Chapter 1: Ash

Our mother returned to us two days after we spread her ashes over Notley Fern Gorge. (Levi) Chapter 1

When she’d wandered back into her living room she immediately started shedding sheets of paperbark all over the carpet, while an ornate crown of bluegum branches burst from her head and the furred tail of a Bennett’s wallaby flopped out from beneath her dress. (Levi, about his great-aunt Margaret’s reincarnation) Chapter 1

They all had their reasons for returning – unfinished business, old grudges, forgotten chores. Once they’d done what they came back for they trudged back to the landscape that had re-spawned them, and we never saw them again. (Levi) Chapter 1

I wondered what form she would take when she returned to me … (Levi about Charlotte) Chapter 1

I started looking for a coffin, and I swore to bury her whole and still and cold. (Levi about Charlotte) Chapter 1

Chapter 2: Salt

… the Oneblood Tuna. A man couldn’t hunt it alone, and neither could a seal, but together they could kill a beast twice as heavy as the two of them combined. (Karl) Chapter 2

Sometimes he chased a tuna for twenty or thirty metres, but always broke off and returned to Karl, a doggish smile hanging from his whiskers. (Karl’s seal) Chapter 2

When fish and seal have come within three metres of the sea’s lid it is time for the human to act. And it’s not hard, really, not when compared with what the seal has done, but it takes precision, and speed, and a certain calmness. (catching a Oneblood) Chapter 2

His other half lay sleeping beside him. (Karl and his seal after their first Oneblood kill) Chapter 2

Oshikawa had wanted the whole, animal, guts and head and all, but Karl had laughed – those parts belonged to the seal, and everyone in the fish industry knew it …Chapter 2

They took turns gripping its tail in their teeth and flinging their heads left to right, over and over again, using the hard lid of the ocean to break Karl’s seal into ragged chunks of brown-red meat. (the orcas) Chapter 2

Soon the clicks would stop, and he would stop hearing his seal hit the sea, and an idea or direction or purpose would swim up at him. (Karl) Chapter 2

Chapter 3: Sky

Charlotte will burn, tomorrow or in half a century, but she will burn. Chapter 3

She does not trust her father. (Charlotte) Chapter 3

This look of control. This look of I need to do something; she needs my help, when really (as far as Charlotte is concerned) he is the one who needs help, because what was she doing but grieving? (about Levi) Chapter 3

Their mother was dead. What does it matter what form or sound her grief takes? Chapter 3

Charlotte is wandering the main road of Franklin and thinking to herself, more with pictures and feelings than words, that she is getting closer to wherever she needs to be. … And Charlotte is calm too, just for being there. Chapter 3

Chapter 4: Iron

He had been here longer than the loud pale apes, longer even than the quieter dark ones who had arrived earlier. (the Esk God) Chapter 4

… he could see the iron they sunk into his rivers, building dams, dropping anchors, hooking fish. He had learned the colour and the shape of their callousness, but he could not stop them, for his power was limited to the rivers, while they swamped over everything. (the Esk God) Chapter 4

Without the Cloud God where would be no Esk rivers, and without the rivers there would be no Esk God. Chapter 4

He was wise enough to know that his fury would not help the river or stop the apes, so he continued on, soothing his rage in a simple, humbly way – by nipping screws out of the hull of an idle jetski. (the Esk God) Chapter 4

But the Esk God remained, and the Esk God thrived, for who could kill a river? Chapter 4

The Cloud God would be waiting for him, high on the peaks and plateaus where she poured her sky water down the slopes and into his rivery veins. (the Esk God) Chapter 4

Chapter 5: Fur

… I assume you are aware, is actually a terrorist group … (Thurston to Levi about the Country Women’s Association) Chapter 5

I use high-grade wombat pelts sourced from a premium supplier in the far south, ensuring all my coffins are more luxurious than a royal featherbed. (Mr Hough) Chapter 5

I am besieged in my own home by the creatures of the river. (Mr Hough) Chapter 5

They have started digging at the foundations of my house like dogs at a beach. (Mr Hough about water rats) Chapter 5

At night I lay it over my pillowcase, where it heats my cheek throughout all my fitful dreams. (Mr Hough, the water rat pelt) Chapter 5

Chapter 6: Ice

You shouldn’t drink gin before you drive a sedan. But you also shouldn’t talk back to your mother, wear black with blue or sleep with loose men, and I’d done all those things plenty of times … (the detective) Chapter 6

It sure was pretty, all that light on all that water. I’m not interested in pretty things. (the detective) Chapter 6

Like his private-school manners were paved over something that had cracked. (the detective about Levi) Chapter 6

Skinny boy’s mother and all her twice-dead relatives didn’t make me blink. (the detective) Chapter 6

I don’t feel much at all. (the detective) Chapter 6

‘… They just say he looks ordinary, acts normal, and that they can’t imagine why a policeman would be interested in him. Then their eyes glaze over and they start talking about the footy or the weather’. (Malik to the detective about Jack) Chapter 6

Graham’s instincts were rarely wrong, and I believed his anxieties even more than I believed his tips. (the detective about Malik) Chapter 6

I’m not the best detective in the world, but I know how to find the right people to answer my questions. (the detective) Chapter 6

These eyes – shifting, unknowable points of whiteness and iris and heat – froze me to the ground. (the detective about Jack) Chapter 6

The sight of his shrinking back, changing colour and shape before my eyes from this distance, drew a curtain of exhaustion over me. (the detective) Chapter 6

Chapter 7: Feather

Hard-working, capable and diligent, she also displays a level and affection for the livestock that I have never seen in my twenty-odd years of farming. (Allen about Nicola) Chapter 7

After checking their skin for ticks every morning she brushes them, an inessential task that she revels in, murmuring in their ears, ruffling their necks as if they were pets. (Allen about Charlotte with the wombats) Chapter 7

And in the evenings she shepherds them into their burrows with a with a wordless song that lulls them into a state of hypnosis; as she sings they march sleepily towards her voice and tumble into their holes … (Allen about Charlotte with the wombats) Chapter 7

I cannot bear the thought of being taken away from the farm, or from Melaleuca. If the wombats are my family, then this place is my home. (Allen) Chapter 7

We had agreed to supply over five hundred premium-grade pelts to various clients, but at this rate we will be lucky to harvest even half that number. (Allen) Chapter 7

I would visit the leader of the cormorants, and then I would now how next to proceed. … He would show me the path. (Allen) Chapter 7

… as she yelled, a blue light began leaking from her eyes. (Allen about Charlotte) Chapter 7

Fire was pouring down her chin and chest in a cascade of burning vomit. (Allen about Charlotte) Chapter 7

Chapter 8: Cake

… he was a terrible neighbour, an unpleasant person, and a poor citizen. (Mavis about Thurston) Chapter 8

A thin, jittery and softly spoken young man, he told the constable everything he knew in a dispassionate and polite matter, all while paying me the utmost respect. (Mavis about Levi, about Thurston) Chapter 8

But enough of Thurston Hough! He is as unpleasant in death as he was in life. (Mavis) Chapter 8

Chapter 9: Grass

After school his mother would welcome him by locking him outside, where their cottage bordered a great forest of eucalyptus and sassafras. (the ranger) Chapter 9

… to let the wonder take his soul places it hadn’t been since he was a child in the forest, crouching in a branch-built shelter, thirsty for the taste of all the wild things in the world. (the ranger) Chapter 9

Chapter 10: Snow

She split the face he showed the world, and drew his love towards her. (Nicola about her father’s smile) Chapter 10

Nothing could match the blaze of love in her father’s smile. (Nicola) Chapter 10

Charlotte’s eyes would not drift from the ground or sky. It was as if she was trying to blend in with the fields and snow. Chapter 10

A friendship defined by shared danger, but a friendship nonetheless. (Nicola about Charlotte) Chapter 10

And out of this set of ill-chosen clothes poked the neck and head of a woman. (the detective) Chapter 10

‘You girls got any gin?’ (the detective) Chapter 10

Chapter 11: Wood

… he loved her more than he could ever show with words; … the coffin represented … this. (Levi about Charlotte) Chapter 11

Levi is not well. Levi is not realising: he could have just spoken to her. In a mind like his, grand acts will always trump honest words. (about Charlotte) Chapter 11

He would wear them whenever he drove, regardless of the weather, and Levi always found this suspicious. (about his father) Chapter 11

It’s where he and Charlotte would come every day of summer, running through the heat to swim and shout, although she did most of the shouting and all of the swimming. (Levi about the beach) Chapter 11

It’s where his mother would sit quietly at the end of most days. (Levi, about the beach) Chapter 11

It’s where his father would not come, not past the gully edge, for he was afraid of the ocean. (Levi, about the beach) Chapter 11

‘Your sister will come home, eventually, and you need to be reliable. Strong. The brother you normally are.’ (Jack to Levi). Chapter 11

…he does not care about the man, not about who he is or what he says or where he goes, because at the mention of his mother he has stopped caring about almost everything … (Levi about his father) Chapter 11

Chapter 12: Coal

In such a short time he had lived, learned, grown and died. (Fire) Chapter 12

At the sight of the sea he flickered with fear, but the water stayed where it was, and after a while he discovered that as long as nobody introduced them to each other he was safe. (Fire) Chapter 12

It was people, always people; only people that he really cared for. (Fire) Chapter 12

He had helped them took, create, shape and heat themselves, and had come to think of them as not so much a family but as part of himself. (Fire) Chapter 12

For of all the shapes of life he had encountered, they were the only ones who had shown him that he had purpose in this water-edged world. (Fire) Chapter 12

Though he liked people … he couldn’t relate to their problems. He couldn’t know their love and pain and hate and joy. (Fire) Chapter 12

And he couldn’t stay with any group of them for a long time, because he did not age. (Fire) Chapter 12

It was far easier to watch from the coals, to help them with the flames, and be around them but not with them. And besides: it was more fun to be fire. Chapter 12

He never tired of this life, if life is what it was – even when the paler people came, changing the land in ways he could not have imagined. (Fire) Chapter 12

… with these pale, overclothed people he learned now to burn hotter than ever before, as they moulded him into infernos that could crack and melt the ores he hadn’t known hid inside him. (Fire) Chapter 12

The pain was still there, the loss and fear, fury and sorrow, etched into the faces of the people who were being hunted in their own homeland. Chapter 12

It had something to do with attraction, he knew, and kindness and care and devotion. A true kind of love was in itself a version of what he knew best: it was a purpose. (Fire, as Jack) Chapter 12

So he began following his greatest purpose yet: to make her love him. (Jack about Edith) Chapter 12

This love had grown between them, hard and fast, and the strength of the feeling was so strong it sometimes had him spurting fire from his eyes and nose and fingertips, fire he would quickly slap dead before Edith noticed anything. (Fire, as Jack) Chapter 12

All that his son had inherited from him was his love of purpose and his strength of resolve. (Jack, about Levi) Chapter 12

He never realised that this distance grew not because they were different, but because they were so alike – flames or not. (Jack, about Levi) Chapter 12

His feelings for her were of the purest, awe-blinded kind of devotion. (Jack, about Charlotte) Chapter 12

Even when Charlotte grew into a loud, hard-to-handle blur of a child, he could feel nothing but love. (Jack, about Charlotte) Chapter 12

In the end he could barely summon the energy to finish her cremation. He only managed it because he knew that it was what she wanted. (Fire) Chapter 12

Just like their mother, they would eventually die. And he did not want to be close to them when they did. (Jack about his children) Chapter 12

Chapter 13: Grove

The flames of rage and loneliness that burn through her smirk; flames that can’t be put out. She is just like me. (Charlotte, about the detective) Chapter 13

Levi and I have never understood each other. (Charlotte) Chapter 13

But I know that between us there is love. … Love built with his stubborn resolve, with my hot temper, with all the care our mother poured into us. (Charlotte about Levi) Chapter 13

I am a coast person. I don’t like being hemmed by these trees. (Charlotte) Chapter 13

If I am to leave Nicola, I need to control them without her touch. (Charlotte) Chapter 13

… I’ve always found his smile unforgettable; when I think of him it’s always the first thing I see. (Charlotte about her father) Chapter 13

Chapter 14: Cloud

Only the cloud could have seen. And she was too busy weeping. (whether the flesh and feathered form of Allen Gibson was dead or alive) Chapter 14

A special pelt: a river pelt. A pelt that had belonged to the other half of the cloud’s heart. The pelt of her waterlocked love … Chapter 14

He who owned the river now burned in the flames. Chapter 14

Never again would he climb the dark mountain and stare up in hopeful worship. Never again would she feed his kingdom with her tears of lonesome love. (The Esk and Cloud Gods) Chapter 14

A cloud’s sorrow: … whenever a storm hits the world with uncommon force. When mountains crack and forests flood. When rivers surge and oceans bloat. When there is no true shelter in the world. Chapter 14

Chapter 15: Sea

I have nothing to forgive. I have only trust to win back. (Levi about Charlotte) Chapter 15