Author biography

Lisa Fuller is a Wuilli Wuilli woman from Eidsvold, Queensland, and is also descended from Gooreng Gooreng and Wakka Wakka peoples. She won a 2019 black&write! Writing Fellowship, the 2017 David Unaipon Award for an Unpublished Indigenous Writer, the 2018 Varuna Eleanor Dark Flagship Fellowship, and was a joint winner of the 2018 Copyright Agency Fellowships for First Nations Writers. She has previously published poetry, blogs and short fiction. Lisa is an editor and publishing consultant, and is passionate about culturally appropriate writing and publishing.

Lisa is a member of Us Mob Writing, the Canberra Speculative Fiction Guild, the First Nations Australia Writers Network, and the Canberra Society of Editors.

Title page

Dedication

For Pop

Prologue

Fire is the centre of our world. It’s where everything happens: cooking, playing, laughing, family, story. Fire means so much more than just a bunch of burning carbon.

I sit and watch the embers escape, propelled by hot air swirling upwards. They dance into the sky, as the smoke moves steadily in one direction. My twin sister sits right in its way.

‘What’s wrong with you?’ I shake my head as she coughs.

‘Ay, smoke follows beauty, little sister.’

‘Or, you know, the wind? Which in your case makes sense.’

‘You wanna talk!’

‘Are you sure we’re related?’ we say together.

Laughing with the same smile, same eyes, but a mirror image. A small freckle above the eyebrow on my right and her left is how most people tell us apart. Mirror twins are rare. Opposite sides of a whole, Mum says, even in our personalities. Laney is outgoing, sporty and popular. I am not.

‘What are you two fightin bout now?’

Nan comes shuffling out of the dark, a big jewfish in one hand and a massive ceratodus in the other. I hop up to go help, but she shoos me away, tossing them to the ground. I stare in fascination at the ceratodus. ‘Salmon’ the old people call it, as old as we are in this country they reckon. Whitefullas said they were prehistoric dinosaurs or something. Made sense to us. Sometimes people call them lung fish, cos that’s what they had. Sitting by the river at night you’d hear them surface to gasp in air. Nan’d already whacked these ones on the head, otherwise that salmon’d be gasping now.

‘You gonna just look at it or you wanna eat it?’

‘Sorry, Nan.’ I smile at her as she comes over with her cleaning gear. An old knife, some newspaper and alfoil.

I stay close, watching every move she makes, while Laney sits to the side acting like a big dainty thing with her ‘ew’ this and ‘yuck’ that. Nan looks at me and we both roll our eyes.

‘Anyone would think you weren’t black. Call yourself my granddaughter,’ she mumbles in her rough smoker’s voice. ‘In my day you’d figure out how to clean it or you’d starve.’