• Author:agent Laurie Duggan http://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poets/duggan-laurie
Issue Details: First known date: 2018... 2018 ‘A Homemade World’ : On the Dandenong Line
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Sometime in 1953 my parents bought a house in Clayton (Victoria, Australia), then on the edge of south-east Melbourne. We moved there from a decidedly different environment: the guest house that my Grandmother owned. This was on Beaconsfield Parade in South Melbourne. In those years that suburb was largely working class with connections to the Port Melbourne wharf and the further dockside territory along the Yarra River. This guesthouse and the country around Ensay in the Tambo valley of East Gippsland where my father was born were ghost presences as I was growing up – imaginaries of an existence I might have had (urban / rural). We would visit my uncle and aunt in Ensay (travelling by train and bus until around 1960 when we finally owned a car) and we would venture into the inner suburbs occasionally where I would get to look at the ‘slums’. I’m not sure what significance these places had for my parents or even why they wanted to take me there. It could have been as a ‘this could have happened to you’ lesson, though I suspect this was not the case. The places we visited may have had more of an affirming effect for my parents. For me, the inner suburbs were simply ‘picturesque’. In art classes at Huntingdale High School I would often draw or paint decaying buildings from the images I had taken on my box Brownie camera. These were sketchy romantic visions lifted probably from the work of Sydney artists like Sali Herman or Donald Friend (encountered in the library rather than the art gallery).'  (Introduction)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Cordite Poetry Review Suburbia no. 84 1 February 2018 12858164 2018 periodical issue

    'We begin with two recent voices in Cordite Poetry Review.

    '‘There is an assumption that real art only comes from the city,’ writes Winnie Siulolovao Dunn in her 2017 essay, ‘FOB: Fresh off the Books’. Dunn is writing about the stigma of hailing from both Mt Druitt and Tonga. For the young Dunn, the ethnically diverse Western Suburbs of Sydney seem far removed from any cultural centre. Indeed, as Dunn recounts, it took her twenty-one years to write and own ‘the literature of being a Fob in Mounty County.’

    'The second voice is Corey Wakeling’s, and it comes from his brilliantly provocative review of Puncher & Wattmann’s Contemporary Australian Poetry. Here, Wakeling argues that ‘the suburban is a preeminent register of the Australian contemporary’ and that ‘much Australian poetry already seems embedded in the suburban condition.’ For Wakeling, the huge CAP volume is a testament to the various ways that contemporary poetry is implicated in or grappling with notions and legacies of suburbia.' (Lachlan Brown and Nathanael O'Reilly : Editorial Introduction) 

    2018
Last amended 8 Feb 2018 11:44:42
Subjects:
Settings:
  • Clayton, Murrumbeena - Oakleigh - Springvale area, Melbourne South East, Melbourne, Victoria,
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