Reading Contemporary Fiction
ACL1001
 What is Grunge?
 What is Grunge writing?
 The term Grunge literature, for the purposes
of this lecture, refers to a group of Australian
writings that were published between the
early and mid 90s.
 This period starts with Andrew McGahan's
Praise and ends around the time Christos
Tsiolkas's Loaded was eventually removed
from the shelves for the first time -- but
before it was put back on the shelves in the
wake of the movie, Head-On.
 Clare Mendes
 Edward Berridge
 Neil Boyack
 Justine Ettler
 Leonie Stephens
 It began in 1992 with a quirky book about
half-hearted ugly people who did drugs and
had a lot of sex. It finished in late 1996 after
the publication of a frenetic book about a
handsome Greek-Australian homosexual who
did drugs and had a lot of sex. In between
there were a dozen books and a number of
stories and poems published which were
largely about people who did drugs and had a
lot of sex.
 In 1996 Ian Syson wrote an article in overland
'Smells Like Market Spirit', where he
suggested that:
“Grunge's time was almost over; it was a
spent force; it had gone about as far as the
marketeers could push it”.
 A number of reviews and articles were
starting to develop an increasingly cynical
tone about the whole Grunge process.
 Since 1996 we have seen few if any Australian
novels marketed implicitly or explicitly as
Grunge writing. However, the term postGrunge is one that has come to prominence.
 In the late 90s there were a bunch of
anthologies and novels that seemed to have
been inspired by Grunge but came very much
after its high point .
 Patricia Cornelius's My Sister Jill (2003) is just as
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emotionally and physically tough as those books produced
in the early 90s.
McGahan's work has gained a softer focus and has matured
somewhat but he still deals with tough issues. And Christos
Tsiolkas has of course kept up his confronting style:
Who's Afraid of the Working Class
Jesus Man, his novel published in 1999. In it one of the
main characters commits suicide by cutting off his own
penis.
Dead Caucasians
Dead Europe
The Slap
 Rawness
 Vulgarity
 Explicit
 Spare or ‘dirty’ realism
 “in your face”
 Grunge was a literature of anger and protest
that came from younger writers alienated by
mainstream publishing tendencies.
 Grunge was also a label generated by critics
and publishing companies to publicise and
give a certain kind of credibility to an
emerging trend in Australian writing.
Paradoxically, a form of writing captured by
mainstream publishing.
 Naturalism
 Social realism
 Kitchen sink drama and the angry young men
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in Britain
American realists like Henry Miller and
Raymond Carver
Beat poets such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack
Kerouac
Dirty realism
Neo-realism
 The New Writing
 In the late 1960s and early 1970s a new
phase of Australian writing seemed to begin.
Peter Carey, Michael Wilding and their cohort
represented a new perhaps even revolutionary
phase of writing in Australia at the levels of
both Form and Content
 Peter Carey, Michael Wilding, Frank Moorhouse, Vicki
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Viidikas, and Helen Garner, wrote stories and novels which
shared a lot of the thematic characteristics of '90s Grunge.
drugs
sex
alienation
ennui – weariness, discontent, boredom
generational conflict
 Often influenced by new writing from America , they were
responding to what they saw as a staid and boring realist
tradition which very rarely explored beyond the edge of the
ordinary. What Patrick White had referred to as "journalistic
dun-coloured realism".
 However, the New Writing was a school of
writing that, according to Michael Wilding,
quickly lost the sense of radicalism that
spawned it. It too easily became a protest
literature which was merely protesting about
the right to say fuck on the page, leaving
behind a long developed sense in Australian
writing of its strong relationship with the
struggles and lives of ordinary Australians.
 As Mark Davis has pointed out in Gangland,
the past 40 years is a period in which the
generation which took control of Australian
cultural production in the 1970s became
conservative and cemented their places in the
arts world. People who had to fight to be
heard in the first place erected barriers like
the ones they had demolished in order to
preserve their newly obtained kingdoms.
 They sewed up the public sphere for their own
ends.
 Writers like McGahan, Ettler, Berridge,
Tsiolkas, Boyack were indeed shut out of the
loop.
 When Grunge emerged in mainstream
publishing, the texts were understood as a
form of revolt. Like the New Writers before
them, they wanted to talk about sex, drugs,
music and alienation.
 Interestingly, this revolt usually meant, on the
formal level, a return to the realism rejected
over twenty years before.
 What has come after Grunge?
 What have been its effects and influences?
 Is there still evidence of this kind of writing
today?
 ABR
 Kalinda Ashton's novel The Danger Game was
conceived in this post-Grunge period.
 Ashton, born in 1978, is one of a new group
of young Australian writers who have come
through the creative writing system
flourishing in the universities. As such she has
been influenced by the writing of the nineties
and is particularly influenced by Christos
Tsiolkas -- as are a lot of young writers.
 Tsiolkas has led the charge in a number of
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areas:
representing the urban
representing the edge
migration
sexuality
politics
history
His novel The Slap was recently long-listed for
the Man/Booker prize.
 What the Grunge writers have done, like
so many radical literary movements before
them, is to lay bare some social and
historical truths. A close examination of
recent post-Grunge Australian fiction
reveals a serious attention to Australian
history on the part of a number of younger
writers.