AustLit

'Suburbia has been satirised and mocked by the best of them from George Orwell’s 1939 caricature in Coming up for Air to Dame Edna Everidge from the 1960s and TV’s Kath and Kim in twentieth-first century Australia. For many of the generation growing up in the twentieth century, suburbia is, on the one hand, the remembered nightmare from which the human chrysallis escaped to experience adulthood and its pleasures elsewhere – he stifling, conformist sameness which nonetheless hid evil deeds like murder. Others hold dear the wistful nostalgic memories about growing up in a domesticated cosy world of backyard games so effectively mobilised by conservative Prime Minister John Howard during the 1990s in relation to Earlwood, a suburb of Sydney.' (Authors introduction)