After AustraliaI think there are a lot of ways you can approach a short story collection and After Australia absolutely hits all of these…Perhaps you’re looking for a way to discover new Australian writing and writers? Well, After Australia has a selection of twelve incredible Indigenous Writers and Writers of Colour including Ambellin Kwaymullina, Karen Wyld, Omar Sakr, Future D Fidel and Zoya Patel.Maybe you like reading a story in a single sitting? After Australia is like a moreish pack of mixed lollies that you promise yourself your only going to have one of but end up finishing way more than intended.Maybe you love writing around a theme that lets you explore ideas from different perspectives. Well After Australia promises to imagine an alternate Australia - after empire, after colony, after white supremacy.See After Australia is the book we’ve needed but perhaps didn’t know it. As we all try to come to grips with the impact of pandemic on our lives it is unavoidable that the structural imbalances in our society are tipping further against marginalised communities.After Australia seeks futures where these balances are challenged, inverted or perhaps simply upended as environmental destruction flips the game board.In a collection like this there’s simply so much to talk about. I’m going to hone in on one story to give you all an idea of what After Australia has on offer…Claire G Coleman’s Ostraka takes us into the searing heat of an isolated, remote compound. An individual waits against the chain-link fence in a seeming prison of inertia. Around the compound are others; pale skin turning a vivid, painful scarlet in the unforgiving heat.It is Australia’s near future and the government has enacted the Ostraka law. Hearkening back to classical Athenian democracy the Ostrakismos gives the body politic the power to ostracise citizens. But who is to be ostracised and why?!In Ostraka Claire does so much in a very short space. The pain and remoteness of ostracism is immediately apparent in the harsh environment, as is the purgatory of uncertainty as the lawyers line up periodically to give their clients next to no news.Ostraka complicates this narrative though as it shows us the Ostraka laws were seemingly built around the established precedent of offshore detention and individuals are buried under mountains of go nowhere paperwork.The callous inhumanity of the existing system of offshore and endless detention is highlighted simply by applying it to everyday people (and by everyday let’s just understand we mean white and middle class).So do we hate the increasingly authoritarian government that through mission creep might one day enact such laws? Or do we hate ourselves for being willfully blind as it happened to others, only to sit up when it happened to us? Maybe we should thank Claire G Coleman for showing us this vision, so that we might do something before it’s too late.And that’s just a sampling! After Australia is a mighty collection of twelve incredible Indigenous Writers and Writers of Colour, it’s been edited by Michael Mohammed Ahmad who is the founding director of Sweatshop Western Sydney Writers Collective. It’s a book that’s able to look our historical moment square in the eye and it has a lot to say to Australia today...