Bruce Nash was awarded a 2022 Varuna Residential Fellowship for an earlier draft of this manuscript; indeed, he has enjoyed three such fellowships for his work. His previous books  The Long River of Cat Fisher (2020) and An Island in the Lake (2019) were published by Australian Scholarly Publishing. He has been shortlisted for several writing awards and his short fiction has appeared in Meanjin, Australian Short Stories and anthologies. Bruce is a retired teacher and now lives on the southern New South Wales coast.