'Helen, Walt and Duncan are looking for ways to entertain themselves in the sprawl of Sydney’s western suburbs. Walt, scrappy and idealistic, wants to prove a point, and turns to petty vandalism. His friend Duncan sticks to his fledgling football career, and sexual encounters in strange houses. Walt’s sister Helen, restless and seeking something larger than herself, is forced by scandal to leave the family home. As they move into adulthood they gravitate to the dingy glamour of the inner-city suburbs, to escape their families’ complicated histories, and in search of new identities, artistic, sexual and political.
'The Magpie Wing is set on football fields, in punk gigs, and in dilapidated and gentrifying pubs, moving from the nineties to the present, and between the suburbs and the inner city. Max Easton’s debut novel explores how, even in a city divided against itself, disparate communities – underground music scenes, rugby league clubs, communist splinter groups – share unexpected roots.'
Source : publisher's blurb
Epigraph: Many people want to claim subalternity. They are the least interesting and the most dangerous. - Chakravorty Spivak
They thought they were better than us! Not better footballers, but better people. - Tommy Raudonikis
'The Crossroads Hotel in Casula has gained the kind of infamy that most venues in 2021 want to avoid. In June the hotel became ground zero for the Covid-19 outbreak in the multiracial, largely working-class area of south-west Sydney. The starkly different, militarised response to this outbreak, compared with those in the eastern suburbs, has arguably done more to entrench Sydney’s west–east divide than any other event in the city’s history.' (Introduction)
'The Crossroads Hotel in Casula has gained the kind of infamy that most venues in 2021 want to avoid. In June the hotel became ground zero for the Covid-19 outbreak in the multiracial, largely working-class area of south-west Sydney. The starkly different, militarised response to this outbreak, compared with those in the eastern suburbs, has arguably done more to entrench Sydney’s west–east divide than any other event in the city’s history.' (Introduction)
