Read an extract from The Thinning

Dive into this powerful literary page-turner from famed Australian novelist Inga Simpson below!

We're slipping into nautical twilight. It’s the light sailors used to navigate, when the first stars appear but the land is still visible. For Dianella, it’s just the time to set up, to prepare and frame her shots. But for me, this is where the magic is, when we’re in between worlds.

In books or in school, when they talk about six degrees of separation, they mean connections between people. In our family, it means the sun dropping, six degrees at a time, in thirty-minute intervals: from golden hour into blue hour, through the three stages of twilight, until the sun is eighteen degrees below the horizon, leaving us in true astronomical dark – when galactic core visibility begins. That was when my parents’ workday started and when the observatory came to life. The whole process is reversed at the other end of the night, as Earth turns towards the sun, our day star. With all the evolutions through millennia, all the human impacts, the one thing that hasn’t changed is that day always follows night.

I spot Sirius first, the Dog Star, which is closest, and moving closer. It’s actually a binary star, two stars gravitationally bound together and orbiting around each other. I didn’t believe it until I saw them for myself through the telescope. Canopus, the navigator, is next brightest. Then the Crux and two pointers: Alpha and Beta Centauri. Beta is a three-star system. The two brightest are binaries, and the third orbits the other two.

But it’s Betelgeuse, in Orion, who is brightest of all, even brighter than the moon. I call him Betel. We saw him go supernova, which puts you on familiar terms, even with a star. He doesn’t drag on you, the way the moon does, but he has presence, just hanging there all red and spent, like my conscience. Reminding me why we’re here and not lying on our beds in the cabin.

Halfway through astronomical darkness, when the centre of the sun reaches fifteen degrees below the horizon, used to be called amateur astronomical twilight, because most of the stars and constellations were visible without any high-end equipment. Naked eye astronomy, in other words, which First Nations
peoples have been practising for tens of thousands of years. Des says there have been supernovas before, which hung around for hundreds of years before fading. Cultural astronomy extends back long before written historical records, painting a bigger picture.

Dianella’s eyes are on the sky, still appraising the best shot: calculating the time until Betel and the moon set, the shifting angle of the galactic core. Nothing is as straightforward as it used to be. Since the mining accident up there, the moon’s cycles are all out of whack. And, with it, the tides on Earth, the migratory patterns of birds and other animals. Human rhythms, too.

We follow the sparkling burn of a meteor shower, debris falling to Earth, like all the species disappearing, all the words dropping out of the English language. If Betel exploding like that taught me anything, it’s that nothing stays the same. Not even the stars.