Hodgins wrote these words after he returned to the locations of his childhood to find them unrecognisable, changed or destroyed. This book is a history of the migrations away from dying homes, streets, neighbourhoods, suburbs, towns, cities and countries—and the return journeys to the empty spaces where once they were. I have called these journeys, which can take place either on the ground or in the mind, ‘returning to nothing’.

Often the journey to nothing is actual. Kass Hancock returned to Darwin twenty years after Cyclone Tracy had destroyed her home and almost the entire suburb of Wagaman. The house opposite the place she had lived, where two little children had been killed, had vanished and the street itself was almost unrecognisable. Cracks in the pavement in Wagaman Terrace were almost the only tangible reminder of many sunny days and of one dreadful night. The returning journey to a lost place can also be metaphorical. Dorothy Hewett, in her poem ‘In Summer’, imagined herself going back for a look to her childhood home, listening to the ever-flowing rip in the darkness outside as it closed about the family and the dwelling.