Madeleine Watts is a writer whose work has appeared in the White Review and the LIfted Brow. Her novella Afraid of Waking It won the Griffith Review novella prize.

In The Inland Sea, our narrator has left the comfort of university with barely a vague plan for what comes next. On the advice of a friend she falls into a job as an emergency call centre operator. There she listens day in and day out as disasters befall callers around the country. Jotting down these moments in her notepad she becomes fascinated with the kind’s of tragedies filling her world.

I’m sure many of us have been through exactly this; you know that life is supposed to begin but where’s the start button, and what’s the first step?!

The Emergency call centre offers constant reminders of disaster; floods ravage northern Queensland while fires ring Sydney. Our narrator tries to understand the impact of all this while following the script and transferring the call; police, fire, ambulance.

Against all this tragedy our narrator is heedless to her own safety. Emotional and physical well being are hazardous and fate is there to be tempted.

The Inland Sea was written about Sydney in 2013 around the time Madeleine Watts left for New York, but it’s themes resonate with our present as we try to come to grips with a world seemingly on the brink.

Madeleine’s unnamed narrator is a careful and lyrical chronicler but we are constantly left to wonder at her detachment from the events around her. There is so much feeling and so much anticipation but we know that the stories being told are not reliable.

And it is storytelling that is at the heart of The Inland Sea. The narrator’s story, our story of Australia and the trajectory it is taking us towards destruction are habits we need to break. The Inland Sea is a story telling us that our stories are inadequate; that we need to change the stories we are telling and craft new ones that might offer some semblance of hope.