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'One suburban morning in Summer 1970, Peter van Rijn, proprietor of the television and wireless shop, realises that his suburb is 100 years old. He contacts the Mayor, who assembles a Committee, and celebrations are eagerly planned. That same morning, just a few streets way, Rita is awakened by a dream of her husband's snores. It is years since Vic moved north, and left their house of empty silences, yet his life remains bound up with hers. Their son, too, has moved on - Michael is at university, exploring new ideas and the heady world of grown-up love. Yet Rita still stubbornly stays in the old street, unable to imagine leaving the house she has tended so lovingly for so long. Instead she has taken on the care of another house as well - that of the widowed Mrs Webster, owner of the suburb's landmark factory, now in decline. As these lives entwine, and the Committee commissions its centenary mural and prepares to commemorate Progress, History - in the shape of the new, post-war generation represented by Michael and his friends - is heading straight for them...'
(Source: Publisher's blurb)
Notes
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Dedication: To the memory of William Francis Carroll (1917-1984) and to Jean Irene Carroll (nee Williams) born 1921.
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Featured by the BIG Book Club, an initiative supported by the Advertiser in partnership with Arts SA, The Australia Council for the Arts, South Australian public libraries and FIVEAA to promote a love of reading, discussion and literature, May, 2007
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Other Formats
- Also sound recording.
Works about this Work
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The View from Above from Below : Novel, Suburb, Cosmos
2016
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Australian Humanities Review , November no. 60 2016; -
Colonising Time : Steven Carroll’s Reinvention of Suburbia
2013
single work
criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , vol. 13 no. 2 2013; 'Suburbia is a familiar topos in Australian fiction. Its address to colonisation is mostly oblique, yielded through its focus on the inauthenticity and restlessness of a settler modernity typically sourced in the white Anglo culture of pre 1970s decades. Yet the actual suburbs of postwar Australia are multiplicitous and shifting, always in tension with the imagined terrain of fictional suburbia. My paper explores literary suburbs as constituted by a complex set of orientations towards the real and the imagined. It reads the ways that Steven Carroll’s fictional suburbia indexes real world localities, while simultaneously serving as locus for reinvention of the novel in Australia, through forms of interior consciousness and temporality affiliated with European models of literary modernism. In Spirit of Progress (2011), Carroll's narrative engages with classic Anglo-Australian suburbia as a representational field, working with and against the real of history, even as it mines the seam of suburbia as a site of both colonization and forgetting, and of longing and return.' (Author's abstract) -
Celebrating Suburbia
2012
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Exploring Suburbia: The Suburbs in the Contemporary Australian Novel 2012; (p. 303-334) -
Finding Meaning in the Mundane
2009
single work
review
— Appears in: Antipodes , June vol. 23 no. 1 2009; (p. 94-95)
— Review of The Time We Have Taken 2007 single work novel -
The Time is Nigh for Winner
2008
single work
column
— Appears in: The Age , 14 March 2008; (p. 7)
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Progress of Small Moments
2007
single work
review
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 17-18 February 2007; (p. 12-13)
— Review of The Time We Have Taken 2007 single work novel -
Untitled
2007
single work
review
— Appears in: Bookseller + Publisher Magazine , February vol. 86 no. 6 2007; (p. 40)
— Review of The Time We Have Taken 2007 single work novel -
A Meditation on Time
2007
single work
review
— Appears in: The Advertiser , 3 March 2007; (p. 12)
— Review of The Time We Have Taken 2007 single work novel -
Melancholy in Suburban Speed
2007
single work
review
— Appears in: The Canberra Times , 3 March 2007; (p. 13)
— Review of The Time We Have Taken 2007 single work novel -
The Spaces That a Suburb Failed to Fill
2007
single work
review
— Appears in: The Age , 3 March 2007; (p. 23)
— Review of The Time We Have Taken 2007 single work novel -
Momoko Revisited
2006
single work
column
— Appears in: The Age , 23 December 2006; (p. 23) -
Present Tense With Meaning
2007
single work
column
— Appears in: The Advertiser , 10 March 2007; (p. 13) -
Life and Times in Suburbia
2007
single work
column
— Appears in: The Advertiser , 5 May 2007; (p. 46) -
The Poet of Suburbia
2007
single work
criticism
— Appears in: The Courier-Mail , 12 - 13 May 2007; (p. 23) -
Author's Suburban Saga Takes the Slow Road to Success
2008
single work
column
— Appears in: The Sydney Morning Herald , 14 March 2008; (p. 14)
Awards
- 2009 longlisted International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award
- 2008 winner Commonwealth Writers Prize — Best Book
- 2008 winner Miles Franklin Literary Award
- 2008 winner South East Asia and South Pacific Region — Best Book
- 2007 shortlisted The Age Book of the Year Award — Fiction Prize
- Melbourne, Victoria,
- 1970s