IT IS DISTURBING and painful to be told that the world that formed you, held you, has now ceased to exist – nonetheless, this experience is not unusual. You may have questioned this world, disapproved of it, held it in contempt – and it is better if you did. Nonetheless, this world is all you knew.

In Berlin last September – a city I found myself living in, like many Australians in their mid-to-late twenties, rather haphazardly – I attended a two-day seminar on trauma. That I could afford to attend such a seminar says much about my milieu and my lifestyle; something else I suspect is ending, or has ended. The seminar considered trauma as a temporality: is trauma genetically transmitted, can there be a ‘pre’-trauma as much as there is a post-trauma? If so, is this the moment in which we find ourselves?