Suburban Space, the Novel and Australian Modernity

By Brigid Rooney

‘Suburban Space, the Novel and Australian Modernity’ investigates the interaction between suburbs and suburbia in a century-long series of Australian novels. It puts the often trenchantly anti-suburban rhetoric of fiction in dialogue with its evocative and imaginative rendering of suburban place and time. ‘Suburban Space, the Novel and Australian Modernity’ rethinks existing cultural debates about suburbia – in Australia and elsewhere – by putting novelistic representations of ‘suburbs’ (suburban interiors, homes, streets, forms and lives over time) in dialogue with the often negative idea of ‘suburbia’ in fiction as an amnesic and conformist cultural wasteland. ‘Suburban space, the novel and Australian modernity’ shows, in other words, how Australian novels dramatize the collision between the sensory terrain of the remembered suburb and the cultural critique of suburbia. It is through such contradictions that novels create resonant mental maps of place and time. Australian novels are a prism through which suburbs – as sites of everyday colonization, defined by successive waves of urban development – are able to be glimpsed sidelong.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2018
• ISBN: 9781783088164

Book preview

Suburban Space, the Novel and Australian Modernity

ANTHEM STUDIES IN AUSTRALIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE

Anthem Studies in Australian Literature and Culture specialises in quality, innovative research in Australian literary studies. The series publishes work that advances contemporary scholarship on Australian literature conceived historically, thematically and/or conceptually. We welcome well-researched and incisive analyses on a broad range of topics: from individual authors or texts to considerations of the field as a whole, including in comparative or transnational frames.

Series Editors

Katherine Bode – Australian National University, Australia

Nicole Moore – University of New South Wales, Australia

Editorial Board

Tanya Dalziell – University of Western Australia, Australia

Delia Falconer – University of Technology, Sydney, Australia

John Frow – University of Sydney, Australia

Wang Guanglin – Shanghai University of International Business and Economics, China

Ian Henderson – King’s College London, UK

Tony Hughes-D’Aeth – University of Western Australia, Australia

Ivor Indyk – University of Western Sydney, Australia

Nicholas Jose – University of Adelaide, Australia

James Ley – Sydney Review of Books, Australia

Andrew McCann – Dartmouth College, USA

Lyn McCredden – Deakin University, Australia

Elizabeth McMahon – University of New South Wales, Australia

Susan Martin – La Trobe University, Australia

Brigitta Olubas – University of New South Wales, Australia

Anne Pender – University of New England, Australia

Fiona Polack – Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada

Sue Sheridan – University of Adelaide, Emeritus, Australia

Ann Vickery – Deakin University, Australia

Russell West-Pavlov – Eberhard Karls Universitat Tubingen, Germany

Lydia Wevers – Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

Gillian Whitlock – University of Queensland, Australia

Suburban Space, the Novel and Australian Modernity

Brigid Rooney

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2018

by ANTHEM PRESS

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© Brigid Rooney 2018

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN-13: 978-1-78308-814-0 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78308-814-1 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

Dedicated to the memory of Barbara and Elizabeth Rooney, and for my family.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Things to Do with Suburbia

Notes

Works Cited

Index

ACKNOWLEDGeMENTS

My journey through real and fictional suburbs has sometimes been arduous but mostly joyful. The resulting book would have been impossible without the guidance and support – intellectual, material, emotional – of friends and family, as well as colleagues at the University of Sydney and in the field of Australian literary studies.

I am indebted to the University of Sydney for the generous assistance provided by a Thompson Equity Fellowship in 2015 that freed me to think and write at just the right time. I am the recipient of much-needed support through grants and periods of study leave for which I thank the School of Literature, Art and Media, and the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. I owe thanks to colleagues in the Department of English and its Australian Literature Program for a lively intellectual environment and for myriad forms of advice and support.

I have a number of people to thank for their patient, critical feedback on my work-in-progress. Thanks to Monique Rooney, my abiding reader of first resort whose critical and creative responses I cannot do without. I am hugely grateful to colleagues and friends who have read and responded to drafts at various stages – especially to Leigh Dale, Guy Davidson, Robert Dixon, Paul Genoni, Paul Giles, Peter Kirkpatrick, Elizabeth McMahon, Peter Marks, Liam Semler, Angela Seward, Susan Sheridan, Lee Wallace and Elizabeth Webby. Thanks also to Jacinta Van Den Berg for her excellent help as research assistant in this project’s early stages. For their astute feedback, advice and support I thank commissioning editors of the Anthem Series in Australian Literature and Culture, Katherine Bode and Nicole Moore. Over the years, anonymous peer reviewers and respondents at seminars and conferences have provided insightful comments on my contributions to journals, edited collections and books; I am grateful to the editors of those collections whose comments have contributed, knowingly or not, to the present book: Richard Begam, Coral Howells, Michael Valdez Moses and Brigitta Olubas. To my students in English and Australian literature at the University of Sydney with whom I have talked about suburbia for more years than I like to admit, I have learned much from your observations, insights and enthusiasm.

I am grateful to Anthem Press for agreeing to publish this book, and for the assistance, advice and help of Abi Pandey, Nisha and the Anthem team. I am especially appreciative of the careful labours of Fergus Armstrong who lent his editorial expertise. I thank the artist Ian Strange and his producer and professional assistant Jedda Andrews for kind permission to use Number Twelve from the wonderful series Final Act for the book’s cover image.

I owe the greatest debt to my family. I dedicate this book to my late mother, Isabel Barbara (Han) Rooney, without whose spirit, creative intelligence and wisdom it could never have been imagined, let alone written. I have drawn inspiration from the wit, gentleness and courage of my father Maurice, from my late sister, Elizabeth (Liz), whose gifts remain and whose light shines on, from her beautiful daughters Miranda and Lily, and from all my nieces and nephews – not least from their parents, my brothers and sisters, with whom I share memories of our growing up together in a succession of suburban homes. I thank my sons, Robin and Jeremy, for living contemporary suburbia with me, for being tuned in, for bringing coffee and encouragement, music and distraction. Last but not least, thank you, John – not just for the occasional rant, but for your kindness, goodness, forbearance and love.

INTRODUCTION: THINGS TO DO WITH SUBURBIA

How do those of us who live in suburbs, and most Australians do, relate to our neighbourhoods? Are they places which, physically and mentally, we are trying to get away from? Do we drive through them each morning and evening, to and from work, our eyes fixed upon the car in front, upon straying pedestrians and traffic lights? Have we seen where we live? Has it entered our imagination?

—Bernard Smith, ‘On Perceiving the Australian Suburb’¹

My regular exercise is a forty-minute circuit through suburban streets. When I walk this route, daydreaming or distracted by music or podcasts, the roads I cross, the gardens, houses and parklands I pass are slightly out of focus. There is the tangible, three-dimensional world to enjoy – the morning atmosphere, the humidity of late summer or the chill of winter, the overarching dome of dawn skies or the pale moon hanging low in the west over remnant bushland through which roars the hidden freeway that now bisects the suburb. Though I know every letterbox, every front garden, the style and condition of every house, every crack in the pavement, the burly gang of cockatoos that hangs out on a particular roof, and my fellow walkers and their greetings, the circuit always furnishes some never-before-seen detail. The daily walk, however, has lately served notice that the suburb’s times are changing. Its mostly 1960s houses – modernist or vernacular three-bedroom brick veneers – are ageing. Their original owners, their families grown and departed, are elderly, many already gone or in the process of moving on. A new population is altering the composition and contours of the neighbourhood. Not without a pang I observe as one by one their houses are demolished, as once carefully tended gardens are obliterated in no time at all, flattened to bare earth, preparing the way for larger homes. Elsewhere, around transit and retail hubs, whole swathes of even older suburban vintages – streets of Federation and interwar bungalows – are spectacularly gone. In their place rise new multistoreyed residential apartment blocks, enjoying vistas of still surrounding suburban sprawl.

The prospect of suburbs, charged with ambivalence, is both intimately felt and alien. Though my walk through the suburb conjures urban flux and the passing of an era, it also suggests the amnesia that routinely accompanies everyday suburban spaces, contingent upon the present of global capitalism and continuous with the longer history of colonization, particularly in a settler society like Australia. If, as Patrick Wolfe succinctly puts it, ‘[s]‌ettler colonialism destroys to replace’, then Australian suburbs are surely the structuring products of a settler-colonialism that has been and continues to be ‘foundational’ to Australian modernity.² And yet the suburbs are also home. In his 1976 essay, ‘On Perceiving the Australian Suburb’, art historian Bernard Smith questions how we relate to, inhabit and imagine the suburban neighbourhoods in which we live – spaces that constitute the ‘environmental reality’ of the majority of Australians. This is a reality even more prevalent now than at the time of Smith’s writing, with Census data showing two thirds of Australians live in capital cities – a figure that does not include all built-up urban areas that arguably share the structures and conditions of suburbia at large.³ The cultural representation of suburban space, moreover, must be considered formative of the ways and the terms in which it is lived. As literary scholar and novelist Andrew McCann argues, ‘suburbia’ is both a lived, experiential, ‘tangible site’ entailing a ‘distinct set of social and spatial relations’ and ‘a discursive fiction, a facet of various imaginary topographies’.⁴

Bernard Smith is responding to the inherent ambivalence of suburbia as an environment that seems as mundane and nebulous as it is ubiquitous, one that proves difficult to see or grasp. It is a built and social environment with its own local settler-Australian shape and obvious continuities with its counterparts elsewhere around the world. Suburbia – especially in the present era of globalized late capitalism – is a worldwide phenomenon that recalls Jean-Luc Nancy’s account of the breakdown of the older Roman ideal of ‘The City’. Glossing the papal benediction ‘urbi et orbi’ to mean not just ‘city and world’ but ‘everywhere and anywhere’, Nancy observes that the city now ‘spreads and extends all the way to the point where, while it tends to cover the entire orb of the planet, it loses its properties as a city’. This bleak appraisal of contemporary urbanization is a prelude to Nancy’s concerted attempt to think dialectically about the emergence of the globe, both as a concept contingent on techno-capitalism and also generative of possibilities for the creation of a ‘world’ despite and because of globally deforming urban agglomeration.⁵ Nancy’s project is not so very far removed from Bernard Smith’s delineation of the profound challenges to imagination and belonging provoked by everyday suburban forms. Not surprisingly it is art that provides Smith with his key avenue of action and redress. For Smith, art can foster, among ordinary people, something he calls ‘historical perception’ – a mode of vision that perceives the past in the present, that builds the communal memory and value of spaces otherwise subject to heedless development.⁶

It is important to note, however, that both the pronoun ‘we’ and the implicitly gendered scenario of Smith’s imagined daily commute to and from the suburbs mark his rhetorical orientation to a public sphere occupied mostly, in the 1970s at least, by married white men. To draw attention to this perspective is not gratuitous but crucial to my own investigation of how suburban space is made by words, how it has been represented, imagined and challenged in Australian fiction over time and across successive phases of modernity. My chosen focus for this investigation is the novel, a form that, as we will see, holds the capacity to imbue space with narrative time and feeling, simulating and arguably fostering Smith’s ‘historical perception’. Tracking novels of suburban space over the longer course of the twentieth century, moreover, foregrounds a set of recurring tropes and preoccupations that, as one might expect, show continuity with suburban fiction elsewhere while refracting specifically Australian contexts, experiences and things. The word ‘things’ in my introduction’s subtitle emphasizes the eclecticism, randomness and slipperiness of suburban sites, tropes, images and objects – the tendency of suburban space to lose those definitive properties and firm rhetorical boundaries that academic literary scholars and critics otherwise like to impose. In thinking about ‘things to do with suburbia’ I am also consciously invoking the themes and findings of an important essay – ‘Things to Do with Shopping Centers’ – by Australian cultural studies scholar Meaghan Morris. In particular I take from Morris’s analysis of things suburban the value of a feminist-oriented insistence on ambivalence rather than astonishment towards her objects: ‘Ambivalence allows a thinking of relations between contradictory states […] Ambivalence does not eliminate the moment of everyday discontent – of anger, frustration, sorrow, irritation, hatred, boredom, fatigue.’⁷

This book mounts a case for recognizing and valuing in Australian fiction the often ambivalent and contradictory significance of suburbia, of spaces and things suburban. First, it seeks to better understand and calibrate an anti-suburban literary discourse that has, since the 1990s, been frequently dismissed as narrowly elitist. In the 1990s, trenchant criticism of literary anti-suburbanism was partly a function of the revaluing of everyday and popular Australian culture by scholars in the newly ascendant interdisciplinary fields of cultural studies and urban history. In Robin Gerster’s influential phrase, the anti-suburban creations of renowned post-war cultural figures like novelist Patrick White and satirist Barry Humphries had effected a ‘gerrymander’ of the field, a takeover by a minority imbued with a sense of cultural superiority, resulting in a set of skewed representations that had little to do with the experiences and aspirations of most Australians.⁸ While not without some validity, however, the post 1990s anti-elitist critique has itself become a routine gesture with problematic side effects. These include a narrowing of the capacity to distinguish what may be notable or valuable in the anti-suburban drive so evident in key Australian fictions of suburbia. My first objective, therefore, is not to dismiss but to investigate the critique of suburbia generated in canonical works of fiction, to recognize how this critique resonates and alters within and across different contexts and eras. Second, this book aims to extend the existing field of Australian fictions of suburbia by opening up the category of what counts as a novel of suburban modernity, factoring in a capacious if at times eclectic assemblage of ‘things suburban’, and bringing recognition of how discourses and tropes of suburbia enter and inform a wide range of texts. Most importantly, my readings of novels as novels, attending to their forms and patterns, are designed to gauge the contradictions and ambiguities within even the most anti-suburban of fictions, drawing attention to the ways in which, for example, they may encode or summon the lost suburban home. The latter point touches on an endeavour that will bring us, time and again, to the idea of the novel as a repository of individual and collective memory, sometimes obscured but always imaginatively mediated.

For well over a century, from established literary classics to lesser-known works, novels have represented, mapped, remembered, critiqued and reinvented everyday Australian suburban place. Viewed this way, the field appears as a multilayered archive of reimagined suburbs that yield palimpsests of place capable of ghosting and supplementing the historical record. In novels across the long twentieth century set in Sydney we may visit, for example, workers’ bungalows stretching along the 1920s tramline to Narrabeen lagoon in D. H. Lawrence’s Kangaroo (1923); a fictive version of Burwood’s genteel Appian Way, with its Queen Anne and Federation bungalows, in Dymphna Cusack’s The Sun Is Never Enough (1967); the tiny settlement of The Spit, in Mosman, in the pre-bridge, tram-ferry era in Lesbia Harford’s The Invaluable Mystery (1987; written c.1921); and, indirectly, the view from suburban heights in Bexley through the streaky mist of American settings in Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children (1940). In one of the most influential of these suburban texts, George Johnston’s My Brother Jack (1964), we visit Melbourne’s interwar suburbs of Elsternwick and Brighton East. Moving away from Sydney and Melbourne, the list seems endless, stretching to Adelaide and Brisbane, Newcastle, Perth and Hobart, in novels by Jessica Anderson, Peter Cowan, David Ireland, Christopher Koch, Melissa Lucashenko, David Malouf, Katharine Susannah Prichard, Christos Tsiolkas and Tim Winton – not to mention the growing cultural diversity of the contemporary field that is taking us, for example, into the houses, streets, shops, pubs, waterways and parklands of Sydney’s western suburbs of Parramatta, Lakemba, Punchbowl, Mount Druitt and Liverpool. Once mapped in this way, the field is impossible to account for or represent in any single study. Among the conditions that inevitably shape my view of the field is my own spatial and temporal location in the suburbs of Sydney, a circumstance that represents both the limit and strength of the ensuing discussion.

This book is not an exercise in literary tourism nor does it enact a psychogeography of the suburbs, though recent work using such models suggests the (still latent) cultural significance of suburban space.⁹ Nor do I argue that fictional suburbs in novels bear any direct or unmediated relation to real-world suburbs. Indeed, this book works with the opposite recognition: that fictional narrative involves the reinvention of historical, geographic and biographical source material drawn from so-called real worlds outside the novel. This recognition redirects attention to novelistic form, in Caroline Levine’s sense of forms as durable, portable, adaptable, generative patterns.¹⁰ Levine’s emphasis on form, as well as being aligned with the recent turn to new formalism in literary studies, recalls the principle famously promulgated by Marshall McLuhan that the medium is the message. This warrants an approach that factors into analysis of literary suburbia greater consideration of the ways content, theme and story interact with medium and form. This principle underpins my attention to the formal properties of the novel that mediate suburban spaces and communities. My hypothesis is that the most valid way to draw the full import from fictions of suburban space is to give close attention to their genre, formal composition and aesthetic attributes as novels.

The novel can be defined as long-form fictive narrative in print. It is a form with a history that comes prefabricated with an array of genres and modes of composition that are not only durable but also involve continual adaptation and reinvention. As the word itself implies, the novel is always about the ‘new’, a function of modernity itself. As a form, the novel is adaptable and accommodating: it affords the capacity to map suburban place and fix it in the proverbial aspic of narrative time. The word ‘affords’ recurs in my discussion, following Levine’s appropriation of ‘affordance’ from design theory, to refer to the functionality, uses and properties of materials and designs.¹¹ The idea of the novel as a form that affords certain uses encourages attention to what both constrains and produces meaning, to what links novels over time and across space, as well as suggesting how elements of novelistic form may be contingent upon the socio-economic and cultural conditions that also, not irrelevantly, produce suburban modernity. Indeed historian of the novel Ian Watt meditates on the historical coincidence of suburbanization and the novel, noting their mutual orientation to individualism, interiority and privacy, and observing the paradox that ‘the process of urbanisation should, in the suburb, have led to a way of life that was more secluded and less social than ever before, and, at the same time, helped to bring about a literary form which was less concerned with the public and more with the private side of life than any previous one’.¹²

Other forms, genres and media – film, song, poetry, drama, television, visual art and photography – can of course also invest space and place with meaning, but none does so in quite the way of the novel. This does not mean that the novel is inherently better than other forms at conjuring suburban space. On the contrary, poetry and television, for example, are forms and media engaged with, implicated in and refractive of things suburban.¹³ Rather, my focus on the novel is a useful means of tracking features that in Levine’s sense are continuous, durable and yet also adaptive across time and context. So as much as this book is about suburbia, it is also about the novel, about the relationship between a specific artistic form and a specific milieu in terms that I hope will capture how everyday places can, to adapt Smith’s terms, enter our imagination, while also engaging urgent questions about the effects of successive phases of modernization and modernity.

Suburbs, Suburbia, Suburban Space: Discourse, Definitions and Debates

‘Suburb’ is from the Latin ‘suburbium’, affixing ‘sub’ (under, close to, towards) to ‘urb’ (city). Roman suburbs were either mixed commercial districts within city walls or outlying settlements on the periphery, beyond the city’s purview. The prefix ‘sub’ still denotes the suburb’s ancillary condition, its subordination to an imagined centre. From ancient to modern contexts, the suburb is always relative, falling between spaces, not quite urban and not quite rural. As such the suburb can function, in advertisements for real estate for example, as an ideal space combining the best of city and country – representing the Arcadian rus-in-urbe. Equally suburban space can connote lack and liminality, being insufficiently formed or bounded. The Oxford English Dictionary notes that the suburb is ‘now typically residential in character’, aligning with the usual figuration of ‘suburbs’ in contemporary discourse as separate from and ancillary to the sphere of work and economic production.¹⁴ As the historical product of industrial modernity, suburbs are coded as feminine spaces for the reproduction of that modernity, functioning symbolically and materially as dormitories for private life, family and related services. The gendered bifurcation of public and private, work and home, production and reproduction is arguably still operative today, but in the post-suburban, digital age an increasing complexity, multiplicity and practical entanglement of spheres contend against earlier, industrial models of suburban space.

Unlike ‘suburb’, the term ‘suburbia’ – which the OED notes is mostly ‘depreciative’ in tenor – does not begin to circulate in English until the 1870s, in the wake, it would seem, of one of industrial Britain’s major waves of suburban development. Suburbia refers to ‘suburbs considered collectively, typically treated as if a distinct community or country with its own way of life’ and ‘characterized by a dull ordinariness and monotonous conformity’. The etymology of ‘suburbia’ coincides, then, with fully fledged industrial modernization in mid to late nineteenth-century England, spreading more or less in tandem in Australia and North America. The word ‘suburbs’ is less decisively pejorative than ‘suburbia’, tending to point towards diverse, distinctive localities rather than to the abstracted and collective phenomenon of suburbia. The latter term hints scathingly at a failed ‘utopia’ as the undesirable consequence of modernity. For Andrew McCann, however, the distinction between the terms ‘suburbs’ and ‘suburbia’ is moot; in practice, he says, discursive and material, real and imagined aspects of suburbia are impossible to disentangle.¹⁵

Suburbanization is at once a local phenomenon and the product of imperial, colonial and transnational traffic. Australia was born modern and suburban, according to both Donald Horne and historian of suburbia Graeme Davison.¹⁶ This is not to suggest Australia is exceptional but rather to observe the coincidence of colonial invasion with industrial modernity and the rise of suburbanization. In City Dreamers (2016), tracing the peak and decline of the suburban ideal, Davison identifies four nineteenth-century ideologies that accompanied (Anglo) suburbanization – Evangelicalism, Sanitarianism, Romanticism and Class Distinction – with their structuring logics of avoidance and attraction: ‘avoidance of the vice, disease, ugliness and violence of the city’ and ‘attraction to the virtue, health, beauty and peace of the countryside’.¹⁷ As we will see in Chapter One with respect to the bungalow, the transnational spread of suburban forms entailed localized material, social and administrative adaptations that conditioned their cultural meanings.

In the American context, residential suburban areas, partly formed by white middle-class flight from racialized urban environments, are marked out as materially and socially distinct from city cores, with histories of administrative zoning that maintain white privilege and wealth.¹⁸ Settler Australian suburbs have been shaped by a somewhat different social and material history. Australian metropolitan areas have typically developed as a ‘deconcentrated form of settlement space’, with suburbs sprawling out in almost unbroken, amorphous mosaics from inner suburbs near the city core to middle and outer growth rings – variously subject to processes of infill and expansion, decay, renewal and gentrification, and more recently redevelopment through rezoning and densification.¹⁹ Noting that the Australian suburb is a ‘unit of municipal government’ applying to a wide range of precincts, from inner-city neighbourhoods (as in Bernard Smith’s Glebe) to outer suburban zones, Meaghan Morris astutely observes that unlike American suburbia, stereotypically figured as comfortably middle class, Australian suburbia (in reality hugely diverse) stereotypically connotes ‘working- and lower middle-class lifestyles and aspirations’.²⁰ The built space of Australian suburbs, conditioned until the 1970s by the White Australia policy, manifests socio-economic divides that are now thoroughly cross-hatched by both post-industrial class structures and the multicultural topographies created by diverse ethnicities and religions as a result of post-war immigration policies. Poverty has persisted in specific, often geographically stigmatized suburbs that house both non-Indigenous and Indigenous communities – groups which are often beset by welfare dependency, marginalization and structurally racist social disadvantage issuing from legacies of colonization, dispossession and the intergenerational trauma of the Stolen Generations. As will be evident in several novels I discuss, however, a newly emergent professional Indigenous middle class, with its leading artists, writers and filmmakers, is giving voice to the perspectives and experiences of these and other Indigenous communities.

Historians of Australian suburbia since the 1970s, led by Davison, Paul Ashton, Grace Karskens, Max Kelly, Peter Spearritt and others, demonstrate that the deconcentrated suburban form of Australian cities was well established by the end of the nineteenth century, spreading out during key periods of suburban boom during the twentieth century.²¹ Suburbanization ensued from conditions of post gold-rush urban growth and prosperity in the 1880s, notably in Melbourne. The next suburban boom, albeit short-lived, occurred during the interwar period, in the 1920s, after the Great War but before the Depression, when suburbs spread along newly established tram and train lines. The most pronounced phase of suburban expansion, in Australia as elsewhere, occurred between 1950 and 1970, in which various patterns of sprawl and infill were governed by the triumph of the automobile. These decades, the time of economic boom and American-led popular, consumerist culture, are often deemed the high tide mark of suburban development. In the post-war period, the still largely white Australian polity was secured by economic protection, social conservatism and welfare state-supported egalitarianism, making the dream of home ownership possible for working-class Australians. Until recently, Australia has had among the highest rates per capita in the world of home ownership, peaking in 1966 at 71 per cent.

The high tide of post-war sprawl was closely correlated with the high tide of suburban critique, one of the most memorable examples of which appears in Patrick White’s 1958 manifesto, ‘The Prodigal Son’; White conjures the sprawling suburbs as ‘The Great Australian Emptiness, in which the mind is the least of possessions […] and the march of material ugliness does not raise a quiver from the average nerves’.²² Beyond this time, however, the suburban ideal waned, certainly for educated professional classes from which anti-suburban critique mostly emanated. The ensuing decades saw the return to the city by these classes, including White himself who, together with his partner Manoly Lascaris, left Castle Hill in 1964 in order to live closer to the city with its newly flourishing creative, theatrical and artistic networks. Discourses of urban renewal aimed at reviving inner cities as communal spaces, famously championed in North America by Jane Jacobs, drove a new ideology that ironically underpinned the gentrification of formerly working-class inner suburbs, once considered slums, leading in some cases to the forcible displacement of existing communities. The mid-century struggle for ‘spatial control’ of the inner suburb of Fitzroy in Melbourne, for example, is vividly documented by Indigenous historian and writer Tony Birch.²³ Indeed these gentrifying processes have continued, as evidenced in recent struggles in Sydney’s Redfern.²⁴ Australian cities are now well embarked on another marked phase of urban development, with densification and sprawl occurring simultaneously, and with renewed forces of gentrification deepening socio-economic divides in and across city regions at a time of population growth, significant precarity in labour and a crisis of housing affordability for those late to the market. These problems are profoundly conditioned by a global capitalism that plays out in the decentred micro-politics of social space and through the decision making of local and state government administrators in concert with and response to market-led forces of development.

Suburbia’s critics, satirists and detractors, who first emerged in the late nineteenth century among writers, bohemians and libertarians, turned the virtues of the suburbs into vices: ‘The suburb was simply too spacious, too clean, too conventionally virtuous, too sanctimonious.’²⁵ Prime among the critics of suburbia, then and subsequently, have been literary figures concerned with national and cultural progress and cosmopolitan values. In Australia, anti-suburban rhetoric stretches from writing in the Sydney Bulletin to bohemian and interwar literary contexts, as notably exemplified in works by dramatist Louis Esson and critic Nettie Palmer. In this period, as also later on, anti-suburban discourse is not monolithic but describes a spectrum of ideological positions. Composed for his play The Time Is Ripe (1911), Esson’s famous polemic against the feminized purity of the suburban home asserts and performs a somewhat paranoid masculinist bohemianism. In her piece in The Argus (Melbourne) in 1931, however, Palmer troubles her own assertion that suburbia is a ‘variegated monster’ by meditating on its internal differentiations – her article compares suburbs accidental and planned, old European and newer modern Australian.²⁶ This first wave of Anglo-Australian anti-suburban critique meshes in part with cognate discourses mobilized yet partly unravelled in D. H. Lawrence’s Kangaroo (as discussed in Chapter One) and with Australian women’s writing of this period (Chapter Two), though with markedly differing effects.

Accelerated suburban sprawl in the 1950s and 1960s, during a time of social and political conservatism, was accompanied by the re-emergence of a pronounced anti-suburban consensus among intellectuals, artists and professionals, from Robin Boyd’s criticism of the 30 in The Australian Ugliness (1960) to Humphries’s debut performance as Moonee Ponds housewife Edna Everage and Patrick White’s broadside in his 1958 essay ‘The Prodigal Son’.²⁷ As mentioned above, historians and critics now commonly detect a patronizing, cosmopolitan elitism in these works, an elitism that defined itself in resistance to the alleged complacency, materialism and parochialism of the suburbs, but one that also betrayed ignorance of the lived, heterogeneous realities of suburban communities.

A recent surge of scholarship on both British and North American suburbs has introduced new dimensions to critical accounts of their cultural and literary representation. Landmark books include, in the US context, Catherine Jurca’s White Diaspora: The Suburb and the Twentieth Century Novel (2001), which investigates the emergence of the suburb across a century of fictional texts, identifying its function as a site of literary disavowal of white masculinist privilege. Semi-Detached Empire: Suburbia and the Colonization of Britain 1880 to the Present (2010), by Todd Kutcha, is in many ways cognate with Jurca’s project, likewise extending the coordinates and significance of British fictions of suburbia to a much earlier period, and reading its texts through a postcolonial frame.²⁸ More recently, in his Scenes from the Suburbs: The Suburb in Contemporary US Film and Television (2014), Timothy Vermeulen sets out to resist prevailingly reductive or binarized accounts of the suburbs and to develop a vocabulary in order to ‘come to, if not a unitary, then at least a prismatic understanding of ways in which the space of […] the cinematic and televisual suburb is constructed’.²⁹

Work on fictions of suburbia in Australia, in contrast, has to date been relatively scant, focused on novels after 1950 and trained narrowly on the question of whether post-war Australian writers are for or against suburbia, mostly following Gerster’s preliminary survey of Australian novels of suburban space in his essay ‘Gerrymander’ (1990).³⁰ Reviewing works by George Johnston, Patrick White, David Malouf and many others, Gerster’s argument that representations of Australian suburbia had been skewed by an elitist, inner-city imagination advanced a clear, decisive and polemical critique. These attributes made his essay a memorable and important touchstone, but on closer examination its analyses glide too quickly over the nuanced and complex effects produced by a number of the texts he discusses.³¹

A notable advance in the field was Andrew McCann’s edited collection of essays, Writing the Everyday (1998), which brought not only analytical substance but also a more theoretically nuanced account of ‘suburbia’ as an unstable semiotic field. McCann himself demonstrated, for example, the ways in which White’s anti-suburbanism was not simply conservative elitism but a mode of resistance to hegemonic norms via an aesthetics of abjection.³² Recent work includes Belinda Burns’s essay ‘Untold Tales of the Intra-Suburban Female’, an attentive feminist account of fiction by women that distinguishes various directions of flight by female protagonists away from or within the suburb.³³ Nathanael O’Reilly’s Exploring Suburbia, the only monograph on the topic to date, seeks to consolidate Australian suburban fiction as its own coherent subfield, nominating Johnston’s My Brother Jack as the inaugural, indisputably anti-suburban novel, then gauging the pro- or anti-suburban stance of Johnston’s successors.³⁴ ‘Australian writers’, argues O’Reilly, ‘who seek to write realistic fiction about their nation severely limit their choice of subject matter if they choose to disparage the suburbs and their inhabitants, or ignore them altogether’.³⁵

It is clear from this body of scholarship that the novel and the Australian suburb form a nexus of cultural significance. Though it does have the virtue of polemical clarity, the prevailing pro- or anti-suburban paradigm proves too limiting a framework with which to examine these works, whether as mappings of place or as responses to suburban modernity. In suggesting (above) that writers have been too concerned with suburbia as a target of scorn but blind to suburbs, however, O’Reilly mobilizes a necessary distinction between the pejorative signifier ‘suburbia’ and the heterogeneity of lived suburban space, place and community. It is true that novels dealing with suburbia often do refract a cosmopolitan-oriented cultural elitism, but such labelling tends to foreclose recognition of salient modes of political and cultural critique mobilized in fiction. Further, if we seek to discern the variety of fictive suburbs, often reinvented from real-world counterparts, a more capacious and interesting space unfolds: suburbs are everywhere in Australian novels. This not only extends the range