Bring me the bones of Australian babies, the more the better.

I sometimes wonder if all those English country gentlemen who built themselves big houses with long sightlines and high walls did it because they were afraid of people coming across the seas for vengeance. I hope they were terrified.

…just as people in colonized India and Africa often created ways of communicating that remained unintelligible to their European occupiers, so Jesus often hid from outsiders, especially from the Roman occupiers, what he wanted to reveal only to those who, he said, “had eyes to see, and ears to hear.”

Trust me that I had no other plans. Outside of my immediate family, the only people who were nice to me were people who went to my church.

I had one trajectory and that was to get out.

You can never make that crossing that she made, for such Great Voyages in this world do not any more exist. But every day of your lives the miles that voyage between that place and this one you cross. Every day. You understand me? In you that journey is.

…one cheats oneself, as a human being, if one has respect only for the style of high culture…

“You have to understand that most people at the executive level at a label, they’re usually rich kids who don’t need the job,” Israel explains. “You’re talking about a boys’ club and a history of a record label signing 50 to 150 bands and focusing on one or two.”

…creeping suspicion that I am not a person but a card catalog of the books that I’ve read.

…all was well. Well enough. The world still ached with beauty. The birds kept chirping, leaves clattered in a breeze, the late-afternoon sunlight, thick and pale, slanted in from the south.

…she was struck by how private American forces of mercy were straining to offset America’s public agents of cruelty.

Looking at the bright light on the horizon, your first thought was: well, that’s it then. Nuclear war. Sydney’s gone.

The City, the locals call it, as if it’s the only one.

Whatever we think of the historicity of the orthodox account, we can admire its ingenuity. For this theory—that all authority derives from certain apostles’ experience of the resurrected Christ, an experience now closed forever—bears enormous implications for the political structure of the community.

…the ‘ancestors’ and the ‘communities’ we believe we have shucked off (where I come from, at least) are still present. They haunt us, not least because they make it possible for us to be alive.

British colonisation was the beginning of the end for natural Australia.

The plunders and even the occupation of earth by the Europeans violated the land. Bennelong hoped they could be taught that fact. It might have been one of the reasons he stayed so long in Sydney Cove, and risked his soul.

The enduring lesson of the Rum Rebellion was the power of the big men of New South Wales.

Like many others who went through that time, he was gripped by what he could think of only as a numbness, though he knew it was a feeling compounded of emotions so deep and intense that they could not be acknowledged because they could not be lived with. It was the force of a public tragedy he felt, a horror and a woe so all-pervasive that private tragedies and personal misfortunes were removed to another state of being

It dawned on me then that all immigration policy around the world was used the same way by every country: to control labor.