Cirrus@Austlit

'As a self-employed artist living in relative autonomy and precarity, I can feel untethered from the formal structures and conventions that shape our notions of ‘work’. I don’t observe a weekend or an eight-hour day; the line I draw between labour and leisure is indistinct. Twenty years have passed since I last reported to a ‘boss’. Even so, while reading Sam Wallman’s sweeping graphic love letter to unionism, I am reminded of the myriad ways I benefit from the revolutionary history of organised worker solidarity—a struggle that has re-modelled the framework of contemporary institutions and the imaginations of those who populate them.' (Introduction)

'The city of Melbourne churns at the centre of Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip, sustaining the plot of a book lauded as the ‘quintessential Melbourne novel.’ The streets of the inner north on which the story unfolds still exist: Delbridge Street down through the ‘green tunnel’ of Edinburgh Gardens still leads to Fitzroy Baths where one might still dive into the cool blue ‘aqua profonda.’ Yet they also never existed.' (Introduction)