Summary

In the Prologue, Maxine Beneba Clarke lives in Melbourne, Australia. One morning, she walks through the “increasingly gentrified suburb of East Bentleigh” to pick up her son from school (v). She is pushing her daughter in a pram and thinking about the upcoming summer vacation when a passing driver starts yelling racial slurs at her. She ignores him, but he continues yelling, demanding that she return to her country. Maxine is Black but was born and raised in Australia. Once the driver passes, she sits on the curb and tries to calm down. She feels angry with herself for letting the man upset her. A woman asks if she is okay but does not seem to understand when Maxine explains what happened.

Maxine helps her son prepare for his theater show the next day. Maxine dreads the event, remembering “the unforgiving playgrounds...