Shannon > Books: review-copy‎ (210)

"For many Australians, bushfires are a part of life, but we often only hear about the immediate aftermath of the fire. I wanted to explore the community 18 months after the fire, when the national spotlight has vanished, the buildings have been restored, and the bureaucrats are saying 'you're good to go now'... Only, they're not good to go. Scars run deep. It takes years and years for a community to recover from a devastating fire and that's a message I wanted to share."

"A sun like that, heat like that - it bleached the entire sky yellow-white, nothing like the blue sky one was used to from home. It was that sky that was a warning, the yellow light a warning that this was not a hospital place. It was the glow of pain, the glow of the end of the world. It was not a friendly colour for a sky to be." (p.39)

"It was a land of bones he walked, a land of death and bones and pain. He had helped make it that way, had added bones to the soil. He was as guilty as any other. He knew now though, that when you plant bones, nothing grows from them. Nothing but pain. As much as his homesickness racked at his soul there was no use thinking about it. This camp in the bush was his home - a series of camps in the bush would be his home until they planted his bones." (p.86)

"The arrival of the Toads had eliminated all racism and hate within the human species. It was not that with a common enemy the humans had decided to work together - humans never made a decision to no longer fight between themselves. Instead the colonisation by the Settlers simply ended all discrimination within the human race by taking away all the imbalance. There was no caste or class within humans; to the Toads who now owned the planet and everyone on it all humans had the same low status. To the Toads, all humans were nothing more than animals.

With no distinctions between humans, no rights, no countries, the human race was in the process of homogenisation. A slave is a slave is a slave. Humans had in the past sought to assimilate all humans into one group - to breed out colour, destroy other cultures. Where they had failed the Toads had been successful." (p.159)

He finds a hundred memories, some vivid as photographs and meaningless, snapped by the mind for reasons of its own, and others mere facts, things he knows are true but has no snapshot for.