No where else can the essential, eternal and eternally reversing dialectic between icon and iconoclasm be observed and experienced so well.

Jennifer Maiden The Suburban Problem of Evil

From the lounge room of my family home – a little house atop a small mountain suburb on the outskirts of Liverpool – you can make out the tip of Sydney Tower far to the east. From this vantage, the iconic tower is the size of a turntable needle, and at night is tipped with a blue light like the fragile flame of a birthday candle. I grew up with this view, strangely orientated by the distance between a landmark of the city and my suburban, quotidian existence. It was an oddly de-centring backdrop, pinning my life into – and simultaneously out of – place, not least because it also happened to be where my father worked. My father did not live with us and often, when I came home from school, I contemplated that thin point on the horizon with some familial longing. I considered that to look out the window and see that global symbol of our nation on the horizon would also be to watch my father in some strangely abstracted and surreptitious way.

This unique perspective of immensity reduced and reproduced in miniature, with all its potential cultural associations and authority likewise minimised and made ambiguous by the obscura of distance, is the image that always springs to mind when I consider the ‘eternally reversing dialectic’ that Australian poet Jennifer Maiden describes in her 1998 essay on the problem of evil and suburban violence. This reversing dialectic which transitions ‘between the top and bottom of the power position, and between the animate and the inanimate: life and death’ (1998) are in constant oscillations and reversals. Maiden believes such a dialectic is nowhere more vivid than in the western suburbs of Sydney.. It is this dialectical movement that also characterises the emergent dimension in our national literature: the rise and rise of a 21st century western Sydney poetics.

Maiden’s article is an idiosyncratic personal essay in which she interrogates her own poetic attempts to come to terms with what she calls the ‘suburban problem of evil’ – a menacing form of violence that is present in the unique, and misunderstood spaces of Australian suburbia. Rather than viewing the outer west of Sydney as a wasteland or a void – a characterisation common in popular and even critical renderings of the region (see articles such as Geordie Williamson’s Life Flares in Suburban Void (2013) and Here be Bogans: four miniatures of Sydney stereotypes by Frank Jacobs (2015) she attributes the atmospheric tensions and ‘evils’ as products of a peculiarly rich inner life of mind. This mindfulness is facilitated by spaces fit for private life – shaded yards and locked bedrooms: places and time for thinking. Such considerations are made persuasively in the essay, which is replete with the fictocritical, anecdotal features that adorned much literary and cultural criticism in the 1990s. In this respect, Maiden’s article is perhaps a dubious source to interrogate contemporary poetics in a scholarly context – however, though borne out of an unusually personal and pontificating style, Maiden’s argument, as I see it, is essentially a proposal of a poetics of our literary fringes rather than an attempt to assert empirical ‘facts’ about the region. Though the article explicitly describes itself as an attempt to understand evil, its concerns have the literary as their intended locus, with Maiden’s entry point into her discussion of suburbia being her own writing practice as a poet and novelist.

As critics such as the poet Martin Harrison have pointed out, literature is always a question of ‘place’ – the grammatical tendency of language itself is to ‘map spaces and imagine place’, it embodies a series of ‘responses to place’ (p. 37). Maiden’s is a theory in response to a place grounded in a literature of place. This literature – and the aesthetic of western Sydney literature – is one which Maiden distils in her formulation of the ‘reversed dialectic’. That Maiden’s case for a poetics of western Sydney remains an important contribution to our critical literary culture is borne out by the recent emergence of literary works from the region which carry this ‘reversed dialectic’ poetics in their core.

The emergent writing from the flourishing ‘margins’ of our literary communities in recent years – the catalogue of which can be largely attributed to the work of the Giramondo publishing house – comes at an interesting and increasingly ambiguous time for the culture at large. At the mid-point of the second decade of the 21st century, the traditional iconography of Australian identity and its attendant cultural potencies have been under unprecedented pressure to perform their sacred nationalist duties. Prime Minister Abbott – before being ousted by his own party – proliferated his addresses to the nation with enough Australian flags to become blatantly self-parodic, ‘prompting social media discussion, jokes, and comparisons to the number of flags used by other world leaders’ (Evershed, 2015). Simultaneously, the Abbott-led government re-established our colonial connection to the ‘centre’ by resurrecting knighthoods – the first of which, suitably, went to the Queen’s husband, a move which served to embarrass almost everyone in the lucky country, being variously described as everything from ‘ “total craziness” to “pathetically stupid” to “a joke and embarrassment” ’ (Safi, 2015).

The year 2015 was also the centenary of the Gallipoli landing and as The Australian put it, ‘seemingly every arts, cultural and media organisation in the country… announced their own tribute’ to the centenary (Burke, 2015). It was the high-water mark of what historian Mark McKenna described as the ‘resurgence’ of the ANZAC tradition as a psychic site of security for Australians with which they might replace their ‘guilt and shame’ with ‘honour and pride’ (McKenna, p. 679). So fervid was the push by Australian media to do justice to a reprised significance of the Anzac mythos that their enthusiasm seemed to reach a kind of anticlimactic saturation point in the eyes of the viewing public. The centenary commemoration, which historian Peter Stanley described as being ‘as good as it gets for Anzac Day’, gave birth to the term ‘commemorative fatigue’ (Burke, 2015). What this means for the consolidating influence of the Anzac myth remains to be seen, but it is perhaps an efficient demonstration of the subtleties that underlie Australian identity and its attendant mythologies – subtleties that direct attempts to reconcile and simplify cannot possible hope to accommodate.

In a similarly curious precipitation of the shift in cultural consciousness was the clumsy attempt by SBS to ‘spark an important national conversation around social equality and disadvantage in Australian society’ (SBS.com, 2015) with the ‘poverty porn’ documentary series Struggle Street (2015). The controversy around the exploitative nature of the show would perhaps have escaped mainstream media attention were it not for the widely circulated teaser-trailer for the program which began with visions of our national icons – the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House – as a voiceover described ‘sparkling Sydney Harbour: a gateway to a sun-bronzed Aussie lifestyle’ (SBS, 2015). The trailer then cut to a close-up of a bronzed, bikini-clad surfer’s bum as she paddled out into the waves off an iconic beach moments before we, and the camera, were sucked west over the bridge and into a dark tunnel to emerge into the western suburbs and the climactic sight and sound of an old man farting on the front doorstep of his ‘trashed’ house.

Whatever else can be said about this trailer, the dialectical hierarchies of our national ‘imaginarium’ have never been so perfectly envisioned. The highways that lead away from our iconic coast were imagined as the jammed bowels of our national psyche, coiled through a ‘suburban void’, only to emerge into the excremental shame of our ‘westie’ wasteland. Considering SBS advertises itself as producing ‘excellent content for all Australians’ (SBS.com, 2015), and that 10 per cent of the nation lives in the densely populated western suburbia that SBS smeared with their crude take on life on the ‘disadvantaged margins’, it makes one wonder who exactly they believed their audience for this ‘pornographia’ of Sydney’s heartland to be.

In effect, the narrative offered by the Struggle Street trailer was a representation of the cultural ideal that only life in the centre is worth living, while what goes on in the suburbs takes place in abject, irredeemable vulgarity. Maiden calls this conception of Australian life a ubiquitous ‘social discipline device’ (1998). The idea that ‘the city is somehow more artistic, intellectual or exciting than the suburbs – based on the feeling that real life is going on elsewhere and that somehow because of one’s failures of achievement or impositions made by others’ needs, one can never quite reach where it is’ is one that serves as a pseudo-religious script in the Australian psyche. That there was a significant backlash to Struggle Street when its trailer first emerged suggests that there is less tolerance for such ideas to be openly articulated, even – as SBS claimed – when they are done in a spirit of solidarity and empathy.

Such an extraordinary misreading of our changed cultural situation by one of our mainstream media outlets points to – amongst myriad other idiosyncrasies in our society – the ever growing ambiguity that charges the nation’s binary stretched mythos. Whether the poetics of western Sydney has played a part in the cause and effect of this changing cultural and discursive dynamic is an analysis beyond the scope of this essay. Nevertheless, the emerging literary scene from this part of the country coincides with these subtle shifts in our collective language, and it is with this idea of the marginal positioning of the western Suburbs in mind that the subtleties of its growing literary voice needs to be understood.

In a country that celebrates its red-dusted ‘sweeping plains’ and the curves of our sun-swept coasts, Sydney’s western suburbia has always lain with an almost gothic indignity between the more mythologised provinces of the country. In this geographically and culturally uncomfortable position, the region serves as a convenient scapegoat for the cringe clinging to our national psyche. Despite being home to 10 percent of our nation’s population, the complexity and diversity of life in Sydney’s western suburbia has barely registered in the Australian psyche until recently. Instead, the figure of the westie has long been reduced to a vague parade of threadbare stereotypes. Currently these stereotypes represent bong smoking bogans drinking longnecks in ‘penriff’; dragon-tattooed heroin dealers from Cabra; and bikie gangsters of Middle-eastern appearance doing drive-bys through the streets of Bankstown. It is precisely because of the shameful positioning in the Australian consciousness of the western suburbia as an empty wasteland that the new ‘westie spring’ of Australian literature is so ripe with potentialities. Indeed, the lived experiences of those writers from the western suburbs have been so inscribed upon them the notion of the cultural wasteland that the fecundity of its silencing is perfervid in their works. The desire to break out despite the cultural taboo of their own voice is written in the texture – and forms the basis for the poetics that are at the heart of our frontier poetry and prose.

The observation that there is something unique about the literature that has come and continues to flow from the western suburbs in recent years has become commonplace. In fact, the suggestion that Australia’s literary ‘centre’ appears to be shifting – or leaning, at the least – towards Sydney’s ‘suburban frontier’ is now a familiar refrain. Perhaps the first (certainly the most emphatic) recognition of this de-centring to find its way into print was provided by Sam Twyford-Moore, director of the Emerging Writers’ Festival, who stated in an interview in 2014 that ‘Western Sydney is the capital of Australian literature… if not already, then certainly it’s the future’.

As someone with a sensitive ear for the minor tremors of our most aspirant and incubational writers, Twyford-Moore can reasonably be considered an authority on the subject of Australian literary nascence, which makes his declaration a little less hyperbolic than it might otherwise seem. A cynic, perhaps unswayed by the authority of a cultish figure like Twyford-Moore, might dismiss such a proposition as an instance of overstatement – perhaps pointing to Twyford-Moore’s caveat that such remarks were ‘very much a personal statement’ (2014) as evidence that his commentary is little more than the loose talk of exuberant generosity and wishful thinking; but if so, then others are on record as suffering the same illusions.

Maxine Beneba Clarke, a slam poetry champion and author of the celebrated short story collection Foreign Soil(2014) – in her extended review of a reading performance by myself and writers Peter Polites and Michael Mohammed Ahmad – described the shift in literary consciousness as one already realised. Referencing the backdrop for the performance – in which a map of Australia with the words ‘Under New Management’ was on display – Clarke ends her assessment of a new era of Australian literature with an exhortation to ‘Buckle in tight, ’cause … Australian literature is indeed “Under New Management”’ (2014). The cynic, ever unmoved, might suggest that Clarke’s remarks are nothing more than the usual expression of camaraderie that characterises our cloistered national literary scene.

The recognition of a significant literary emergence is being registered however, by critics, as well as writers and arts administrators. Geordie Williamson, chief literary critic of The Australian, described the inexplicable appearance of fiction set and styled by Sydney’s western suburbia in the following terms: ‘It is as though a Madagascar-sized island suddenly materialised off Sydney Heads’. Most recently, Matt McGuire, senior lecturer in English Literature at Western Sydney University, detailed the developing situation in an article for The Conversation, calling the publications that came from Sydney’s suburbs in 2014 as an ‘important moment in Australian culture’. The acknowledgement of this upspring of new ‘voices’ is important, but then there are some that seem to have gotten lost in the mix, to be missing from the above accounts. Unsurprisingly, they are the poets, and it is from them what we have the most to learn about the unique character of this new cultural manifestation. It is in their work that the potent western Sydney poetics is at its highest register.

Lachlan Brown’s collection, Limited Cities (2012), was the second of Giramondo’s Western Sydney Project titles (the first was Fiona Wright’s Knuckled in 2011). As a collection of poetry, it has the bad luck of being too culturally obscure to deserve an entry even within the narrative lineage of literary mutation for which it, along with Wright, is progenitor. But Brown’s effort also had the misfortune of being – like all good poetry – ahead of the curve: too sensitive to the shadowy movements of a changing conceptual landscape. In Limited Cities Brown plays many roles with astonishing versatility. The back blurb describes the poet as ‘personal, political and revelatory in turns’. Of all Brown’s poetic talents, it is his role as revelatr that I find most thrilling, and most interesting for my argument here. At times there seems in the poems of Limited Cities to be a tone of barely restrained eschatological ecstasy, as in the poem Burn:

A bus passes its shadow over driveways and

unfinished gardens.

You agree there will be flames:

the shards of a broken bottle directing

light to the heavens and the earth

and cigarette ash twitching in the grass.

There are days when civilisation will end. (p. 6)

This is an example of the apocalyptic tendency that can be found in Brown’s work, and there are much subtler instances of this same mode – a mode that is descriptive of the charged atmosphere of western Sydney. In its religious ecstatics, and its obsession with evil manifest in the materialist menace of suburban life, Brown’s poetry demonstrates the dialectical ambiguity that Maiden recognises as a uniquely suburban feature. Brown’s poetry, with gleeful dramatic irony, enacts the dialogue between icons of shared ‘low’ cultural meaning: the broken glass as a symbol of diabolical intoxication, violence, lawlessness, and irreversible moral decay; a bus’s shadow contrasts as the referent of order, ordinariness, safety and civilisation. Both these details are subsumed by the high abstraction of heaven and earth which proceeds from them.

This contrast provides a startling effect, one that might easily tear the poem into a bathetic incoherence were it not for the eerie twitching of the cigarette ash. This implausible but strangely evocative detail provides a disturbing pivot for the tonal shifts of the poem to balance upon. Indeed, the ambivalent pathos of the detail is one that Maiden seems to describe as a characteristic part of suburban religiosity when she writes of the tendency toward: ‘dis-incarnation involved in religious faith … often (accompanied by) an insistence on the necessity of submitting totally to immediate sense-data’ (1998). Rather than merely representing this reflex toward ‘dis-incarnation’, Brown again reverses the habitus of expectation by using the fulcrum of the twitching ash to bring an uncanny, transhumanist pathos to the transcendental light in the shards of broken glass. The glass becomes the shattered slate upon which the transcendental is coded – the sin which permits the cruel and capricious earth to reflect its own indifferent dialectical reversal of grace. The high, in other words, is not merely tethered to the low, it is rendered lucid only as related by it. The distance between firmament and materialist earth provide a canvas for the poet to render the poetics of an eternally reversed dialectic between high and low detail. For the poet, these imploding structuralist dichotomies are a source of revelatory ecstasy, and his hyperbole – ‘There are days when civilisation will end’ – in turn reveal the awed giddiness of apocalyptic expectation that is a palpable characteristic of the ‘suburban frontier’ of Sydney’s outer suburbs – an electrified sense of the histories that can be felt, as Brown puts it, ‘on the edge of your skin’ (p. 3).

In at least one sense, this ambiguity of suburban ‘meaningfulness’ is the revelation that Brown decodes in his vision of the eerily unpresentable landscape of the unwritten suburbs – a place where the ordinary is ripe with an alarming portentousness, where the left hand blinker of a silver hatchback points, eternally, to the problem, and a kid on a train twirling a pen lid becomes the pivot upon which the meaning of life depends. Though this atmospheric ‘intensity’ is clearly one that Maiden was writing about in 1998, one which she attributes to an internalised possibility of subjective violence – there is nevertheless something radical about this aesthetic dimension of Brown’s poetry. Where Australian poetry traditionally insists on the easy retreat into effortless eternities of anti-allegorical landscape – which by its very ‘nature’ defies articulation, remaining silently indifferent to the complexity of human life – Brown’s poetry, emboldened by a faithfulness to the sacred, inverts this reflex. While the traditional relationship between an immutable and allegorical landscape and a cultured, lyrical poet provide a redemptive, articulatory dimension to the poem, Brown’s observations reverse this dynami.: Where people are helpless, desperate in their inability to articulate their plight or wilfully blind to the significance of their position, Brown redeems them in his reading of the landscape, rather than in the fact of the poem itself (and therefore inherent in the poet). In Brown’s decoding of knowing birds, watchful blackberry bushes, zealous self-immolated trucks, and jacaranda trees that even in the face of death will give up their blessings, he lends a redemptive ‘poetic’ dimension to the landscape – or rather, he suggests a transcendentally coherent dimension to the landscape that is accessible to all, if not necessarily coherent to anyone. To take this one step further, I return to the line from Burn: ‘You agree that there will be flames’ (p. 6). In my reading, this sudden shift of perspective is the dreadful and climactic voice of the divine, forbidding the baring of false witness – refusing the reader the freedom to pretend that they do not understand what is right before their own eyes.

This is the paranoid character of the parochial revelator whose distance from traditional centres of power, and stabilised cultural iconographies, leaves them with an inverse sense of the own interconnectedness. Rather than internalise their minimal relation to power, they invert it and begin to see in the isolated and disassociated symbols of cultural meaning as symptoms of divine conspiracy – the sense that they must surely be part of something greater than themselves. As Ivor Indyk (2014) has pointed out in his paper on ‘Gerald Murnane and the Provincial Imagination’, provincialism, at least in Australian literature, can be characterised as making ‘large claims for itself’ in the sense that it is marked by ‘the tendency to see all things in one thing; the whole world in the local detail’.

Likewise, as Maiden points out, the parochial sense of isolation is one which belies the true nature of power – which in actuality is not inversely correlated with provincial isolation. As Maiden puts it, ‘power is in essence parochial.’ (1998) As if to emphasise this provincial potency, Brown’s collection takes his revelatory, suburban tendencies to the world’s cultural centres with ‘rhapsodies on the Parisian banlieues during Advent and Lent, and list poems set on the streets of Barcelona’ (back cover blurb). Brown’s ultimate revelation on these cultural centres is hinted at in the collection’s title – it is the great cities of the world which Brown’s revelator finds to be ‘Limited’, not the dislocating and fervid expanses of suburban Campbelltown.

In the provincial uniqueness and radical inversions of Brown’s work resides at least some explanation for the collection being left out of the public considerations above. There are many other reasons, and the situation is complex, but as everyone knows, poetry is just born to lose. Evidence of this is that the first writer to contribute to the Western Sydney Project was Fiona Wright, whose collection Knuckled, while, like Brown’s, found critical acclaim, yet warranted no mention in the above examples of the biographia of Western Sydney literature.

In striking contrast to Brown’s Limited Cities, Wright’s collection begins with a poem called Inner West and its first line reads: ‘the things you notice when you leave’ (p. 1). Looking at that line now, I cannot helped but be astonished, once again, at the poet’s knack for prescience – it seems Wright was able to foresee her absence from the post facto critical mapping of a place that she had in mind even as she wrote about her distance from it. More importantly, Wright’s line subtly begins an inversion of the dialectic between the inchoate emptiness of the western suburbs and the culturally coherent inner-west by foregrounding the very emptiness of the former. The details that Wright accumulates in this paratactic poem are of a genuinely quotidian nature – they lack the portentousness with which objects are imbued in Brown’s poetry. It is as if Wright is fascinated by the very ease which the ordinary seems to excite in this alienated, inner-west context. There is something jealous about Wright’s observations – she seems to both resent and greedily consume the absence of menace or ambiguity which these images capture. This jealousy accumulates in the punchline of the poem, with its ‘holistic hairdressers and organic graffiti commissioned by the council.’ The absence of dis-ease underlies the resplendent healthiness of this place, and it is a ludicrous, implausible vision that the poet turns to us.  

This poetics of place is present, too, in the prose that has emerged from the Western Sydney movement. Perhaps the most startling argument for the unique potential of this new literature is found in the review of Michael Mohammed Ahmad’s The Tribe(2014) by the renowned anthropologist Ghassan Hage. In his review, Hage describes this ‘significant and astonishing novel’ as one which manages to transcend binaries of racism and anti-racism; displaying, as Hage (2014) puts it, a ‘healthy narcissim’. Hage applauds Ahmad for creating a work which captures life in its ‘heroic normalcy’, giving texture to life as it is lived by ‘the Tribe’ with ‘love rather than in the usual defensive position of the “constantly worrying about what the dominant culture is going to say about this” posture’. The much-talked-about dedication for The Tribe, begins: ‘To my family, who will never read this’ (Ahmad, 2014). Whatever commentary this might be on the intimate specifics of the author’s familial relations, there is, I suspect, also in it a declaration of being painfully aware of the obscurity to which most fiction, particularly literary fiction, is addressed. It is a radical question of intent to begin a work of fiction in this way – to deny, or at least, to revise longstanding presuppositions about a universal, and persuadable, audience into which a work is introduced. Even in this, Ahmad seems determined to produce work for a self-contained, fully formed culture that is not in relation to the gaze of those outside the ‘wastes’ of the western suburbs.

This defensive ambivalence is yet another characteristic of the provincial mindset – an urge to confide to an outside world the secrets of one’s own province. In James Woods’ How Fiction Works (2008), the provincial’s situation is described as a ‘double-bind’ – they are at once compelled to share their provincialism, but unwilling to lose the secretive essence of their separation, an outcome which communion virtually guarantees (p.104). Ahmad’s text revels in this contradictory desire – in a ‘reluctance to give things up too easily’ (Indyk, 2014). One tendency that reveals this complex in Ahmad’s work is the recurring moments of dislocating translation. In the opening scene of the collection, the young narrator, Bani, explains that his Tayta’s hands are too arthritic to move, ‘except when she’s preparing aa-jeen, which is what we call dough’ (p. 1). In effect, these translations, deployed consistently throughout the collection, serve to emphasise the ongoing separation between narrator and reader. It is essential for the integrity of both that this point of difference remains in play. After all, it is one that defines the reversed dialectic of values that the collection seeks to articulate – one that the collection’s opening epigraph signals: whosoever shall read this book shall not be of the Tribe. This verbal act of separation is not a note of defiance, but a melancholic recognition of larger cultural hierarchies of value.

As Maiden writes, ‘the proximity of differing races and social classes in the Australian suburbs allows this dehierarchising aesthetic process to develop very often’ – and Ahmad’s collection is certainly one that seeks to defy aesthetic hierarchy. The opening scene introduces Bani’s grandmother, his Tayta, whose life and death (from Bani’s perspective) provides the collection’s structure. In the opening lines, Tayta is described as big-belled and covered in c-section scars ‘that look like train tracks running in different directions just below her belly button’ (p. 1). Her skin is ‘golden and soft’ but her body feels like ‘a plastic bag filled with warm water’. Such descriptions are not merely examples of differentiation through metaphor – they are reversals of cultural aesthetic hierarchies. Bani, and his Tribe, are of little value to the outside world, and the awed excitement with which Bani details the Tribe’s inner-world performs this awareness. Nevertheless, the Tribe, despite its difference to the surrounding ‘Aussie’ cultural awareness, has its own powerful value systems – which operate, as Hage indicates, without the need for any outsider’s legitimation.

Ultimately, the question begged by Ahmad’s contentious dedication must be: who is the work of fiction for? What audience is out there for these words, and what in the world will they make of them? In the case of The Tribe, much has been made, and more is surely coming – and whatever the answer, it is clear that the audience will not be the one that SBS had in mind when they excreted Struggle Street onto our screens. Neither will it be an audience that requires the constant debate about de-colonising and re-colonising our national obsessions that so preoccupy our literary critics and the writers who have for too long kept such dreary and feverish dreams alive. Whoever it is that this ‘westie’ literary emergence is destined to reach, it is likely they will be the inheritors of an identity caught between cultural borders – between the city and the pillar, the coast and country: a people whose common language is the infinite antipodean rhythm of western Sydney itself.

Author’s note: Of central concern to Maiden’s article ‘The Suburban Problem of Evil’ is a reflection on her 1990 novel, Play With Knives. The novel, set in Mount Druitt, the reaction to its publication, and the controversy surroundings the unpublished sequel, Complicity, make for fascinating reading and are essential texts for anyone wanting to understand the literary tradition of Western Sydney. All of the above are free to download, from Quemar Press: http://quemarpress.weebly.com/books.html

References

Ahmad, M. (2014). The Tribe. Giramondo: Artarmon

Benebe-Clarke, M. (2014, June 27). Under New Management. Sydney Review of Books Retrieved from http://www.sydneyreviewofbooks.com/three-jerks-carman-ahmad-polites/

Brown, L. (2012). Limited Cities. Giramondo: Artarmon

Burke, J. (2015, April 18). Patriotic drama: arts undaunted by Anzac fatigue. The Australian Retrieved from http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/review/patriotic-drama-arts-undaunted-by-anzac-fatigue/news-story/7ba4d886fca56c9f7c25128db8b396c5

Evershed, N. (2015, March 3). Surge in poles: Tony Abbott’s flag count hits a new high. The Guardian Retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/australia-news-blog/2015/mar/03/surge-in-poles-tony-abbotts-flag-count-hits-a-new-high

Hage, G. (2014). Writing Arab-Australian Universes. Overland 15 May Retrieved from https://overland.org.au/2014/05/writing-arab-australian-universes/

Harrison, M. (2004). Who Wants to Create Australia?: Essays on Poetry and Ideas in Contemporary Australia. Halstead Press: Michigan

Indyk, I. (2014). Gerald Murnane and the Provincial Imagination. Paper presented to the Writing and Society Research Centre. Western Sydney University, 2014

Jacobs, F. (2014). Here Be Bogans: Four Miniatures of Sydney Stereotypes. Retrieved from http://bigthink.com/strange-maps/524-here-be-bogans-four-miniatures-of-sydney-stereotypes

Maiden, J. (1998). The Suburban Problem of Evil. Australian Literary Studies 18(4), 115

McGuire, M. (2015). The new Australian literary frontier: writing Western Sydney. The Conversation Retrieved from http://theconversation.com/the-new-australian-literary-frontier-writing-western-sydney-37284

Safi, M. (2015, February 3). How giving Prince Philip a knighthood left Australia’s PM fighting for survival. The Guardian Retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/feb/03/how-giving-prince-philip-a-knighthood-left-australias-pm-fighting-for-survival

SBS.com.au (2015). Struggle Street sparks national conversation. SBS Retrieved from http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2015/05/14/struggle-street-sparks-national-conversation

Struggle Street (2015, May). [television program trailer]. SBS. Retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/media/video/2015/may/05/sbs-mount-druitt-struggle-street-promo-video-doco

Twyford-Moore, S. (2014) Interview with Digital Writer’s Festival Director Sam Twyford-Moore. Retrieved from http://everguide.com.au/arts-and-culture/literary/%20interview/digital-writers-festival-director-sam-twyfordmoore.aspx

Williamson, G. (2013, Dec 14). Life flares in Suburban Void. The Australian Retrieved from http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/review/life-flares-in-suburban-void/story-fn9n8gph-1226781593003

Woods, J. (2008). How Fiction Works. Macmillan: London

Wright, F. (2011). Knuckled. Giramondo: Artarmon

About the author

Luke Carman is a writer from the Sydney suburb of Liverpool. His Doctorate of Creative Arts from Western Sydney University was conferred in July 2016. His first book, An Elegant Young Man, was awarded a NSW Premier’s Literary Award in 2015 and shortlisted for the ALS Gold Medal. In 2014 he was named a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Novelist.