WHEN thinking about Australia’s great literary movement, a feeling of absence arises. Not because there is a lack of decent literature or a lack of consistent output. It is more a sense—a sense that many young Australians are not familiar with their literary past.

When one thinks of America, Germany, Japan, and Russia, names of literary giants are abundant. The rich lineage of influence, genre, and conflict ruptures the form and produces new styles. 

Out of the interiority of Mishima comes the materiality of Murakami. Out of the Brontës comes Virginia Woolf. Out of Baldwin comes Angelou. 

In these canons, literature is a dialectical process of which its students can trace its tensions, its friendships, its context. 

Yet in Australia it seems spontaneous; a combustion out of nowhere. However, this sensation of randomness denies the existence of a deep history of rebellion that revolves around the written word, which is centred around the fraught, colonial abstraction of what it means to be from the ‘lucky country’ (Horne, 1964).

It is very easy to compartmentalise Australia. It is geographically compartmentalised. Isolated from the hegemonic literary forces that determine the worthiness of a novel. It is also easy to relegate the Australian identity to the desert, the outback, the outlaw. The image of a white man on land he shouldn’t be on, given to him by a Crown that had no business out there. 

In reality, like all Commonwealth countries, Australia is grappling with the throes of neoliberalism and financialisation. It is a country where the lived reality for most is not on a station grappling with the wanton caprice of the rugged land; it is instead in an urban centre. For most, it is debt, rent, and a favourite park. A collection of mundane practices that deny the epic experience of the Australian narrative. 

However, there was a time in our recent history where a body of texts documented Australia’s urban experience. They explored the mentality of disaffected youth and the emptiness of the Great Australian dream. They were vile, offensive, and seemingly senseless. The most interesting part of this moment is that, to the Australian Academy’s dismay, it sold a lot of copies, and it made young people read. 

It was the 1990s, and ‘Grunge Lit’ appeared, except its existence is fiercely contested.

What is ‘Grunge Lit’

Grunge Lit refers to a selection of texts that emerged in the 1990s that dealt with the gritty reality of being young in the urban centres of Australia, namely Melbourne, Brisbane, and Sydney. It seems to have begun with the publication and success of Praise by Andrew McGahan in 1991, which went on to win the Vogel, marking some level of institutional success (Leishman, 1999, p. 94). Praise follows the hedonic relationship between its protagonist, Buchanan, and his girlfriend, Cynthia. The story documents a seemingly nihilistic and meaningless existence, centred around drugs, casual sex, and urban cohabitation. Praise awoke a ‘previously unmapped demographic of sub-thirty-year-old readers’(Leishman, 1999,p. 94) It poked at the gate kept realm of Australian publishing.

Then, 1995 came around, and with it so did Christos Tsiolkas’ queer text Loaded, Justine Ettler’s domestic violence novel River Ophelia, and Linda Jaivin’s erotic comedy Eat Me. Whilst content-wise the novels are disparate, due to their preoccupation with youth, disaffection, and nihilism; they got lumped into one overarching category: Grunge Lit. 

However, on all sides of the literary equation, Grunge Lit produced audible moans. On one hand, the antecedents of Australian literature were outraged. The so-called modernist sincerity of the Australian tradition was coming face-to-face with postmodern malaise (Gelder, 2009, p. 189). Grunge Lit was seen as apolitical, indulgent, and 'seemingly destined to fade into history’ (Syson, 1996, p. 21). Archaic attitudes within the literary industry grouped together these young novelists under the label as a means to pigeonhole their texts as exclusively youth-orientated and, god forbid, trendy. 

In particular, Justine Ettler’s, albeit highly graphic novel River Ophelia, loosely based on the Marquis de Sade’s body-horror writings, was dismissed by critics as ‘compromised in the end by a desire to be transgressive’ (Pratt, 1995). 

Perhaps this is true. Reading this book, inspired as a feminist counteraction to Brett Easton-Ellis's American Psycho (Thompson, 2012, p.7), there were moments I had to fiercely clench it shut and subdue a whole-body quiver. However, Ettler sold her 40,000 copies and produced a text worthy of legacy and revision (Syson, 1996, p. 21). 

On the other hand, the writers within the ‘Grunge’ troupe also loathed the term. At the 1996 Melbourne Writers Festival, Linda Jaivin, Andrew McGahan, Fiona McGregor, and Christos Tsiolkas attempted to deny it all together, rejecting the notion of a new literary brat pack as the US saw with the notorious Bennington crowd (Syson, 1996, 21). 

The one size fits all label to emerging writing ‘threatened their difference, integrity, and purpose’ (Syson, 1996, p. 21). The title was a 'market creation’ exploiting the new readership their books warranted; it was the predatory nature of the publishing industry adhering to the economic logic of capitalism; it was merely an extension of the dirty, urban realism seen internationally. There were so many reasons why Grunge Lit, a figment of the industry’s imagination, was simple. It, in all intents and purposes, did not exist (Syson, 1996). 

However, with time on our side and the capacity for retrospection, even the act of contesting the boundaries of Grunge Lit is delectably exciting in a country ruled by economic pragmatism and marked by insistent carving out of the humanities and the arts. It was a moment of outrage and debate. Where there were, seemingly, access points for debut writers with new stories, there was critical reception, good and bad. These fruitful disputes and tensions have created a vibrant document of a time of ‘generationalism’ (Leishman, 1999,p. 95) and tension, which proves the role of the written word in Australian political thought. 

Why is Grunge Lit so important? Cultural Cringe and the history of book banning

My emphasis on Grunge Lit comes out of the notion, or delusion, that there was a collective movement: a cohesion of fringe ideas about consumption, occupation, and conservatism that burst into the mainstream and managed to do that very difficult and wonderful thing that some writers manage to do: identify the themes of the present while the present still exists. Grunge Lit implies a moment of shared rebellion, of organised intellectual action within a country that possesses many obstacles to seeing a youth ‘literary movement’ emerge—namely a long history of Cultural Cringe and book banning. It is this nefarious cocktail that suffocated a literary tradition. 

Cultural Cringe is a phenomenon not exclusive to Australia, despite it being integral to Australian literary history. It is a concept which arose in 1950, when A.A. Phillips published a (now) monumental essay in Meanjin called Cultural Cringe (Phillips, 1950). It outlined the psychological state endemic to Australian writing, which is largely to do with the fact that Australia cannot compete with Anglo-Saxon traditions. As a ‘new country’, Australia could not compare itself to the European writers, with their strong lineage and propensity for tradition (Phillips, 1950). 

Cultural Cringe is not exclusive to literature either; it is seen to emerge in academia at large (Pickles, 2011). It is a psychological sense that Australia is inferior, and that to legitimise oneself in any field, one must make their departure to ‘The Continent’. This is a common conversation among young creative people within the urban centres of Australia; I just need to move to Berlin, London, or Amsterdam; they don’t appreciate art and culture here. To be legitimate is to be distinct from the isolated, clean public relations profile of the Australian. Of course, A.A. Phillips' argument is arrogant and parochial. His constant repetition of being a young country ignores the fact that the Indigenous people of the land are the oldest civilisation in the world, dating back 60,000 years. He labours over the traditional assumption that written knowledge is more valuable than spoken knowledge, and also that it is only the Anglo-Saxons who have a rich literary tradition. Denying the ‘Global South’ of any canonical history. 

However, the most hypocritical feature of A.A. Phillips’ essay, the most glaringly obvious reason why Australia continues to struggle to participate in the international discussion, is the fact that Australia had a robust literary censorship regime from the 1930s until the 1970s (Bullock & Moore, 2008). During this time, writers such as Aldous Huxley, Phillip Roth, and James Baldwin were denied to the greater public (Bullock & Moore, 2008). Australians were, without their knowledge, refused access to texts that challenged social consciousness and political thought. The below discussion on censorship is owed immensely to the tireless work of Marita Bullock and Simone Moore who have laboured over compiling the Banned in Australia Bibliography and associated research that has pieced together this opaque and confusing period of Australian history (Bullock & Moore, 2008). 

The literary censorship regime began officially in 1935 under the supervision of the Minister for Trade and Customs, Thomas White, and was enabled by the Trade and Customs Act of 1901. It operated unfettered as a restriction on imports rather than explicitly political ideas. International titles were subject to banning for a multitude of reasons, and the breadth by which the Department was able to make assessments on what the Australian public could read shifted from value-driven appropriateness to whether a text was sufficiently 'literary', veering into a curatorial, taste-driven authority. The government decided not only what aligned with the Australian world view, but what the average reader ought to be reading (Moore & Bullock, 2009). 

Censorship functioned effectively for roughly forty years, largely due to the fact no one knew about it. Customs were under no obligation to tell the general public what books were banned until 1958. By that time, Catcher in the Rye was censored by the Australian government (Moore & Bullock). The Australian government intentionally and covertly constructed psychological obstacles for participation in the international literary community until the 1970s, which is interesting to think this was the same time of the Second Wave Women’s and Civil Rights Movement in the United States. 

While there was still rebellion influenced by international aesthetics, largely through music, chunks of those movements and creative blooms were left behind. The reciprocity of cultural flows and youth culture was stifled by material access, instigated by the Minister of Trade of all people! Such an example was during the 1960s, when there was a clear appreciation for the Beat movement and Beatnik style. Australia had produced some Beat poetry that leant into the Kerouacian propensity for natural awe, defection, and drinking. 

However, they received access to very little of the original texts, despite the waves they were making overseas. Academics almost awkwardly have to acknowledge that the Beat experience was only partial. A piecing together of fashion, style, and sensibility without legitimate access to central texts—the Beat poetry itself (Birns, 2018). Those young poets were denied participation, their stories overlooked. Of course, a phenomena such as Cultural Cringe would persist. 

So extensive and persistent was this denial of creative and intellectual freedom that Penguin Books sued the Australian government over the banning of Portnoy's Complaint, written by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Phillip Roth. University students were bootlegging copies of this novel and distributing it in secret amongst friends in a hungry attempt for literary freedom in a highly conservative environment. It was this fiasco that brought down the literary censorship system in the 1970s, as Australia welcomed a new period of Labour governance under Gough Whitlam (Cain, 2022). 

Cultural Cringe and literary censorship helps to explain the psychological sensation that Australia is a baron creative landscape, and why perhaps foreigners also overlook what the country has to offer. Or don’t think of a rich urban experience with diverse narratives. 

Grunge Lit - the urban manifesto 

The importance of seeing Grunge Lit as a movement, not just a ‘market creation’ as Syson famously framed it as (Syson, 1996), is to showcase Australia’s moments of literary challenge and transfiguration. To broadcast an invigorating burst of momentum where young writers challenged the Australian tradition and split open ideas of what narratives were seen as important or even, intellectual. While there are decades between 1930 and 1990, Grunge Lit, Cultural Cringe and censorship seem causally connected. Or, alternatively, the rampant conservatism within the Australian tradition, makes its existence almost miraculous. 

Grunge Lit was a moment of literary exchange. It transplanted the qualities of dirty realism that were successful in other increasingly laissez-faire economies: the individualism, the isolation, the yearning for soul, and stylised it to suit the Australian psyche. Now, there exists an eternal document of how many urban youths lived in a country which had a tradition of undermining such expression. 

Whilst the contents were overlooked for their seemingly immature themes, the works of Tsiolkas, McGahan, Jaivin, Ettler, and Davies made sense of a shift in contemporary Australian life. 

They acknowledged the new burdens that came with the atomised expectations of consumerism and the new rhetoric of the Australian dream. When I think about Grunge Lit, in the context of Cultural Cringe and literary censorship, I selfishly wonder if the writers within the 'movement’ would in retrospect claim the title. With time, esteem, and reputation on their side, would they reflect and see, not exact carbon copies but similarities within their texts and ideas? Their individual integrity intact but also, perhaps, a recognition of a certain cultural momentum that warranted an Australian youth perspective.

Australian history, due to its conservatism, its censorship, its long-tradition of big government, and freedom of information regulation, has always framed art or literature as unimportant. Outside of the institutionally affirmed texts of Banjo Patterson and the patriotic propaganda of frontiership, the literary canon is engaged with a certain indifference. 

However, the debates and tension that came out of Grunge Lit produces an exhilarating feeling, maybe it could happen again? Grunge Lit as a sensibility is a vital tool for burgeoning writers in Australia. A way to embrace the form but critique tradition to produce literary generations that we can track. A document by which young urban Australians can see figments of themselves and find comradery amongst generations. They are books one may hate, but they are ours. 

References

Bullock, M & Moore, 2008, ‘Introduction’, Banned in Australia, Original, AustLit, e-resource https://www.austlit.edu.au/austlit/page/5960610 

Birns, N 2018, ‘Beat Australia: Hydra to Balmain’, in The Routledge Handbook of International Beat Literature, Routledge, pp. 71–86.

Cain, S 2022, ‘The extraordinary life of an illegal copy of Portnoy’s Complaint: ‘It’s a terrific Australian story’ The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/feb/02/the-extraordinary-life-of-an-copy-of-portnoys-complaint-its-a-terrific-australian-story 

Horne, D 1964, Lucky Country, Penguin Books, Australia. 

Ken Gelder, PS 2009, After The Celebration: Australian Fiction 1989-2007 1st edn, Melbourne University Publishing, Melbourne.

Leishman, K 1999, ‘Australian grunge literature and the conflict between literary generations’, Journal of Australian studies, vol. 23, no. 63, pp. 94–102.

Phillips, A  2010, ‘The Cultural Cringe’, Meanjin, vol. 69, no. 4, pp. 52–55.

Pickles, K 2011, ‘Transnational History and Cultural Cringe: Some Issues for Consideration in New Zealand, Australia and Canada’, History compass, vol. 9, no. 9, pp. 657–673.

Pratt, C 1995, ‘Compromised in the End by the Desire to Be Transgressive’, Canberra Times, p.56. 

Syson, I 1996, ‘Smells like market spirit: Grunge literature, Australia’, Overland, no. 142, pp. 21–26.

Thompson, JD 2012, ‘“I Don’t” Wanna Live in this Place’: 

The “Australian Cultural Cringe” in Subtopia and The River Ophelia’, Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature : JASAL, vol. 12, no. 3, pp. 1-13.

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Emma Carter is a Sydney based writer and researcher. She is a postgraduate student studying Media Practice at The University of Sydney and has a specific interest in media history in the Australian context. Emma also works in publishing and has a deep love for literature, especially showcasing Australian texts and embracing her antipodean roots.

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