AustLit

'Ten years ago, David Marr stirred the pot with his Colin Simpson Lecture by claiming that ‘few Australian novels … address in worldly, adult ways the country and the time in which we live.’ As Sophie Cunningham among others pointed out at the time, plenty of Australian writers had, in fact, been doing this throughout the 1990s. But Marr’s speech expressed a specific view of what writing about contemporary Australia should be like. He wanted a literature of the mainstream – of ordinary life in Australia’s suburbs. The kinds of novels Cunningham and others had been publishing were about daily life in Australia, but they were about sex and poverty, unemployment and drug use. Christos Tsiolkas’ first novel, Loaded(1995), was among them. Ever since, Tsiolkas has been raising questions about what the Australian mainstream is, or might look like.' (Introduction)