NRB’s Second Great Opening Lines of Australian Literature Quiz
More great opening lines of Australian literature – can you name the author and the title of these works? (Hint: some openings point directly to the title.)
1 We could begin with desertorum, common name Hooked Mallee. Its leaf tapers into a slender hook, and is normally found in semi-arid parts of the interior.
But desertorum (to begin with) is only one of several hundred eucalypts; there is no precise number.
2 The hospital again, and the echo of my reluctant feet through the long, empty corridors. I hated hospitals and hospital smells. I hated the bare boards that gleamed with newly applied polish, the dust-free window-sills, and the flashes of shiny chrome that snatched my distorted shape as we hurried past. I was a grubby five-year-old in an alien environment.
Sometimes I hated Dad for being sick and Mum for making me visit him. Mum only occasionally brought my younger sister and brother, Jill and Billy. I was always in the jockey’s seat. My presence ensured no arguments. Mum was sick of arguments, sick and tired.
3 Will you look at us by the river! The whole restless mob of us on spread blankets in the dreamy briny sunshine skylarking and chiacking about for one day, one clear, clean, sweet day in a good world in the midst of our living. Yachts run before an unfelt gust with bagnecked pelicans riding above them, the city their twitching backdrop, all blocks and points of mirror light down to the water’s edge.
4 By nightfall the headlines would be reporting devastation.
It was simply that the sky, on a shadeless day, suddenly lowered itself like an awning. Purple silence petrified the limbs of trees and stood crops upright in the fields like hair on end. Whatever there was of fresh white paint sprang out from downs or dunes, or lacerated a roadside with a streak of fencing. This occurred shortly after midday on a summer Monday in the south of England.
5 There is no way, unless you have unusual self-control, of disguising the expression on your face when you first meet a dwarf. It brings out the curious child in us to encounter one of these little people. Since Billy Kwan added to his oddity by being half Chinese, it was just as well that we met in the darkness of the Wayang Bar. My attention was drawn to Kwan’s arrival by Wally O’Sullivan, a correspondent for a Sydney daily.
6 The first thing I did this morning was visit the chickens. Archie had already given them the kitchen scraps, so I leaned over the fence and scattered handfuls of layer pellets. As always, they fussed and squabbled as if they’d never been fed before and never would be again. Then I opened the gate and went to the laying boxes, where they crowded into one corner, although there was plenty of room. There were three clean eggs: two brown, one white. Not so long ago I could tell which chicken had laid which egg. Now sometimes I couldn’t even remember their names.
7 The day was hot and dusty with scattered leaves of poplars lining a towpath. A boy went swimming in green canal water, rolling himself belly-over, gulping and thrashing in pleasure. He beat the slowly moving water with the flat of his hand and floating face-down blew noisy bubbles.
Syms Covington was naked as a bulb, white and hairless except for a slicked-down tuft of red curls across the dome of his conspicuous head.
8 Even at the end of things she is still looking for a reason as she had been at the beginning, puzzling in a muddleheaded way while she watches that fool of a Reever, legs dangling from fifty feet up where he has lashed himself for the third day into the crown of a celerywood tree.
Along the new road being hacked through the rain forest, bulldozers grumble and snort and shove brutally at the matted green, blades skimming challengingly towards the heads of protesters buried up to the neck or nudging back a still chanting mob of greenies. She shifts the binoculars upwards and catches sight of Reever’s straining face as he peers back down the track through leaves.
9 My brother Jack does not come into the story straight away. Nobody ever does, of course, because a person doesn’t begin to exist without parents and an environment and legendary tales told about ancestors and dark dusty vines growing over outhouses where remarkable insects might always drop out of hidden crevices.
10 I’m a Williams; my mob’s from Cowra, Brungle Mission, Griffith and Canberra, but I was born in Gadigal country (aka the city of Sydney) and have spent most of my life living on Dharawal land at Matraville, which is strategically placed between the Malabar sewage works, Long Bay gaol and the Orica industrial estate. It’s a place where I grew up playing cricket in the street, walked safely to and from school each day, and where neighbours always had a spare key to the house. My home suburb remains the perfect setting for creative inspiration today. I am an urban, beachside Blackfella, a concrete Koori with Westfield Dreaming, and I apologise to no-one.
11 We Russians believe that if you knock a knife from the table to the floor, a male visitor will come, and if a bird flies into the room, the death of someone close to you is at hand. Both these events occurred in 1945, around my thirteenth birthday, but there had been no omens of dropped knives or stray birds to warn me.
12 In Poland’s deepest autumn, a tall young man in an expensive overcoat, double-breasted dinner jacket beneath it and – in the lapel of the dinner jacket – a large ornamental gold-on-black enamel Hakenkreuz (swastika) emerged from a fashionable apartment building in Straszewskiego Street, on the edge of the ancient centre of Cracow, and saw his chauffeur waiting with fuming breath by the open door of an enormous and, even in this blackened world, lustrous Adler limousine.
‘Watch the pavement, Herr Schindler,’ said the chauffeur. ‘It’s as icy as a widow’s heart.’
13 Coonardoo was singing. Sitting under dark bushes overhung with curdy white blossom, she clicked two small sticks together, singing:
Towera chinima poodinya
Towera jinner mulbeena
Over and over again, in a thin reedy voice, away at the back of her head, the melody flowed like water running over smooth pebbles in a dry creek bed. Winding and falling, the words rattled together and flew eerily, as if she were whispering to herself, exclaiming, and in awe of the kangaroos who came over the range and made a dance with their little feet in the twilight before they began to feed.
14 In the house at 61 Allen Street, Sapphire Hayes was birthing the baby who would grow up to look into the eyes of the King. She liked to suck the leaves of a mint plant while her body went about its business, and was concerned now with prising free a large leaf from the roof of her mouth with her tongue. ‘Mum,’ said Ethel. Saph Hayes opened her eyes and said, ‘What is it, love?’ Ethel, who always tried to look as if nothing could surprise her, was standing at the foot of the bed, her face tight. ‘Do you want some more mint?’ she asked, but Saph Hayes only closed her eyes again, and rubbed her infamous Hayes nose. ‘Outside now, Eth,’ said Saph’s fat sister Eva, ‘there’s a good girl.’
15 It was a warm day and they had behaved, as they had promised they could, so there must be ice-cream. Veronica took her sister’s hand. That afternoon, so near to winter, the sky was very blue; the sun felt soft as a cat. The children, on the footpath, paused to wave to their mother. For them, at their age, a trip to the milkbar could take on the dimensions of a voyage.
16 First the colours.
Then the humans.
That’s usually how I see things.
Or at least, how I try.
Here is a small fact:
You are going to die.
17 In the evening we pushed our red shopping stroller along the five-minute walk from our hotel to Columbus Avenue, where crowded dining tables spilled out onto open terraces and tall mannequins in tight black dresses stared down at us through plate glass and neon. It was in New York, I decided, that we would be successful. It was there that we would work every evening until the crowds drifted away after midnight. It was there that we would have lots of glorious fun and return home with bags of money. There that we would live out the long, warm nights that would later complete the repertoire of my father’s stories, a repertoire of which I longed to be a part.
18 A cart drove between the two stringybarks and stopped. These were the dominant trees in that part of the bush, rising above the involved scrub with the simplicity of true grandeur. So the cart stopped, grazing the hairy side of a tree, and the horse, shaggy and stolid as the tree, sighed and took root.
The man who sat in the cart got down. He rubbed his hands together, because already it was cold, a curdle of cold cloud in a pale sky, and copper in the west. On the air you could smell the frost.
19 First impressions?
Misleading, of course. As always. But unforgettable: the red glow of his face – a boozer’s incandescent glow. The pitted, sun-coarsened skin – a cheap, ruined leather. And the eyes: an old man’s moist, wobbling jellies.
But then … the suit: white linen, freshly pressed. And – absurdly, in that climate – the stiff collar and tie.
‘Herr Keller?’
‘Mrs Crabbe?’
20 I have always, for as long as I can recall, identified myself with the elephant. This is not something I readily admit because in my profession friends and colleagues are only too ready to leap in with an analysis, to place a facile interpretation on this most intimate, personal and colourful of facts. You will occasionally find me throwing people off the scent (supposing they are on the scent) by making reference in a light-hearted way to ‘a herd of elephants’ or to the fact that the elephant never forgets.
Answers below.
1 Murray Bail Eucalyptus
2 Sally Morgan My Place
3 Tim Winton Cloudstreet
4 Shirley Hazzard The Transit of Venus
5 Christopher Koch The Year of Living Dangerously
6 Debra Adelaide The Household Guide to Dying
7 Roger McDonald Mr Darwin’s Shooter
8 Thea Astley It’s Raining in Mango
9 George Johnston My Brother Jack
10 Anita Heiss Am I Black Enough for You?
11 Belinda Alexandra White Gardenia
12 Tom Keneally Schindler’s List (originally published as Schindler’s Ark)
13 Katharine Susannah Pritchard Coonardoo
14 Susan Johnson A Big Life
15 Sonya Hartnett Of A Boy
16 Marcus Zusak The Book Thief
17 Mandy Sayer Dreamtime Alice
18 Patrick White The Tree of Man
19 Peter Goldsworthy Maestro
20 Carmel Bird The White Garden
