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Australian Grunge Fiction, the Bildungsroman and the Long Labor Decade

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Australian Grunge Fiction, the Bildungsroman and the Long Labor Decade Unbecoming-of-Age: Australian Grunge Fiction, the Bildungsroman and the Long Labor Decade by Michael Robert Christie BA/ BEd (Hons.) Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Tasmania, June 2009 Statement of Originality This thesis contains no material which has been accepted for a degree or diploma by the University or any other institution, except by way of background information and duly acknowledged in the thesis. To the best of my knowledge and belief this thesis contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due acknowledgement is made in the text of thesis, nor does the thesis contain any material that infringes copyright. Michael Christie Authority of Access This thesis may be made available for loan and limited copying in accordance with the Copyright Act 1968. Michael Christie Abstract This thesis interprets and explains changes in aspects of the Australian literary and political fields that occurred during the period sociologist Peter Beilharz has named the long Labor decade: 1983 to 1996. During this period tropes of youth, illness and mobility, and the Bildungsroman form were central to the textual embedding, via the putative modernisation of Australian Labourism, of Neoliberalism in Australian political culture. This thesis's central argument is that at its best Grunge and post-Grunge literary fiction both register and attempt to resist Neoliberal governmentality through the tropes of youth, illness and mobility, and through the Bildungsroman form. The introduction surveys the critical reception of Grunge fiction and presents the thesis' central literary-theoretical concepts which are taken from Franco Moretti and Fredric Jameson's historical sociology of literary form. It argues that the effective application of these methods of literary history to Grunge fiction requires a locally and temporally specific historical sociology and that Peter Beilharz's Transforming Labor is a productive text from which to further generate a late twentieth-century Australia-centred historical sociology. Chapter one analyses the textuality of the non-fiction writing of the long Labor decade through Beilharz's hermeneutic historical sociology. After establishing its key terms the chapter moves into three studies of central figures and texts of the period: prime ministers Gough Whitlam and Paul Keating, and Paul Kelly's The End of Certainty. Chapter two reads the oeuvres of Frank Moorhouse and Amanda Lohrey against the loss of Whitlam and Whitlamism and the emergence of Neoliberal forms of government. It also interprets The Reading Group and Forty-Seventeen - two of their pre-Grunge novels - against the post-Whitlam sense of mourning and loss. Chapter three returns to Grunge fiction and reads Andrew McGahan's Praise and 1988 and Christos Tsiolkas' Loaded in affiliation with the Neoliberal textuality of the stories told by and of Keating. Chapter four utilises the analysis of The End of Certainty to read three post- Grunge novels. Elliot Penman's Three Dollars, Andrew McCann's Subtopia and Anthony Macris' Capital, volume one are interpreted and explained as responses to the embedding of Neoliberalism in Australian and global political culture that Kelly's master-work participates in through its use of the Bildungsroman form. The thesis concludes with a short survey of other fiction of the period and a brief outline of areas for future research suggested by the thesis. Acknowledgements This thesis was supported by a number of communities and individuals. I am indebted to the 2007 executive of the University Postgraduate Association for showing me what service meant in the time of a Neoliberal pressure-drop. Within the School of English, Journalism and European Studies, the collegial and inspiring support of postgraduates Jacob Fischer, Jane McGennisken, Catriona Ross, Tony Stagg, Jo Richardson, Eleni Pavlides, Sarah Gillman, and Jesse Shipway provided emotional and intellectual succour throughout the period of the thesis' production, for which I am very grateful. Associate Professor Philip Mead, my supervisor, guided and assisted me in working through the thesis process in ways that I had previously only experienced in musical improvisation and composition. Thanks for your grace under pressure, belief in scholarship, sharing a passion for text and for keeping faith when I had my doubts. Thanks to Dr Anna Johnston for her timely check-ups on the thesis' health, and to Dr Jenna Mead for her acute, incisive and always challenging responses to presentations of my research, and for the example of her pedagogy. My thanks go also to Dr Leigh Dale and Professor John Frow for their catalytic impetus at strategic moments in the research process. Having migrated from Sydney to Southern Tasmania to enrol in this PhD I have been privileged to have had the support and community of the good people of Snug: the stirrers, the growers, the builders, the fighters, and the visionaries. To my family, and friends Lobster, Barbara, Jim, Margaret and Melissa thanks for your support. To Elisabeth, all my love - now we can do all those things we've been waiting to do. Vale Jessie: thanks for the nose job. This thesis is dedicated to Christopher W. Lobb and my father Robert Christie. Contents Prologue. 1 An Account of the Long Labor Decade 2 Introduction. Boundary Work and Australian Literary Studies 11 1.Reappraising Grunge Fiction 12 2.Reading on the Boundaries 18 3.On the Historical Sociology of Literary Form 33 Chapter One. Writing the Long Labor Decade 42 1.Coming to Terms with the Long Labor Decade 46 2.Labor Tradition and the Ghosts of Whitlam 65 3.Stories of Paul Keating 72 4. The End(s) of Certainty: the Australian un-Settlement and Neoliberal Globalisation 82 Chapter Two. Mourning, Emergence and Governmentality in the works of Frank Moorhouse and Amanda Lohrey 92 1.Left-literary Trajectories: Approaching 1988 93 2.Governmentality across the Long Labor Decade 109 3. The Reading Group and Forty-Seventeen: Works of Mourning 120 Chapter Three. Grunge Fiction: Figures of Youth, Illness and Mobility in the Literary field 134 1. Praise and Atopic Illness: the Sick Machines of Grunge Fiction 136 2. Loaded: Dancing the Arrhythmia 150 3. 1988: Refusing Australia's Coming-of-Age 162 Chapter Four. After Grunge: the Long Labor Decade as National Bildungsroman 174 1. Subtopia as Grunge Bildungsroman 178 2. Three Dollars and Economic Times 189 3. Capital, Volume One: the Cultural Logics of Finance Capitalism 205 Epilogue. 215 Leaving the Long Labor Decade 216 Endnotes. 222 Works Cited. 238 Prologue. 1 An Account of the Long Labor Decade I do not know whether we will ever reach mature adulthood. (Foucault, 1997: 318) Two trends coalesced during the 1980s — the internationalisation of the world economy in which success became the survival of the fittest; and the gradual but inexorable weakening of Australia's 'imperial' links with its two patrons, Britain and America. The message was manifest — Australia must stand on its own ability. Australians, in fact, had waited longer than most nations to address the true definitions of nationhood — the acceptance of responsibility for their own fate. (Kelly, 1994: 13) I am j. 1 interested in how the subject constitutes itself in an active fashion through practices of the self, these practices are nevertheless not something invented by the individual himself. They are models he finds in his culture and are proposed, suggested, imposed on him by his culture, his society, his social group. (Foucault, 1997: 291) Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci wrote that [t]he starting point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is 'knowing thyself' as a product of the historical process to date which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory. The first thing to do is to make such an inventory. (1971: 324). While I appreciate that Gramsci's choice of verbs here could be construed as recommending an account, it is fitting that this thesis begins with an ambiguity over terms that can turn either toward narrative or economic meanings. While I will proceed by keeping to the spirit of Gramsci's advice, I want, however, to shift into a narrative mode in order to tell my own story of citizenship and formation, or Bildung.' Not because I think it is of great interest, but because it helps to orient the different directions that this thesis sets out on. I lived through the long Labor decade in three ways pertinent to this thesis: my experiences in a small family business; participation in Sydney musical culture; and by studying English at Technical College and at University. Having lived through it my first reference points are those historical traces this time deposited in me. 2 There are a number of rites of passage that can mark the transition from adolescence into adulthood; ones that can also signal the crossing from minor to formal citizen. When I turned 18 in 1983, just too late to vote in the Australian Federal election that former President of the ACTU (Australian Council of Trade Unions) Bob Hawke won at the helm of the ALP (Australian Labor Party), I could've confidently flashed my provisional driver's licence at Bryant's band room on Sydney's Northern Beaches. In order to prove I was legally entitled to drown around eight 12 ounce plastic cups of scotch and carbonated coke-syrup mix that night at Manly Vale Hotel while watching, listening and half-dancing to Liverpool band "Echo and the Bunnymen", I would've exchanged that moment of adult recognition but just like the time at Bryant's the previous year when the high-school based all-male gang had gone to see Manchester band "New Order" play no one asked me for ID.
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