'After 13-year-old Vicky is raped by her straitlaced father, she and her younger brother with autism leave Adelaide for Queensland, where they meet up with a group of other runaways who lead them to an eccentric named Xam and a ramshackle house called Tibet. '(Nancy Pearl)
Writing Disability in Australia:
| Type of disability | Autism. |
| Type of character | Primary. |
| Point of view | First person (not the disabled character). |
'Gold Coast beaches oscillate in the cultural imagination between everyday reality and a tourist's paradise of ‘sun, surf and sex’ (Winchester and Everett 2000: 59). While these narratives of selfhood and becoming, egalitarianism and sexual liberation punctuate the media, Gold Coast literary fictions instead reveal the beach as a site of danger, wholly personifying the unknown. Within Amy Barker's Omega Park, Melissa Lucashenko's Steam Pigs, Georgia Savage's The House Tibet and Matthew Condon's Usher and A Night at the Pink Poodle, the beach is a ‘masculine’ space for testing the limit of the coastline and one's own capacity for survival. This article undertakes a close textual analysis of these novels and surveys other Gold Coast fictions alongside spatial analysis of the Gold Coast coastline. These fictions suggest that the Gold Coast is not simply a holiday world or ‘Crime Capital’ in the cultural imagination, but a mythic space with violent memories, opening out onto an infinite horizon of conflict and estrangement.'
Source: Abstract.
