G.G. Rowley

As I lay that night waiting for sleep, I mused about the trade of fish for salt beef that we had been told of. [...] Those women would never have been so dull as to believe sour salt beef was a fair exchange for fresh fish.... Another possibility occurred to me with a feeling like relief, a puzzle solved. Trade was our word. But what the Burramattagal were doing, when they exchanged their fish for our beef, was perhaps not commerce. Perhaps it was something more like education. Look, they might have been saying. I am showing you the proper way to do things; I give to you, you give to me. And in accepting your inferior food, I am teaching you grace, forgiveness and generosity. Perhaps also shame. When the exchange of goods ended, it may have been because the pupil was too dull to learn. Too coarse-grained to feel shame. [...] It was a shadow at the edge of my life, the consciousness that I was on land that other people knew was theirs. (pp.261-62)

She kisses. She isn't alone in the pictur

She kisses. She isn't alone in the picture anymore. He is there. Beside her. She kisses with her eyes closed. She takes his hands, puts them to her face. His hands from the trip. She takes them and puts them on her body. And then he moves, he takes her in his arms and he gently rolls onto that skinny, virgin body. And as he slowly covers it with his own body, without touching it yet, the camera might leave the bed: it might veer toward the window, might stop there at the drawn blinds. And then the noise from the street might come in, muffled, distant in the night of the room. (p.67)

Even those who are alone then, who haven't come to see anyone off, share in the strange tragedy of "going away," of "leaving" forever, or betraying the destiny they realize was theirs just as they lose it; and they, too, have betrayed it, all on their own. (p.211)

He had said to Evie when

He had said to Evie when they came home--he had said something like "Why don't people ever say anything real?" And now he knew why. Because to say anything real was to say things that nobody wanted to know. Or if they wanted to know, they would not care in the right way. Or even understand. It was a private thing, to be alive. p.180