Suburbs
Articles
- Neither Here Nor There: Suburban Voices in Australian Poetry
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…
1 November 1998 - Introduction : Subtopia, or the Problem of Suburbia
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…
1 November 1998 - The Pursuit of Oblivion: In Flight from Suburbia
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…
1 November 1998 - Decomposing Suburbia: Patrick White’s Perversity
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…
1 November 1998 - Subdivisions of Suburbia: The Politics of Place in Melissa Lucashenko’s ‘Steam Pigs’ and Amanda Lohrey’s ‘Camille’s Bread’
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…
1 November 1998 - Alan Wearne : Interview1 November 1998
- Shopping at Last!: History, Fiction and the Anti-Suburban Tradition
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…
1 November 1998 - Shit Creek: Suburbia, Abjection and Subjectivity in Australian ‘Grunge’ Fiction
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…
1 November 1998 - The Suburban Problem of Evil
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…
1 November 1998 - How to Use a Street Directory : Detail and Knowledge in the Work of Alan Wearne
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…
1 November 1998
Contributors
- Karen Brooks
- Martin Duwell
- Martin Duwell
- Margaret Henderson
- Joan Kirkby
- Garry Kinnane
- David McCooey
- Andrew McCann
- Andrew McCann
- Jennifer Maiden
- Alan Wearne