Thoraiya’s Reviews > Praiseworthy > Status Update

"The iPhone was taking an eternity to charge on the slow-use electricity supplier's low-voltage pay-as-you-use card paid by pension money [...] and he prayed for the federal government's golden-hair guardian angel, the saint Mother Holy Minister in charge of all Aboriginal children to hover above him in this moment of great peril, and to prevent him from being caught by marauding black people." - p323

"While the golden emperor moths stirred from countryside to countryside in the mangroves where the phenomenon of old culture was rising, Tommyhawk was beside himself with a paranoid fear of the growing darkness, and itching now to run down the beach, race out into the shallow sea, to really drown that Aboriginal Sovereignty himself." -p176

"The seagulls [...] as far as the eye could see in the star-brightened night, the spectacle of soft body feathers tossing in the brightness of the fiery rippling winds, fanning the overheating of these powerful storytellers whispering, whistling, growling and squawking in the circling, circling of all life quaking after the sedan crash-landed in a loud thud that woke up the dead." - p152

...new life into the planet, and the atmospheric rivers bringing the rain, and sail through the dusty rivers of stars in the Milky Way galaxy continuing its infinite journey out into the universe, and he would follow the magnetic rivers forming the stars just to keep fishing, ahoy one, two, three, the fish to feed his country. Dance claimed that foreign fishing men visit her all the time with gifts of butterflies"p9

"The old man was still wet from the ocean spray that had rolled into the cemetery, following him from the sea. He looked around, and said he was going back to the sea to catch fish, where he must keep following the rivers of old winds, the birth of new winds, and he would follow the aerial rivers of butterflies to see where they go, and he must chase the great rivers of ocean currents eternally breathing new life...

"Tommyhawk! Get here. Planet yelled several times to the tubby little brown-skinned boy with golden curls, the eight-year-old youngest son who ignored anyone who did not address him as a Jedi, or ninja, but he did not look Jedi-like, nor like a ninja, but just a fat boy, a law unto himself, who was following his more superior brother - the song of the country, lightness itself - gliding up the street." -p68

"He carried his country-hardened, long thin frame stiffly, and he often walked as though his body was more than it appeared. He was the solid rock-hard weight of country that was also equally lightness, but he had lost this feature of homeland." - p38

I just love the figurative illustrations and could quote them all day. "It was like expecting a Kmart-bought frisbee to fly all the passengers in Praiseworthy as though it were some majestic bird spirit, as though it were the largest and strongest plane on earth carrying hypersonic vehicles to space while everyone cried with happiness at such a feat, when it was not like that at all."

"They sent a common brown butterfly on a journey down south, to flutter four thousand kilometres to the lonely Australian capital Canberra, as their final embassy on the matter. Then they waited, and waited some more, only to see the broken tattered butterfly return the next autumn on a slow breeze with its singed wings. The story went around that the government shot the butterfly with a blowtorch." - p9