tamarisk Row, The Plains and Landscape with Landscape.
Anthony Peacey, who has the unusual distinction of featuring
twice in this collection, remembers German bombs falling in
England. Born there, he has lived in Norway, Sweden, and (since
1971) Perth, where he has taught English as a second language.
Peacey has sold groceries, loaded ships, made ball-bearings,
founded copper, stacked hides, driven semis across the Nullarbor,
surveyed wildlife and fathered four children.
John Playford is a graduate of Adelaide University currently
working in the D epartm ent of the Prime M inister and Cabinet in
Canberra. There is no necessary link between these facts and his
story of brutal Wagnerian conquest in South Australia.
Yvonne Rousseau is an Honours graduate in English and
Philosophy from M elbourne University, lair of Australian Leavis-
ites. A critic and reviewer, she has only recently turned her hand to
fiction, to gratifying effect. H er brilliant and funny Rashomon- like
book of meta-criticism is The Murders at Hanging Rock.
Lucy Sussex got her MA in Librarianship with a thesis on textual
bibliography in sf, emphasising the generic use of ‘fix-ups’, or
longer works fashioned from earlier unconnected fragments. She
has published scholarly studies on sf; her short fiction has elicited
excited approval from the American innovator and entrepreneur
H arlan Ellison.
Notes on contributors
237
Norman Talbot is Associate Professor of English at the University
of Newcastle. An established poet, he has just begun to publish
science fiction, of a notably sophisticated cast.
George Turner, winner of the Miles Franklin Award, is a well-
regarded ‘mainstream’ novelist who came late to speculative fiction
with his Ethical Society trilogy Beloved Son, Vaneglory and Yesterday’s
Men: a post-cataclysm future which allows the elaboration of his
views on major themes (cloning, extended life, control of aggression). In the Heart or in the Head provocatively intertwines autobiography and a history of sf.
Cherry Wilder, an Antipodean writer currently living in
Germany, has been likened for her clean, balanced style and Taoist
philosophy to Ursula Le Guin. H er novels include the trilogy The
Luck of Brin’s Five, The Nearest Fire and The Tapestry Warriors, and the
hauntingly detailed Second Nature, which shares its background with
‘The ballad of Hilo Hill’.
I
fI }
1
IS
Q —
D avid Foster, George Turner, Cherry Wilder, Gerald
M urnane and
ten other excellent writers bring you these
Strange Attractions —
A group of perfectly ordinary unemployed kids who literally create
a better world for themselves . . . a sinister conflict between the
Nazi SS and SD in the Barossa Valley, following the trium ph of the
Third Reich . . . Emily Bronte’s M r Lockwood cast up
mysteriously into the 21st century . . . a chilling study of the life
and opinions of an uncontrolled cancer cell. . . the brilliantly
realised quest of an interstellar hitchhiker in a world where the
Answer is most assuredly nothing so comfortable as the
num ber 42 . . .
From the utterly alien to the unnervingly mundane, these original
stories of hard-edged fantasy by Australians will beguile and
shock, delight and disconcert. Published to commemorate the
second World Science Fiction Convention hosted by Australia,
Strange Attractors carries this country’s recent notable triumphs
in film and art into a new realm of creative achievement —
Speculative Fiction. And does so with wit, intelligence, pace and
style.
Q
ID
Damien Broderick specially commissioned these tales of wonder
from Australian writers both new and established. Editor of the
well-known 1977 collection The Zeitgeist Machine, and twice holder
of a senior Fellowship from the Literature Board of the Australia
Council, he is the author of the thematically cross-linked novel
sequence The Faustus Pentacle, comprising the award-winning The
Dreaming Dragons, The Judas Mandala, Transmitters, The Black Grail,
and a fifth novel still in progress. T h e Age’s sf reviewer, he also
writes and broadcasts on topics ranging from quantum physics
and cosmology to parapsychology.
C)
f
1
Halc^r I remonger j
m
5806 208
306 209 : ; (paperbouni
________________
Strange Attractors (1985) Page 33
