Introduction: Subtopia, or the Problem of Suburbia

Abstract

Suburbia has been a neuralgic point in debates about Australian culture and Australian identity since the end of the nineteenth century. Louis Esson's 1911 diatribe against the 'vaunted purity of the suburban home' captured what is still a pervasive anxiety about suburban life. The suburban home, wrote Esson, 'stifles the devil-may-care spirit, the Dionysean, the creative spirit. It denounces Art, enthusiasm, heroic virtue. The Muses are immolated on the altar of respectability' (91). In the period since the end the second world war this anxiety about suburbia has become a staple of Australian cultural and intellectual life. If the anti-suburbanism of modernists like Robin Boyd and Patrick White has been noted often enough, the persistence of an anti-suburban strain in more recent Australian fiction has attracted less criticism and comment. In novels as diverse as Justine Ettler's The River Ophelia and Helen Darville's The Hand that Signed the Paper we find the compulsive need to escape the banality of the suburb - to the sexual excitement of inner-city Sydney in Ettler's novel, to the trauma of 'real' history in Darville's. What emerges from post-war Australian writing, at least in so far as it is concerned with suburbia, is that anxieties about the suburbs are not just anxieties about the everyday experience of life in Australian cities, its social and political effects and cultural possibilities, they are also anxieties about the 'everyday' itself as an experiential category referring to the mundane cycle of work, consumerism and domesticity in which most of us are, in varying degrees, implicated.