Abstract Mirabelle (15) and Kelly (16) were interviewed for this final chapter of our book in order to begin and end with the views of young people. We started the book with Clayton, who was four, and we finish the book with teenage girls who have a lot to say about children, place and sustainability. Like Clayton, the girls are growing up in the shadow of a ′crumbling′ world, with the sense that the world is on the brink of collapse. For Clayton this is manifest in the tension between a world going faster and faster to fling off all the rubbish on Australia and the necessary and inevitable anchors that are holding it in place. For the older children, tension is held in their perception of a world that is only just still functioning and we are not doing enough to forestall its disintegration. Through this apocalyptic storyline they inherit a sense of failed responsibility to future generations of humans and to the animals destined for extinction. These are powerful stories transmitted in language that produce strong emotions. The ways that they negotiate the impact and meaning of these stories is threaded throughout the interview in the play of light and dark, the spoken and the unspoken, and what lies in between.
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