As a ubiquitous but under-acknowledged setting in Australian fiction, suburbia affords the detailed representation of everyday, local places and landscapes at specific points in their history, even while adumbrating structures germane to globalised capitalist modernity – features arguably also integral to the novel itself as a morphing yet durable narrative form. Abstract dimensions like these become manifest via individual novels that evoke specific suburban places and geographies. Attending to one such geography, a sector of metropolitan Sydney conventionally known as the ‘North Shore’, this chapter works with four novels, reading them both chronologically and collectively, and proposing that, taken together, they constitute a fictional archive of an affluent, middle-class, urban subregion. Through its tight focus on one specific subregion, the chapter makes the argument that novels can be read not just singly but serially, for their sensory evocation of mundane and ephemeral place, and for their unearthing of that which is routinely suppressed by and within settler-suburbia. The novels from which this chapter forms its putative, fictional archive of Sydney’s North Shore are Christina Stead’s Seven Poor Men of Sydney (1934), Patrick White’s Riders in the Chariot (1961), Jessica Anderson’s The Impersonators (1980) and Fiona McGregor’s Indelible Ink (2010).

Where in the nineteenth century the representation of Aboriginal characters and things was occasional and marginal in the Australian novel, the twentieth century saw a new attention to Aboriginal characters. The twentieth century saw Australia’s foundation in 1901 marred by the emergence of the White Australia policy, which excluded migrants of colour and indirectly affected Aboriginal policy. So would begin a vexed erotics of miscegenation. In her short fiction, Katharine Susannah Prichard would deal with cross-race relations in northern Australia before producing her influential novel Coonardoo in 1929. Nearly a decade later, Xavier Herbert published Capricornia (1938), an epic northern Australian novel concerned with assimilation. Each of these novels is concerned with the field of discursive Aboriginality as a fantasy space for negotiations of appropriate whiteness and identity, as is Eleanor Dark’s Timeless Land trilogy (1941–53) and even works by Patrick White such as Voss (1957) and A Fringe of Leaves (1976), to finally mark the beginning of what has been called post-Mabo fiction in David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon (1993). This chapter tracks these examples of Aboriginal as represented in Australian novels and more ‘minor’ ones along the way.

This chapter focuses on how the word ‘environment’ became culturally prominent in the 1930s, and suggests that Australian novels from this period show the intrusion of the environment – as a signifier – in their basic imaginary structure. The word ‘environment’, and its attendant ideas, emerged as a refinement of the bush nationalism that preceded it, still funding a national settler identity, but now inflected with the sense of crisis that arose with the collapse of the world economy and the drift into cataclysmic global conflict. The distinctive usage of the environment that emerges in the 1930s was most explicitly expressed in the Jindyworobak valorisation of ‘Environmental Values’ and in the work of poets of that school. However, the importance of the word environment and its cluster of associations is also visible in the novelists from this time, including Xavier Herbert, Vance Palmer, Katharine Susannah Prichard, M. Barnard Eldershaw, Elyne Mitchell, J. K. Ewers, Patrick White, Peter Cowan and Randolph Stow. Drawing on the works of these writers, this chapter sketches a dialectic within mid-century Australia that figured the environment as, by turns, a vitalistic substance and a Darwinian struggle.

This chapter will build on recent work by Elizabeth McMahon and Christos Tsiolkas to situate Australia’s first Nobel Prize winner as a queer modernist with his own distinct political valence. Written by the foremost Chinese scholar of Australian literature, Chen Hong, this chapter explores Whites epochal career. It covers White’s novelistic oeuvre from The Aunt’s Story (1948) through to his late queer masterpeice, The Twyborn Affair (1979).