DIRT CLOUD

$5.40 – $15.00

Twelve year old Spook is more preoccupied with Astrophysics and space travel than noticing what is happening around her on Earth.

Her mother Mannie is exiled from her mining magnate mother Bill, who unbeknown to Mannie, is dying. But Mannie knows in her bones that it’s time for reckoning. Spook’s father Eddie, an Indigenous fisheries scientist is soon to become redundant, and also recognises that it is time to return to the place of his birth, from his own self - imposed exile. All this is compounded by the fact that their southern farm is severely environmentally compromised by gas mining off shore.

A trip across country to Mannie and Eddie’s place of birth in Australia’s north-west with a recalcitrant Spook - on the cusp of being accepted into Australia’s first ever junior space program - will tilt her axis forever.

Events that unfold at Twin Hills, a former pastoral station now eponymous with a global mining company, will redefine their lives after Spook disappears down a sink hole only to discover a long buried water source just as she is about to suffocate in dirt.

By the end Spook – the ancestral child of two conflicted cultures – has to consider anew, where she truly belongs in this country, on this tiny planet hurtling through space, and what responsibilities she will accept. Will she embrace the three dimensional grid of knowledge connecting astronomy and the earth bound world - that has developed, uninterrupted for over sixty thousand years and with it the responsibilities that come with that knowledge? And will it even be offered to her?

“They’re coming back now, but I don’t know if the old ones who belong to the water will teach me how to look after it. Dad says we just have to wait. And we know how to do that...."

APT