Stuff goes wild on the peripheries
Dec. 18th, 2025 04:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolorosa_12We're back for another December talking meme post. This prompt is from nerakrose: quintessentially Australian books.
This is not really a week in which I feel much like talking about quintessentially Australian anything, but I'll do my best.
I need to start out with a caveat, though. I haven't lived in Australia for more than seventeen years, and I often feel a bit out of touch from the country's contemporary politics, culture, and so on. So my answer reflects, in some ways, an Australia frozen in the 2000s, and many Australians who do actually live there now, and who have lived there in the intervening twenty-ish years may feel that my answer doesn't reflect their current reality.
For me, the quintessentially (non-Indigenous) Australian story is one of being ill at ease in the land, with a sense that once you move from the big cities of Australia's coastal fringe, things get weird and things get scary. You see this undercurrent running through stories as different as Picnic at Hanging Rock, and elements of the Mad Max films: characters are alien interlopers in a hostile landscape that wants them gone, and will hurt them (or instrumentalise the supernatural, or violent human beings to hurt them or drive them out). The genre of slasher horror films (often based on real-world murderers) set in the outback also has its seeds in this underlying thematic thread.
In my opinion this finds the most perfect expression in a number of different dystopian and post-apocalyptic novels, mainly (although not exclusively) aimed at teenagers and young adults, published by various Australian authors through the 1980s, 1990s, and slightly into the first couple of years of the 2000s. The dates here are key: Australia had its own acclaimed literary tradition of YA dystopia for many decades before the Hunger Games series and its imitators burst onto the scene, doing its own thing and using dystopia to engage with very different political and environmental concerns.
I've been grappling with my thoughts about this subgenre of Australian fiction for over two decades now; you can find many of my thoughts at my tag for dystopian/post-apocalyptic fiction. Above all, I would say that certain books of Victor Kelleher exemplify and are the most accomplished, ambitious, and thematically interesting when it comes to this type of story. In particular, The Beast of Heaven, which we were assigned to read aged 13 for our English class, and which I return to again and again, with a mixture of awe and horror, the loosely linked trilogy of Parkland, Earthsong and Fire Dancer, and Taronga, which I don't think I've ever discussed in great detail here, but which definitely belongs in this group.
I wish more people had read works by Kelleher, because he did things — mainly in books aimed at teenagers — that I feel a lot of subsequent YA authors (particularly outside Australia) would think were too complicated, too ambitious, too morally ambiguous to attempt in books for such a readership, while also, to my mind, providing some of the clearest articulation of truths about Australian colonialism that are mostly felt subconsciously. I've found it impressive for over thirty years now, even if for the first five of those years I lacked the knowledge and context to fully understand what I was seeing explored on the page.
nerakrose: quintessentially Australian books.This is not really a week in which I feel much like talking about quintessentially Australian anything, but I'll do my best.
I need to start out with a caveat, though. I haven't lived in Australia for more than seventeen years, and I often feel a bit out of touch from the country's contemporary politics, culture, and so on. So my answer reflects, in some ways, an Australia frozen in the 2000s, and many Australians who do actually live there now, and who have lived there in the intervening twenty-ish years may feel that my answer doesn't reflect their current reality.
For me, the quintessentially (non-Indigenous) Australian story is one of being ill at ease in the land, with a sense that once you move from the big cities of Australia's coastal fringe, things get weird and things get scary. You see this undercurrent running through stories as different as Picnic at Hanging Rock, and elements of the Mad Max films: characters are alien interlopers in a hostile landscape that wants them gone, and will hurt them (or instrumentalise the supernatural, or violent human beings to hurt them or drive them out). The genre of slasher horror films (often based on real-world murderers) set in the outback also has its seeds in this underlying thematic thread.
In my opinion this finds the most perfect expression in a number of different dystopian and post-apocalyptic novels, mainly (although not exclusively) aimed at teenagers and young adults, published by various Australian authors through the 1980s, 1990s, and slightly into the first couple of years of the 2000s. The dates here are key: Australia had its own acclaimed literary tradition of YA dystopia for many decades before the Hunger Games series and its imitators burst onto the scene, doing its own thing and using dystopia to engage with very different political and environmental concerns.
I've been grappling with my thoughts about this subgenre of Australian fiction for over two decades now; you can find many of my thoughts at my tag for dystopian/post-apocalyptic fiction. Above all, I would say that certain books of Victor Kelleher exemplify and are the most accomplished, ambitious, and thematically interesting when it comes to this type of story. In particular, The Beast of Heaven, which we were assigned to read aged 13 for our English class, and which I return to again and again, with a mixture of awe and horror, the loosely linked trilogy of Parkland, Earthsong and Fire Dancer, and Taronga, which I don't think I've ever discussed in great detail here, but which definitely belongs in this group.
I wish more people had read works by Kelleher, because he did things — mainly in books aimed at teenagers — that I feel a lot of subsequent YA authors (particularly outside Australia) would think were too complicated, too ambitious, too morally ambiguous to attempt in books for such a readership, while also, to my mind, providing some of the clearest articulation of truths about Australian colonialism that are mostly felt subconsciously. I've found it impressive for over thirty years now, even if for the first five of those years I lacked the knowledge and context to fully understand what I was seeing explored on the page.
no subject
Date: 2025-12-18 05:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-12-18 09:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-12-19 06:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-12-19 04:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-12-18 07:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-12-19 04:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-12-18 09:59 pm (UTC)it's interesting that you bring up YA dystopian fiction specifically, because the only Australian media I'm personally aware of for teenagers is this tv show from the early 00s that I only discovered was Australian recently (mainly because as a foreign language media I didn't really clock or care where it was from, only that it was foreign). I can't remember the name of it (the tribe? maybe?), but it was dystopian, aimed at teenagers, and the premise was all the adults had died of some virus pandemic and only the kids were immune. (and there was this constant undercurrent of fear of what would happen once the older teenagers aged, as well). the show followed a bunch of kids living in a shopping centre. I loved this show as a young teen/preteen and watched it religiously!
a few years later in school, we were assigned to read a novel by a Danish author with the same premise, with similar themes, and I wrote a letter to the TV station that had aired the tv show and asked if there was a way to get my hands on one specific episode of the show to use for my class presentation about the book because I wanted to highlight how the book and show had dealt with one specific theme differently but similar. a kind employee at the tv station wrote me back and sent me a VHS tape copy of the episode and told me it was all hush hush because technically it wasn't allowed but since it was for school they would make an exception. if only I could remember what exactly my presentation was about I'd go into more detail, but this was more than 20 years ago and I mostly remember the kindness of the TV station employee getting me that tape.
no subject
Date: 2025-12-19 04:21 pm (UTC)Although I don't remember it's name, I'm pretty sure I also watched that Australian TV show — did the teenage characters dress luridly (with bright hair extensions and wild hairstyles, vivid make up, and loudly coloured clothing in keeping with people going out raving)? If so, that's definitely the show in question. I love the fact that the Danish TV station sent you a VHS tape for your school assignment — that's so sweet!