TRENT DALTON ON HEROES AND HOPE

THE HEROES NEVER changed form. Always flesh and blood; arms and legs and beating hearts as wide as this country. It was the villains who kept morphing on me. I once thought the bad guys all dressed like Darth Vader. Then I learned that the villains in my world wore Jackie Howe singlets and Stubbies shorts and double-plug blue rubber flip-flops that slapped against old wooden hallway floorboards to rhythms of their rage. That man-child monster my mum fell in love with once. That fat-bellied, fire-breathing dragon villain that she slayed without a sword, without a shield; nothin’ but a broke-down heart and two feet to walk away from the battle. And pistols at dawn for any mortal who dares to tell me she wasn’t Perseus, Odysseus and Luke fucking Skywalker hidden inside a body no bigger than Kylie Minogue’s.

You’re the luckiest people on Earth so keep going. Keep hoping

Then the villains turned again. Shapeshifted. Changed their form to the things I could not see. Addictions. Anxieties. The cloaked shadow villains that creep in over time for anyone, crawl into our bedrooms and lock our doors and draw our curtains. Job-loss villains and rotten-luck villains. The kind of villains that swordless hero by the piano, Nick Cave, always sings about. Then an emphysema villain that clustered in the lungs of my durry-munching dad – the first and the last