'Datson Angel is a turbo-charged adventure into the dark heart of 1980s Australia: a place completely alien, yet frighteningly similar, to today.
'EVERYTHING IN THIS BOOK HAPPENED . . .
'At seventeen, aching to begin her adult life, Anna Broinowski is precocious, naive and in her first year of Arts/Law at Sydney University. Anna's already convinced she knows how the world works, but O-week changes that. She watches Australia's drunk future captains of industry terrorise freshers and the Wesley grapevine starts buzzing with reports that a Sancta Sophia first-year has been gangbanged by the St Paul's seniors, who pinioned her to the rose garden lawn with croquet hoops.
'Nothing is what she thought it'd be . . . until the Sydney Uni Dramatic Society (SUDS) leads Anna to her people. New dreams are made. Acting, playing violin, auditioning for NIDA, losing her virginity. And then Peisley, a gentle giant with calves as muscly as the Hulk's, talks of a hitchhiking trip up north. And, after agreeing on three rules - Never split up. Remain platonic. Accept every lift that gets them closer to Darwin - Anna decides to go.
'Hitchhiking the highways leads her to a dystopian dustbowl of raging paranoia and ghastly beauty, a flyblown asylum where outsiders must adapt or perish, and women teeter on an existential knife-edge, between hatred and annihilation. Anna's is a tale of danger, unravelling sanity and blossoming love. It details the extreme things that happen when urban feminism is plucked from the Ivory Tower and forced to confront the toxic misogyny in the guts of the Australian soul. In her travels, Anna will learn that the line between victim and survivor can be as cruel as luck and as random as a shiny blue Datson on a red dirt road.
'Based on her battered travel diary, Datsun Angel is a riveting and darkly funny true story of a sex, drugs and violence-fuelled adventure through the brutal 1980s Australian outback. It is a feminist Mad Max, told through a #MeToo filter.' (Publication summary)
'Anna Broinowski’s memoir, Datsun Angel: A true-story adventure inside the savage heart of 1980s Australia, begins in the hallowed residential halls of the University of Sydney. Hazing rituals, sexist humiliation, class snobbery and drinking cultures are in full swing. Broinowski manages to be a misfit in this environment quite by accident – by being, saying or doing the “wrong thing”, according to the North Shore Old Boys’ culture. This culminates in targeting and bullying, until she ends up the victim of a horrific hazing ritual.' (Introduction)
'In the final pages of her memoir Datsun Angel, writer and filmmaker Anna Broinowski identifies the book as a “call-to-arms critique [of] the eighties patriarchy”. She questions whether women like herself – that is, the well-educated, sexually liberated beneficiaries of second-wave feminism – are really better off than their 1940s counterparts.' (Introduction)
'In the final pages of her memoir Datsun Angel, writer and filmmaker Anna Broinowski identifies the book as a “call-to-arms critique [of] the eighties patriarchy”. She questions whether women like herself – that is, the well-educated, sexually liberated beneficiaries of second-wave feminism – are really better off than their 1940s counterparts.' (Introduction)
'Anna Broinowski’s memoir, Datsun Angel: A true-story adventure inside the savage heart of 1980s Australia, begins in the hallowed residential halls of the University of Sydney. Hazing rituals, sexist humiliation, class snobbery and drinking cultures are in full swing. Broinowski manages to be a misfit in this environment quite by accident – by being, saying or doing the “wrong thing”, according to the North Shore Old Boys’ culture. This culminates in targeting and bullying, until she ends up the victim of a horrific hazing ritual.' (Introduction)
