AustLit

'A continual thread of thoughtful reflection that connects the suburbs to Australian national identity. It harks back, in particular, to a discursive moment just after the second world war, when suburbia as a demographic reality and set of lifestyle choices sprawled into new territory. The 1950s was ‘the suburban moment’, a moment which was seen as the owl of Minerva flew at dusk, when writers like Donald Horne and Robyn Boyd expressed a mood of intellectual despair a decade later, and took evident pleasure in negating ‘the common man’. They, and others, were reflecting on the sudden material changes, on how the car, television, bungalow became the norm, when Australia lost something fundamental in the dialectic of its suburbanisation.' (Introduction)

'In 2015, Richie Benaud hosted an ‘Australia Day’ barbeque, a pantheon of colonial historical figures on his invite list. Benaud gathered the English navigator, Captain James Cook, who remapped and renamed the east coast of this continent in 1770, and Burke and Wills, whose agonising deaths at Coopers Creek in 1861 were possibly in part the result of them coming to rely on the seeds of an aquatic fern, nardoo (Marsilea drummondii), for nutrition.' (Introduction)

'In some parts of Russia and Finland, a superstition once prevailed in the homes of the wealthy that cockroaches must be allowed to roam indoors and breed. To attract good fortune, newlyweds brought roaches into their houses. It was bad luck to kill the insect, especially by tossing it into a fire. About the same time, during the nineteenth century, in the American state of Maryland, it was believed that illness or death would follow if a cockroach flew into you. Another bad omen: seeing a roach crawl across the threshold of a room.'  (Introduction)

'Charles Dickens died at his desk in 1870, aged 58, with his crime novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, unfinished. Robert B. Parker also went out in harness – in 2010, aged 77 – so that there would be no more adventures (by his hand anyway) for the private detective Spenser and his peerless companion, Hawk, although at least readers were spared any more of the insufferable Susan Silverman. Michael Dibdin only reached sixty. The tally of his Aurelio Zen crime novels halted at eleven. Philip Kerr was two years older, his death coinciding with the publication of the thirteenth outing of Bernie Gunther, Greeks Bearing Gifts (2018) (a fourteenth novel is happily in the publisher’s hands). The career of Australia’s foremost crime writer (to call him the Godfather confuses the subject with the craft), Peter Corris, ended in 2017, the year he turned 75, because increasing problems with his sight (caused by diabetes) meant that he could no longer write.'  (Introduction)