Reviews and Comments

Paradise Estate picks up a few years down the road (and on the other side of the peak COVID pandemic years) from where The Magpie Wing left off, following Helen as she endures some major life events in addition to the shitshow that is renting and sharing an anywhere-near-affordable house in a major Australian city.

So many of the characters are looking for genuine connection with each other, if they could only get past their own vices, preoccupations, insecure and unsatisfying work, and inhospitable living conditions.

All the Paradise Estate housemates share a common dissatisfaction with the world at large and have a real desire to make change, which is tempered by their own personal histories of injury and loss, vanity (in Nathan's case), and the jadedness and exhaustion that comes with precarious living and working well into their 30s and beyond.

I've spent most of my adult years in the kind of world these characters inhabit, so to say I found the book relatable is an understatement. I share Rugby League playing laborer/anarchist Rocco's frustration with the typical Australian arms-length friendship and aversion to direct action. I probably also share(d) his idealism of restlessly moving and looking for the ideal place to be and community to be in, (which of course will never work out if you don't stick around and learn to accept where you are and the people around you).

Like The Magpie Wing, you'll get a little extra juice out of knowing the places, names and bus routes in this book, but the universality of getting older and feeling you're not fucking getting anywhere is the real story, which Paradise Estate evokes so well.

Shaun Prescott has a knack for eerie mundanity — or should it be mundane eeriness? Like The Town, Bon and Lesley is set in a disappearing central western NSW town, but instead of the town literally disappearing, the town of Newnes is being vacated, abandoned and burned as a result of a widespread end-of-times scenario.

Bon and Lesley are two train passengers who become stranded in Newnes and form a makeshift family with local brothers Steven and Jack while trying to be better versions of their city selves and Lesley, at least, attempts to construct something to attach her hopes to in a futureless world.

I don't feel like recounting the plot really does justice to the way Prescott ilustrates the absolute averageness of his characters and their inner monologues (so unremarkable as to be quite strange, but so relatable in how they feebly navigate the non-negotiables of life) while creating a kind of ashen, deadened magic that circulates in the forgotten country towns he builds in his stories.

No other books leave me with the feeling that Prescott's do. Might go and re-read The Town now to keep it hanging around.

Bruce Pascoe manages to show how the 'hunter gatherer' tag that has become attached to Aboriginal culture at the time of invasion, was not only factually untrue, but was a story that served to justify the colonisers' dispossession of the land.

Pascoe revisits the diaries and other record made by early colonists and explorers and pieces together their observations of crop cultivation and irrigation, food storage and house building, among many other practices considered marks of advanced society by European anthropological standards.

I am also ashamed to admit that my knowledge of most of these sophisticated agriculture, aquaculture and land management techniques was woefully shallow, having, I suppose, been misled by the colonisers' narrative that plays down or refuses to acknowledge Aboriginal Australians' tens of thousands of years expertise in land management and food cultivation - traditions that should be celebrated and learned from rather than willfully overlooked as they have been for the past two hundred or so years since this land was stolen.

Dark Emu has left me looking at the landscape of the continent I live on in a different way and eager to learn more about the agricultural tradition of its traditional owners.

I always found Emma Warren to be a deeply knowledgeable interviewer of musicians, so I was interested in this effort of hers to document the years that Total Refreshment Centre was in existence. More of a jazz-focused space, and maybe a little more commercially focused than the DIY spaces I'm used to, but the tales of making stuff happen on a shoestring, the mixing and mingling and creating of a scene, as well as the eventual burnout of its main organizers, rang true.

While Warren's affection for the building and its happenings and community was clear, it didn't cloud the many facets of its story, told through interviews with a huge number of people connected with the space. The interviewees provided their viewpoints around the building's history, events, organisation and impact on the local community. There were equal parts frankness, criticism and praise from a wide variety of people. I appreciate that at least one interviewee acknowledged that these spaces are usually the vanguard of gentrification, while others acknowledged the nitty gritty of dealing with neighbours and noise complaints.

In the true DIY spirit, in the final chapter of the self-published book, Warren explains how she put the book together so that others documenting their own scenes, venues or events may learn from her experience.