Who is Tsiolkas Before we get into the lecture proper, it’s probably important to elaborate on who is, and why we’re studying him in this course. So, let’s get the short version out of the way - Tsiolkas is a gay Greek-Australian, the son of post-war migrants. He grew up in Richmond, and went to University, where he was the editor of the student magazine Farrago. Tsiolkas is one of 's more successful contemporary literary novelists. He has been awarded a number of prizes and has made it to some very significant shortlists. And his books are selling well around the world. We must be very careful to use the term literary because in overall sales he is still streets behind writers like Colleen McCulloch and Bryce Courtney, writers of popular fiction. And to emphasise this point – last year The Age’s literary editor, Jason Steger wrote You won't have forgotten that period a couple of years ago when everyone seemed to be reading Tsiolkas's book. You could hardly step into the pub or out for dinner without some bright spark buttonholing you to find out what you thought. Upon which several people commenting on the article immediately pounced on that comment and said they had never heard of the book, nor Tsiolkas, and that Steger was living in a cocoon. Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/the-slap- still-shocks-in-tv-translation-20111006-1lb2v.html#ixzz1tTPruGht Those of us who are familiar with him as a novelist may be surprised to find out that he is actually quite a prolific writer, having written or contributed to several plays, screen plays, art exhibitions, as well as writings on his love of film. As much as we may perhaps like to lump him into a purely literary sphere, Tsiolkas is an avid fan of popular culture, and his works can't be separated from that. As a part of that, he currently co-hosts a weekly music show on 3RRR. Books

• Loaded (1995)

• Jump Cuts (with Sasha Soldatow, 1996)

• The Jesus Man (1999)

• The Devil's Playground (2002)

• Dead Europe (2005) • (2008) Theatre

• Who's Afraid of the Working Class? (with , Melissa Reeves and Patricia Cornelius, 1999, adapted for film as Blessed )

• Elektra AD (1999)

• Viewing Blue Poles (2000)

• Fever (with Andrew Bovell, Melissa Reeves and Patricia Cornelius, 2002)

• Dead Caucasians (2002)

• Non Parlo di Salo (with Spiro Economopoulos, 2005) Screenplays

• Thug (with Spiro Economopoulos, 1998)

• Saturn's Return (2000) That biography is fine as far as it goes but it tells us little about the author's motives and personality. Here's something that Tsiolkas wrote about himself. I was born in Melbourne, Australia during the Cold War and I knew I wanted to be a writer when my Year Eight English teacher held up a piece of my creative writing and declared it “filth”. Though I tried desperately to escape suburbia I soon realised that you can take the boy out of the suburbs but you can't necessarily take the suburbs out of the boy.

My novels, fictions and scripts are an attempt to explore the crevices and dark spaces of the Australian suburban landscape, and in doing so to hopefully scrawl a huge ugly handle-bar moustache over the dirty- blonde, blue-eyed Aryan iconography of this Great Southern Land.

I have been accused of being a misogynist, a racist, a homophobe, a pornographer, a blasphemer and an upstart declasse poseur. I have also been accused of political correctness, of being an unreconstructed socialist, of being a crypto-Protestant Christian (which really pissed off my Mum), and of being a nice man to sit next to at a dinner party. I live in fear that there is an “other” Christos Tsiolkas and one day I'll go through a Philip K. Dicksian wormhole and confront myself as a complete stranger. I think that he gives us clues to what he is about in autobiographical snippets like this. Though he might have added that he worked as a Vet nurse for a long time, only recently resigning from a job he held for probably 10 years. He is formed by the complex politics of being an inner suburban gay migrant boy from a religious family. He likes to express his feelings to the extent that he is accused of writing blasphemy, filth and pornography. He wants to slur complacent anglo culture to shock some of us into seeing the multiplicities of Australian life. He burst onto the scene with his first novel Loaded. Later, this was turned into the film Head On. His second novel, The Jesus man, was pretty much ignored on its release, and is still basically ignored even among his supporters. His third novel, Dead Europe, won The Age book of the year, and was shortlisted for several prizes, while also being criticised for being anti-Semitic, and also of being histrionic and absurd (a criticism often made of his work). By all reports his most recent novel, The Slap, has sold over 800,000 copies world-wide. For example in four weeks in in 2010 The Slap sold over 3000 copies.

• http://www.thebookseller.com/news/slap-tops-booker-sales-list.html

• http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-10951497 Recently the novel has been turned into a TV mini-series An interesting question is why such a political and confronting writer is also such a popular one at home and abroad. Though he is not popular with all critics: The Slap slapped A preliminary observation might be that Tsiolkas is a writer who inflames passions and produces extreme responses whether positive or negative. This is especially true of people within the Greek community, as we’ll see a little later. Tsiolkas is important to me, because he was the first writer that I encountered where I intimately recognised the world and the characters of a novel. That is not to say that I necessarily agree with his conclusions or that he does not exaggerate circumstances – I find the amount of drugs taken to be absurd, but perhaps that's just my sheltered upbringing coming to the fore - but at the same time, the Melbourne that he describes fits far more into the Melbourne I grew up in than many competing narratives. The texts Loaded/Head On Tsiolkas first came to broader prominence in the mid 1990s with his well- received first novel, Loaded, a novel about Ari, a disaffected young gay Greek man (who also pops up in The Slap). The novel documents a day in Ari's life in which he travels around Melbourne NSEW The novel was seen to be a part of the 'grunge' phenomenon sweeping through Australian writing. If the body of writing had any shared characteristics, they were

• rawness,

• vulgarity

• explicit

• spare realism

• in your face Grunge was a literature of anger and protest that came from younger writers alienated by mainstream publishing tendencies and broader senses of social disaffection. In the early 1990s contemporary Australia was a society in which previously secure identities had sometimes come to be atomised and disintegrated. The certainties of the old order had been replaced by the uncertainties of the new. This is Ari's world. As a result Ari's alienation is inexplicable to himself because of the absence of histories that could explain his life. As a gay Greek working class man Ari has no narrative that can unite these aspects of his identity. So this is one important aspect of Loaded: it is a novel about history told through the perspective of someone who doesn't care about the past or the future. Without the narrative fractures I mentioned before, the book wouldn't be able to tell this story. Moreover Loaded is a book that looks at histories (the waves of migration as Tsiolkas sees it) as opposed to a singular history. Loaded is also a spatially organised book about a character who doesn't care where he is. There are some thematic patterns in Loaded that have interesting echoes in The Slap.

• Confusion of identity

• fissures between cultures and generations • Concern to 'map' Melbourne and locate his narrative in the city and its suburbs

• reliance on drugs

• explicit representation of the sexual act

• loss of religion The Jesus Man The Jesus man, his second novel was a critical and commercial flop. Even among Tsiolkas fans, it seems to be clearly the least loved of his novels, and yet it has some amazing scenes. In it you can also see a writer in transition, as Tsiolkas begins blending realism and fantasy – the net results which you can see in Dead Europe. The Jesus Man is about a family torn apart by the incomprehensible actions of one of their members, Tommy, whose life rapidly disintegrates after he loses his job. Once again, Tsiolkas sets this against the background of the supposed end of the history. Dead Europe If one of Tsiolkas' main concerns is the fractures and fissures within the geopolitical space of Melbourne, another is with the relation between the place he lives and the places of his ancestors. He sees the ghosts of Europe as being crucial to our understanding of contemporary Australia. This finds expression in the novel that brought Tsiolkas to full prominence, Dead Europe, a novel that saw him criticised for all his usual crimes but also with the new charge of anti-Semitism. Dead Europe tells the story of Isaac, a Greek-Australian photographer invited to Athens to help celebrate the culture of the Greek diaspora. His exhibition makes a dismal understatement and his relationship with his Greek friends has undergone a curious transformation in the ten years since he last saw them. The sympathy and engagement of their first meeting have become mistrust and miscommunication. From Isaac travels step-by-step across post-Communist Europe and finds that in each country he visits the cultural certainties once taken for granted are out of joint. Outside the train windows of his crossings we see a Europe peopled by strangers. Their dissonant beliefs, cultures and religions have less enriched Europe than they have undermined it. Shadowing this one is another tale, told in alternate chapters and cast in the language of fairytale and fable. It begins: “High in the mountains, where the wind goes home to rest, lived Lucia, the most beautiful woman in all of Europe”. It provides a Gothic counterpoint to Isaac's contemporary odyssey. Beginning prior to World War Two – but invoking a deep mythical past – this story tells of the terror that washes across Greece in the wake of the Nazi invasion and the accompanying flowering of anti-Semitism (both imported and homegrown). In an apparent act of nobility, Lucia's husband Michaelis Panagis gives his word that he will protect and save a ‘Hebrew' boy in return for a box of jewels. Inevitably broken, the pact has disastrous consequences for Michaelis, his family and the rest of the village. The family loses one child (significantly named Christos) and the village loses a succession of young boys to the curse brought down on them all. Like many of Tsiolkas's writings Dead Europe is centrally concerned with the problems of exile and migration. Post-coloniality is also a significant theme of the book. It observes what happens at the heart of empire once its refugee and exiled chickens come home to roost. Australia, in Dead Europe, is barren and anodyne at best, a little like AD Hope's version in the poem, -- but lacking the spiritual source intimated by Hope. Dead Europe's themes:

• The weight of history

• The ghosts that stay with us

• The fall of communism and God, the fracturing of the Balkans, the demise of the European peasantry

• Europe as Hell -- other to Australia's barrenness The Slap Told by a third person narrator, focalised through eight separate characters, each of whom attended a BBQ at Hector and Aisha's home: 1. Hector 2. Anouk 3. Harry 4. Connie 5. Rosie 6. Manolis 7. Aisha 8. Richie The story revolves around an incident at the BBQ in which a child (Hugo) is slapped in punishment by an unrelated adult, (Harry). It generates a great amount of distress and ill-feeling and results in a court case at which Harry is eventually exonerated. This story is not central to the book. Rather it is instrumental in triggering another set of incidents. The characters tend to take a view one way or the other: Harry was right; Harry was wrong to do what he did. And these positions create further stresses in their lives, bringing other tensions to the fore, damaging or destroying some relationships and ultimately strengthening others. The function of the Slap in the novel is not (as some have argued it should have been) to explore the rights and wrongs of hitting children but is to open up already existing cracks in the relationships of the group of people at the BBQ. In opening up these cracks, Tsiolkas gets to discuss a number of his favourite themes.

• Greek-Australian life

• Racism

• Gender and sexuality

• Drugs

• Melbourne

• Suburbia

• Generationalism

• Death and religion Where does Tsiolkas fit? Grunge/End of History Even though we are in a subject called , I feel that it’s important that we don’t forget that thematically, our works are influenced by overseas movements and trends, and that we also contribute to those trends. With the arrival of the children of first generation migrants on the writing scene, combined with the end of the Cold War and the so called end of history, we see thematically similar works being produced in Australia, the and Britain. For example, some of you may be familiar with the works of the British author Hanif Kureishi. Like Tsiolkas, he writes about the degeneration of society at the end of the Cold War, and also discusses the sexual politics in an equally explicit manner. His 1995 novel The Black Album – released in the same year as Loaded - looks at the coming of age of a young Asian-Brit named Shahid, who has to navigate the complicated cultural landscape he finds himself in – where drugs, sex and freedom from traditional cultural constraints are available to him, while he also finds himself in the middle of the rise of a more militant Islam, wakened in part by the protests against Salman Rushdie. Tsiolkas has also often been lumped into the grunge writing movement – off the top of my head the most notable example of the grunge genre was Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh, which even though it is about white Scottish guys, still tackles the same themes of drugs, lack of purpose, and the emptiness of once dominant political paradigms. Certainly Tsiolkas sees these similar cultural jumps across the world. In Loaded, he talks about a Maori bouncer whose dress and demeanour look like they are straight out of New York City – on the same page, Ari identifies two Ethiopian boys who try hard to look like black Americans, but who can’t pull it off, appearing, in Ari’s words, like what they were, migrants straight off the boat. Greek and other Migrant representations Apart from the grunge genre or movement, it’s also important to place Tsiolkas into the context of the popular perception of migrants at the time. We are talking about the era of broad comic stereotype. We’re talking Con the Fruiterer, Kingswood Country, which is being shown again on Australian televelsion and Acropolis Now. It is arguable that we have not left these stereotypes behind. The team behind Acropolis Now and Wogs Out of Work, spawned several more projects – the two Wog Boy movies, the heinous Greeks on the Roof for example. The next generation following them created the Pizza series, which perhaps due to the passage of time, was better able to skewer those stereotypes, even while using them for their comedic value. You can also see that kind representation carried on in the Super Wog internet series. The Heartbreak Kid While some of you may remember the adolescent soapie , perhaps fewer will remember the film which preceded it, the Heartbreak Kid – and for those who have seen that movie, you’ll perhaps be surprised to learn that it was originally a stage play. In it the fairly standard narratives of the children of second generation migrants are again covered – the clash of cultures, the clash of generations, and the tightrope walk of being neither Greek nor Australian - although in both the play and the film, there is a more dramatic quality added, as well as bringing up the issues of class. Still, most representations of migrant Australians in our popular culture either tend to omit them entirely, or use them in stereotypical roles. Some of you may have seen the discussions over the past year particularly in The Age about the lack of diversity on Australian , especially in our drama productions. When the film adaptation of Loaded was released, there was a massive reaction, mainly negative from the Greek community. Orthodox priests told their congregations not to see the film. The local Greek press was filled with letters of complaint – the director expected this backlash, because the film did not portray a stereotypically positive view of Greeks and migrants. Joan Messaris, of Greek newspaper O Kosmos, said many in the Greek community were angry that Ari's character was depicted in a Greek context. While Messaris was happy to see Greeks represented as lawyers and doctors (Marilynne Paspaley' s role in ABC's GP series), she said Ari's image was "un- Greek", because it was not positive. "Head On doesn't do much justice to the Greeks, nor does Wogs Out Of Work or Acropolis Now ," she said. "A lot of our young people took those characters as role models. [Actor] Mary Coustas is nothing like the Effie she portrays." Tsiolkas argues it is not an artist's role to be positive. His novel and the film aim to represent one aspect of the Greek-Australian experience. "No film could pretend to represent all of the Greek-Australian experience," he said. "I would hate for people to think that Head On or Loaded were the final words on what it means to be Greek." Jim Sotiropoulos, 28, of Melbourne, said he could not relate to Ari as a gay Greek. "I didn't like Ari as a character," Sotiropoulos said. "To me he wasn't gay, his sexual experiences were more about frustration and sexual gratification, rather than emotional attachments. I could identify with some of the family things, like the expectations to get married and kids lying to keep their parents happy. "I told my parents I was gay when I was 18. They were angry and upset. I know a lot of Greek gay guys in their 30s who have no intention of telling their parents because it would kill them." Students from the Department of Modern Greek at the University of NSW said they had mixed feelings about the film. Kathie Koutsikos, 20, of Mascot, said she related to having to lie to her parents when she was going out during her teenage years. She said her tertiary education made the difference between her appreciating the film and taking offence. "Our parents didn't have our education opportunities," she said. "That's why our generation will be more tolerant." MARIA Lagoudakis, 20, of Bexley, said while the mainstream press had given Head On rave reviews, Greek newspapers had panned it. "The Greeks are worried about what everyone will think," she said. Emmi Mikedakis, 23, of Neutral Bay, said there was nothing inherently Greek about Head On . "It was more about a struggling, lower-class family," she said. "The film's attitude towards homosexuality is true of a lot of families." Andrew Georgalla, 20, of Carlton, said Heartbreak Kid, which also starred Dimitriades, had presented a safer, stereotypical representation of Greek- Australian family life. "There's been a different response to Head On because people are embarrassed about Ari's behaviour," he said. But it's interesting to note that several of my Greek friends, loved The Heartbreak Kid, but hated Head On – both starred , but the latter film is written off as ‘that poofter film’. And the Greek migrant community is as complicit in supporting this attitude as any other migrant community. Local Greek theatre productions tend towards performing slapstick comedies or comedies of errors or high manners. It is also important however, that we do not equate Tsiolkas with all Greek- Australian or other Australian migrant literary writers or artists. Though he is easily the most well-known and prominent, there are others such as the novelists John Charalambous and Nicholas Kyricacos and of course the poet Pi O, who cover similar ground in different ways, or decide to cover issues apart from migrant stories. There are others, as we’ve seen, who would rather celebrate than question the migrant story. There are also literary journals like Melbourne's Antipodes which have been running for decades. These kinds of writers exist also in other countries. Jeffery Eugenides, another son of immigrants to the west, wrote of course the Virgin Suicides, detailing the implosion of a family, and followed it up with Middlesex, the hundred year or so story of a Greek family escape from genocide from Turkey and their exile from Anatolia, to labouring in America, working the American Dream, to the eventual end of that success caused in part by incest and hermaphroditism. Having said that though, not everyone agrees that the stereotypes are flourishing. Dean Kalimniou, a lawyer and long time columnist for the Greek- Australian newspaper Neos Kosmos, recently put up an article entitled 'Death of a Stereotype'. http://diatribe-column.blogspot.com.au/2012/09/death-of-stereotype.html In this piece, Kalimniou goes on to talk about Greek-Australian stereotypes, as seen from a Greek and Anglo-Austrralian angle, and from a first generation and second generation angle. He talks about how the old assumptions are falling apart, and are becoming unreliable. In a recent news article, it has been noted that 62% of married Greeks in Australia are now in mixed marriages, compared to just 29% back in 1989. And since these were church figures, one can expect the percentage is actually even higher than that. http://au.greekreporter.com/2012/08/28/big-jump-in-greek-australian-mixed- marriages/ Suburbia is Hell/Suburbia Is Not Hell Why Suburbia? Suburbia is where most of Australia lives. Despite the official line that the bush is at the centre of our history and of our culture, we are overwhelmingly an urban society, and have been for most of our history. At one stage, Melbourne was one of the wealthiest and largest cities in the British Empire. And even our biggest cultural export is based well and truly in suburbia – I’m talking about the TV series Neighbours (remember that Anouk is a staff writer on a Neighbours-esque soapie – I shot a man in Vermont, just to watch him die – Gary) This is also evident in Coral Hull's poem Liverpool, in which the city of is cut up into two, between the haves of the inner city and the have nots of the outer west. Hull is of the opinion that there is no option of leaving to a better place for most residents of Liverpool. I make contact with an overweight man Hugging toffee apples diet coke Hawaiian crunch and popcorn In each we other we both see, we will never come together and we will never leave this city Likewise in Alice Pung's Unpolished Gem, there is a division between the suburbs of Footscray and Ascot Vale – one is respectable, and one is not. Who here has watched Kath and Kim and laughed with it rather than at it? Who believes Turner and Riley when they claim they're laughing with those people rather than at them? Myself, I always thought that Kath and Kim was vicious satire. The people are vacuous, uninformed and vain, with zero self-awareness. Yet the media celebrated this image of Australian suburbia. In the comedy series, Pizza, the suburbs are hostile, perennially so. People are racist, greedy, drugged up, homophobic, violent, corrupt, but somehow the society keeps functioning. Indeed, it is alive, unlike in my opinion the Kath and Kim world which is dead. Perhaps my favourite scene in the whole series is where Kath is driving with another person not from Melbourne. Shopping centres and empty footpaths abound – far from the newspaper headlines and government propaganda of Melbourne as a most liveable city, as a cultured city, the laneway and artist city – in reality, the wide roads mostly lead to more suburbs and more warehouse stores. As Kath, heroine of the television satire Kath and Kim (2003), drives past the 'hot-spots' of Fountain Lake's 'Golden Mile' of shopping malls and car distributors, she exclaims: 'It's all here in Melbourne! It's Marvellous Melbourne! In Pizza the entire city is alive, rich and poor have their drugs and perversions, but no matter what happens, people find a way to go and enjoy themselves. So therefore is it just a matter of perspective? One person’s haven is another person's hell? Read Loaded P41, P43, P82. Hell What is hell? Hell is other people – Sartre. In an increasingly secular and multi religious society, can we find a notion of hell that is suitable and applicable across the main part of Australian culture? I proposed a few years ago that such a dichotomy was outdated, that even dichotomies were not useful in their explorations, that they do not provide the adequate amount of depth. This certainly riled up some people, back in the heady days of mid 2008 when calling yourself an atheist was still seen as some sort of transgressive act, rather than being the latest fad. When we're talking about Hell, we're not talking about ancient Greek hell, or an East Asian hell, we're talking about the Hell of the Abrahamic religions, the hell of Mark Twain who said “Heaven for climate, hell for society'. So we're talking hot, barren, lonely, miserable, painful, all that stuff. But also in recent times, it's come to mean separation from God, as the Catholic church in particular has changed its tune. It does not really matter if you literally believe in Hell's existence – the metaphor seems to work just as well even as a secularised term. In this case God may very well mean merely what came before. Whether that's an old country, a war, old problems, but whatever it is, Australia has been used to fix these problems. In old Greek movies and soap operas, leaving for Australia was essentially a plot device to get rid of a character. Going to Australia means you'd never be heard from again. But what kind of effect does this have on native populations? Not only Indigenous populations who have aeons invested into the place, but also people who are say 6th generation Australians, of mixed heritage, for whom Australia is their home? An immigrant may have incorrect and overly nostalgic memories of their homeland, as Alice's dad somehow jokes about the killing fields in Unpolished Gem, but they are rooted in memory and attachment to something real. Where is a similar Anglo-Celtic attachment? Is it in someone like Chopper Read, who laments in his work the loss of the old ways and days, people writing poetry in a non-Australian manner, about the death of the semi-rural suburbs he grew up in, about the old underworld pre-drugs, about how prisons used to be, about the old pub and drinking culture, and the fierce territoriality of suburbs and localities. He says at one point – you didn't call your mates wogs – the wogs were the guys the from the next suburb. Hell Is Other People (Social Sphere) One theme he maintains but modifies is that of Suburban Hell. Suburbia is no longer the blanket hell that Tsiolkas reveals in Loaded, but a subjective hell very much dependent on the individual's experience. In Dead Europe, Australia is no longer hell. Europe, which is adored and praised by Isaac's father, is portrayed as a society on the brink of destruction. Europeans are destroying themselves – their once mighty culture undermined by consumerism, political apathy, and a self-destructive streak which knows no limits. Australia, while dull, culture-less and unsophisticated, is at least safe In The Slap, hell is neither Europe nor Australia, but other people, and the social obligations that the characters are expected to adhere to. For Aisha, hell is the tyranny of a Greek family. For Anouk, it is the pressure of being a childless, single woman by choice. For Manolis hell is in the disrespect that time shows for the old. The evil disease cancer stalks them all and their memories taunt them with stories of youthful exuberance and lust. The young have no manners and are unable to show a modicum of respect. For Richie, hell is the spectre of homophobia, both real and imagined. Religion Religion as a cultural marker is found throughout Tsiolkas' work, and he’s particularly intrigued by what he sees as the illogical, peasant expressions of faith, those kinds of things like wailing, praying, pilgrimage and submission which should have been eliminated in a post-industrial world – last year, he collaborated on a gallery/photography project called Jerusalem, and he describes himself as agnostic, opposed to the smug modern atheist movement. Culturally, they still underpin so many of our traditions, and it is the same in Tsiolkas’ work. There are several references to religion – both prosaic and transgressive. There are converts, those who scream god is dead, spiritualists, the superstitious, those who make pilgrimages – the list goes on. In The Jesus Man, the Nonna is stripped of her religion by her son in law. She is forced to convert to Catholicism – and even when she attempts to mourn her brother’s death in a Greek Orthodox church, the priest rejects her. Two years before The Slap was released, Tsiolkas was the feature writer for Victoria University’s very own Offset journal. He submitted a double short story. One part of that was what became the letter that Connie’s father Luke sent to her Aunt Tasha, asking her to take care of Connie. The other part, which was included in a a different, more distant format in the finished novel, was about the Anglo-Australian woman Shamira’s conversion to Islam What is crucial here is that the conversion happens in the middle of suburbia – Shamira – or Sammi as she’s known then – is working part time at a video store, when she overhears one of the customers, a young boy, reciting verses from the Quran. Where in say, the Liverpool poem, there is no revelation, no insight at all in suburbia, here it is evident that it is possible to find meaning, even in a dull grey mosque, more practical than ornate. Capitalism, Class and the end of the Cold War Tsiolkas’ first three novels are all in some way obsessed with the end of the Cold War. The end of the Cold War signals the end of history (as Francis Fukuyama put it), when the ideological war was over, and capitalism, victorious, would ride off into the sunset unchallenged. The Left’s loss of this ideological battle coincides in Australia with a severe economic recession and the end of a particular way of doing things. Factories, which were once integral parts of the suburban landscape, are shutting down, the notion of a job for life disappearing – in The Jesus Man, Tommy loses his printing job, and from there his life spirals out of control. Loaded P143 We are also seeing the end of what Tsiolkas’ characters see as the illusion of working class solidarity. Everyone turns further inward, becomes more selfish. The working class and their movement become splintered. The Chardonnay socialists turn towards a more libertarian, trendy Leftism, while the traditional working class turn towards a more reactionary Leftist ideology of protectionism, nationalisation and xenophobia. In the Jesus Man, this is illustrated (P351) at a rally held by Pauline Hanson out in the south eastern suburbs, at which most of her audience is working class. By the time The Slap arrives, working class solidarity is just about dead – the furthest one can articulate such issues is via the debate being had about public vs private schools (page 22-23) in The Slap. The middle class leftists claim they support public education, but refuse to risk their children’s future there. Like the successful migrants before him, Harry attempts to bury his wog past underneath his expensive house, huge television and trophy wife. Yet, like so many Tsiolkas characters, he can’t escape his past, and he is ruled by temptation – and all of it must be done in secret Ian Syson has criticised Tsiolkas for not giving the character of Gary a voice and his own chapter, and that by doing this he shows a cultural or social blindspot – and while I initially agreed with him, on further reflection, I don’t think is necessarily true. Gary, despite his drunkenness, is shown to be articulate, artistic and well read, though Tsiolkas says his intellectualism is tied too closely to emotional responses. In The Jesus Man, Zita, an immigrant Serb with an artistic background and training, goes to a Toorak gallery to showcase her work – the curator assumes, because of Zita’s poor English that she is there to apply for the cleaning job – humiliated, Zita abandons her dream. And in much the same way, rather than Tsiolkas writing off Gary, it is the other, middle class characters who do so, who deny him a voice. At the magistrate’s court, the working class from every ethnicity try to assume a middle class persona, in their cheap synthetic suits, but like the Ethiopians trying to look like Americans in Loaded, they can’t pull it off. Harry, a working class man, tries to bury his past underneath his garish nouveau riche lifestyle. Yet, he seeks pleasure in the bed of a working class single mother in the western suburbs. By the end of The Slap, there is no longer any room left for the working class. The working class are literally ostracised and exiled outside the suburbs. Gary and Rosie move to Daylesford. One is fairly certain, like the previously mentioned killed off characters in Greek soap operas, they will never be heard from again. Sexuality Tsiolkas inserts into his texts several characters who do not conform to the accepted norm. There are gay characters, drag queens, bisexuals, prostitutes, the effeminate, the confused, the promiscuous, the perverse and the plain old horny lonely straight guy. In their day to day lives, they can’t show their true selves, for fear of isolation, exile, ostracism – and thus they seek to satisfy themselves in the darker corners of the city, in gay bars, public toilets, alleyways, sex shops, brothels located in industrial areas. Nightfall offers more protection to the deviant, but still, one must take caution. The night world is still related to the day world, the respectable world. Conclusion Rather than the suburban landscape, in its blandness and its isolation, it is the social sphere created within that landscape that is crucial. There are an almost infinite amount of social landscapes that shape the people of suburbia, many different social elements to negotiate, as people try to find a niche of some sort to live in. Tsiolkas, rather than submitting to the quaint notion of a carefree picket fence John Howard style 1950s suburban environment, shoves in the reader’s face, the duplicitous, conformist attitudes that exist within society. In work after work, characters are forced to submit, to conform, to subdue their potential happiness by submitting to the expectations of others. Older characters are broken down – middle aged characters, like Hector and Anouk, are on the verge of that breakdown – while younger characters like Ari see that breakdown ahead, that expectation of submission. The constraints of sexuality, ethnicity, class, gender, work across all areas of suburbia – and to escape them one needs an exceptional form of courage. It is a courage that Ari lacks, that his best mate Johnny, whose poses as the drag queen Toula, does not. George tells Ari, late in Loaded, that all you need to do is tell the truth once, and then you’ll be free. But just like Alice in Unpolished Gem, Ari claims that the truth does not belong to anyone but yourself - truth is used against you. Harry, too, repeats this statement. And yet, finally, after four novels, Tsiolkas finally allows some sort of hope to enter this realm. In the character of Richie, we have someone who is confused, unsure of himself and his sexuality, of his place among his peers, who attempts suicide but receives the near death revelation that he wants to live – that there is a future worth striving for, even within the suburbs. And in Shamira and Bilal, we see social transgression and submission to a higher cause in the one movement – becoming religious teetotallers, fighting back against a society that offers only empty hedonism.