This is how it happens . Billboards, first. Not the city kind; long grass on rural roads and thick fresh Arial letters on white. After that, mountains. Carved into out-of-reach rock faces or caught in the belly of a eucalypt tree like a long-forgotten magic trick, only to be spilled or swept out with the oxblood kino, perhaps to solidify in crystals along the width of the wound; a sentence for the bull ants and the redbacks, at least.

So. To start: a story. Perhaps a novel. Perhaps a great one, the sort that belongs on those lists that everybody hates, one hundred books you have to read before you die , but, in truth, we are not quite there yet. Before there is any talk of books or of piracy, a father drops his daughter in the Sydney Harbor.…