House of the Flight-helpers

Cover image by Watanabe Shotei aka Watanabe Seitei (1851–1918).

'The people of Incognita have walled themselves in...'

House of the Flight-helpers by Tasmanian author Philomena van Rijswijk is a strange and satirical narrative, a mythological mosaic of horrors, feather phobias, dead saints, clay flutes, terrible birds, Border Monkeys, forbidden zones and unsettling forebodings. It casts the reader into the future, a future left trammelled by the glacial passage of xenophobia and exclusion. It is a parable of sorts, and considers the biggest questions and insecurities of our age, one of the most poignant of which is: when we exclude the outsider, are we, in fact, imprisoning and impoverishing ourselves?