Class
Tiffany Tsao • 26 November 2021
In a recent essay for Overland on the overwhelming middle-classness of Australian fiction, Michele Freeman reminds readers that 'the working class is not comprised solely of white, blue-collar male workers, but is in fact incredibly diverse and complex.' Indeed, diversity and complexity were the guiding principles I tried to abide by in assembling this class-themed issue of The Circular, and as such I find it difficult to provide a general 'boil down' of our featured pieces for the purpose of this introduction. They will not be boiled down. (You will notice that for this particular issue, I have dropped the royal 'we'.)
This issue opens with the abovementioned essay by Freeman on the middle-class snobbery of Australian fiction, followed by Enza Gandolfo on reading and writing working-class fiction (which Freeman’s essay quotes and links to, but which I also wanted to foreground in its own right).
Next is Melissa Lucashenko’s award-winning piece of journalism, published in 2013, which interviews three mothers 'doing it tough in the Greater Brisbane Area'. Thank you to the Griffith Review for graciously making this piece open-access for the next two weeks.
Alice Pung, this year’s speaker for Victoria’s annual State of the (Writing) Nation address, talks to Alan Weedon about growing up working class in a refugee family in Melbourne’s west.
Dinithi Samarawickrama ruminates on their family’s rice-farming heritage and the severed organic and spiritual connections between what we labour on and what we eat.
Shannon Burns reflects on the perspective that his white 'lumpen' background has given him on racist attitudes and violent behaviour among the white working class.
And last but emphatically not least ('i became great when (with all the chutzpah) i first began to say I’m brilliant, i’m fantastic, i’m great') is the poet π.o. in conversation with Debris Facility on, among many things, the political poetics of his work and the class he grew up in.
The Australian Publishing Industry’s Problem with Class
'Too many of these types of stories come from people without any basic understanding of the lives of working class people, and without more working class people telling their stories themselves these realities will remain either invisible or unfairly portrayed.
What we are seeing anew in this pandemic is that the working class is a large, diverse and complex community that rarely gets heard or understood. It is the beating heart behind the scenes of the nation, doing some of the hardest and most essential work and not only getting disproportionally rewarded for it – but paying the biggest price when things go wrong. The least we can do is listen to its stories, and do this up close and personal.'
Unearthing the Stories of Australia’s Working Class
'Most literary novels are about the middle class, so much so that we don’t often think about class when we read them. Being middle class – like being white and male – is read as the universal human experience. There were no people like me or my family in the novels I read as a child. Though I didn’t realize it at the time, this exacerbated my feelings of inferiority and marginality. There was a sense that to obtain the life my parents wanted for me I had to leave them and my class behind.'
Sinking below sight
'"People think, oh, you drink your money. Or it's a ‘budgeting issue’. But you use your cash card once a week, on payday, and then you don't use it again, cos it's empty. I don't think people realise how hard it is, not being able to provide. If I have to put my phone into hock so the kids can go on excursions then I will. Nobody rings you anyway, there's no petrol to go anywhere and no money to do anything, so you just sit home."'
Interview with Alice Pung
'There are paradoxes living in Braybrook, Sunshine and Footscray where you could be incredibly poor money-wise but you could be incredibly wealthy fashion-wise if your Aunty sewed for Country Road. She could have a bunch of Country Road labels left over, bits of off-cut fabric where she could fashion them into 200-dollar slacks in about a day...if, you know, she's kind enough to make you a birthday present. And, if you had relatives who imported things from overseas, you could have your fake Gucci handbag – so you can look incredibly well-heeled and incredibly affluent even though you live in the concrete commission house.'
My Mother's Rice
'This division of labour has sanitised rice farming from its original being. It has created, as Marx would put it, a division between the manual forces of labour and the spiritual forces of labour. This means that my people, and many other peoples whose lives were so deeply woven with the cycles of this little grain; are no longer "in direct contact with the conditions of their own existence" (Weil)...Life is no longer – "I am fed and I grow and in turn I feed the land" but instead a struggle for infinite growth; the incessant pestilence of profit.'
In Defence of the Bad, White Working Class
'For many of the white adults, like my parents, "Asians" had turned their neighbourhood into a frightening and uninhabitable place. It appeared no more dangerous to me than it had ever been, but I enjoyed a comparatively privileged perspective. I grew up in a multicultural world, so its "alien" aspects barely troubled me. My parents, however, did not grow up in such a world. They had never been wealthy enough to travel or to experience other cultures on their own terms. As a consequence, the creeping advance of a multicultural society – a reality-shift that they had no control over – frightened them.'
(Note: I found it interesting to read this essay alongside this short 2012 piece, 'Racist Violence and Social Class in Australia', by blogger Eurasian Sensation, a.k.a. Chris Mitchell, for Peril: 'the racism of the more wealthy and middle classes is often not as obvious and visceral as that of the less privileged. But what about its overall impact?')
WRITER & WRITER: 'A poet is a worker in language' – Debris Facility Interviews π.ο.
DF: When we met, you appreciated my name, as I do yours. We’d taken on 'Debris Facility' as a way to re-write the practice/identity, a material linguistic ritual to reinscribe the multiplicity of embodiment including gender. I understand that you’d taken π.ο. as a name while a student. What is the process and thinking behind your name, and what has it enabled for you?
π.ο. : Generally i don’t indulge a lot in explaining my name except to say that when i was a Collingwood Tech, i suddenly realised that altho a lot of kids like me couldn’t pass English subjects we were everyone’s equal in Maths classes if not better cos we were the great white hopes of our families and science and mathematics was the way out of the slum/slump. I fell in love with Pythagoras, and still do and am. And then i fell in love with 'the ratio of the diameter of a circle with the circumference' and it was given the letter π and it was Greek, and it was me: my initials π right next to the circle O, the most compact of visual signifiers with symbol-mathematical-pretentious, and ½ Greek, ½ English, ½ calculation, ½ visual (later understood as 'poem'), and ½ mine. No other name was possible for me.
In non-fiction news, Southerly has devoted their entire latest issue to work by past and present refugees in Australian detention centres on and offshore. The issue is guest edited by writer-activists Hani Abdile, Behrouz Boochani, Janet Galbraith, and Omid Tofighian. The Circular will be featuring writing from it next week, but why wait when you can read it now?
The 2021 Deakin University Nonfiction Prize winner has been announced. Congratulations to Carly Stone and felicitations to all the shortlistees!
CALL FOR END-OF-YEAR RECOMMENDATIONS: You may have noticed that The Circular isn’t about featuring the 'top hits' or 'best of'. Curated by a human being, not an algorithm, this newsletter is about appreciating Australian online writing in all its variety, whether it gets published in Australian outlets, whether the topics or writers are sufficiently 'Australian', whether it was published last week or several years ago. For our last edition of the year, to be sent out 10 December, I’d like to put together an issue consisting entirely of people’s favourite online non-fiction reads.
Interested in participating? Write to editor@thecircular.com.au and respond to the following question: 'What was your favourite online non-fiction read for 2021 and why?' It can be your favourite or just one of your favourites! It can be anything non-fiction – interview, essay, non-fiction poetry, reportage, other. Also, it does not have to have been published in 2021. (How pleasantly startling is it to discover a piece of great writing and find out it’s been there, waiting for you this whole time?)
The selected participants will be credited for their recommendations unless they prefer to remain anonymous. Deadline: Tuesday 7 December 2021.