The past comes with me. It follows me like a lost dog that I can’t shake off: sometimes a bright and eager terrier, more often a melancholy and ambling mutt, but always persistent. Perhaps it’s the result of living in this place.
Most days, I walk along an overgrown and muddy creek that overflows in heavy rain and dries up in summer, its course irrevocably changed by the goldminers of the 19th century, its banks pockmarked by sinks and tailing heaps, making it hazardous to leave the track.
Across the river from my house is the site of the last great corroboree of the Kulin nation, before the discovery of gold meant that the Wurundjeri people were disappeared by white people to a reserve a long way from their home. All around me, ghosts and lost stories.
Lost stories is a slowly expanding collection of brief, true but untold stories, mostly of people I’ve never met, only some of whom I’m related to. These stories tell of people I wish I had known, or recount an event I wish I had witnessed, or describe a place that I long to have visited. Histories that have been lost, but might catch in your mind once you read them, might just attach to you like a determined lost dog looking for a home.