Suburbs

In a 1996 interview Chris Wallace-Crabbe observed: 'There was a stage when those of us who wrote about the scorned suburbs were looked down on by scions of the squattocratic gentry, like Judith Wright and Geoff Dutton. Subconsciously, they treated…

Suburbia has been a neuralgic point in debates about Australian culture and Australian identity since the end of the nineteenth century. Louis Esson's 1911 diatribe against the 'vaunted purity of the suburban home' captured what is still a pervasive anxiety…

This essay is an exploration of the suburban imaginary in David Ireland's The Glass Canoe (1976), Bruce Dawe's Condolences of the Season (1971) and Christos Tsiolkas' Loaded (1995). While the foregrounded concern of these works has as much to do…

Suburbia, whatever else it may be, is also a euphemism for normality. As such it has become central to representations of transgression, deviance or perversion that are either implicitly or explicitly anti-suburban in their refusal of a life-style that is…

The Australian intelligentsia's critical or ambivalent response to the suburbs and suburbia has been well-documented, though the gender-blindness of urban theorising often goes unremarked (Harman 108). The suburbs represent a particular set of problems for their female inhabitants, a specifically…

The well-known line of anti-suburban criticism that we associate with the Barry Humphries of the 1950s actually had its beginnings as a manifesto of the late-nineteenth-century international bohemianism that gained momentum in Australia from the early years of this century…

The popular reception of Andrew McGahan's Praise in 1992 and the subsequent publication of 'a bunch of novels that seemed to share a number of its concerns' (Syson 21) have prompted an ongoing debate on the validity of 'grunge' fiction…

Our first scene is a Western Sydney suburban lounge-room seventeen years ago. It is very clean and tidy and full of shelves and little tables with small pastel ornaments on them. They are the figurines of angels and babies and…

How is it that we can find our way around a city if we think that every street, every suburb, looks the same? The devil, here as elsewhere, is in the detail. Poetry, among its many mansions, includes modes which…