Category / Book Review

by Sarah Layton

Vigilante Girl Gangs: Amelia Westlake by Erin Gough

The Lit Sponge is written on the lands of the Wurundjeri people and acknowledges them as the traditional owners of this land, which was never ceded. I would also like to pay my respects to their Elders, past and present.

When I was 13, my best friend and I wrote a comic. And by ‘wrote a comic’ I mean she illustrated and wrote it and I, thinking it was a stroke of genius, shared it with all our friends. The titular character WYS NERO was a round, potato-like creature with giant circular eyes, eating a blue-pen rendered raw onion. Unfortunately, my friend is now a working professional who took down all the weird stuff we posted online in high school, but the moral (if there is one) – teenage girls do weird shit.

I can also remember the first time I visited a private school. In year twelve some friends and I went to see Carey Grammar School’s production of Chicago. My high school had just put on a direct-from-Savers run of Oklahoma and was now running a school-wide fundraising drive to raise money to buy a baby grand. But walking past the music department at Carey, looking in the windows, we counted four in white-walled, separate rooms. In that moment, I saw the monetary value that had been placed on private education … and knew that the same value had never been placed on mine.

It made me want to pick up some bulk-bought, lined Officeworks paper and a pen. Because again, teenage girls do weird shit. Why not do it for a cause?

It’s somewhere in this vein that Erin Gough’s latest book Amelia Westlake comes in. It’s a member of a rising genre Alexa Wilson Kelly calls “Teen Girls Get Fed Up and Form Vigilante Girl Gangs to Knock Out Sexism at the Local Level”, centring on two girls tackling injustice at their school with an anonymous comic. The book’s primary-coloured, illustrated cover design of boater hats has a Madeline feel, and the story is thoroughly readable YA that tackles sexism, classism and homophobia in its opening chapters. It’s Will Grayson, Will Grayson, but with a bit more to say.

Unlike many other YA offerings, the heart of Amelia Westlake is female friendship, solidarity and a queer romance. Its relationships unfold with slow vulnerability, and allow the main characters Harriet and Will to move from the caricatures of teachers pet and misfit into a more complex understanding of each other and the world they’re fighting against. Gough treats her characters with authenticity and care, giving context to the clichéd identities high schools and social groups demand from young women. The everyday concerns of their school life become real, and as Will and Harriet gain nuance to the reader, they also gain nuance to each other. While Harriet’s overly-idealistic teacher’s pet is played-up in a way that some readers might struggle with, her slow willingness to put aside her absolute belief that the adults and friends in her life are well-meaning is one of the more captivating character progressions in this story. The two girls enable each other to rebel in meaningful ways, and Harriet’s rebellion is absolute.

Amelia Westlake starts with these small rebellions that quickly become a school-wide revolution. The girls are brought together by a shared feeling of injustice about their school’s sexist and predatory swimming teacher, Coach Hadley. An ex-Olympian, Hadley is a key part of Rosemead’s narrative around reputation and prestige, a power he uses to sexually harass and molest his students. As tension around Rosemead’s continued inaction builds, Will and Harriet are placed in a position all too familiar for many young women: unable to let a status quo of predatory behaviour continue and attempting to force change on an institution that has “conditioned us so completely that nobody even considers questioning what goes on here anymore.”

While Hadley isn’t the only injustice the girls fight, he is the centre point that the book revolves around, and a reminder that all too often, girls are exposed to sexism, homophobia and trauma at a young age. Amelia Westlake doesn’t shy away from this, and reading it carries with it some of the horror of seeing the violence of Larry Nassar through a teenage lens. The girls’ cartoon about Hadley is no revelation to their fellow students, it’s an acknowledgement of an open secret that takes place among plans for the school formal and VCE stress. Student reactions come with a mixture of solidarity and victim blaming, often tied to the characters relative privilege, but ultimately the book shows that real change, change that targets power and institutions, is led by young people – and often, young women. It also shows the personal cost of their bravery, and that the worst victims of sexual assault are often the least empowered to speak up. Taking action against these injustices – especially on behalf of those who are less able – is, as Will says, “what Amelia Westlake is all about.”

Amelia Westlake doesn’t shy away from these issues, and reading it carries with it some of the horror of seeing the violence of Larry Nassar through a teenage lens. The girls’ cartoon about Hadley is no revelation to their fellow students, it’s an acknowledgement of an open secret that takes place among plans for the school formal and VCE stress.

Gough’s second novel published through Hardie Grant Egmont is also a sign of changing attitudes. Its win of Readings’ Young Adult Prize for 2018 and position as a CBCA notable is an overall win for Australian-born YA, and its recent shortlisting for the Golden Inky speaks to its success among young readers. In a YA market where the biggest names are often books with male protagonists, seeing strong female-led books is critical. Amelia Westlake is a book that wouldn’t have been published a decade ago, let alone a bestseller, and its success can only help push more diverse stories into the mainstream.

However, this is also why it’s important to acknowledge some weaknesses among the strengths, especially in a book that tries to tackle the lack of diversity in our writing. As Kelly Roberts notes in her Conversation article, today’s YA heroine is “still very white and very upper middle class”, and this is an issue that will not be dispelled by books like Amelia Westlake.

Similarly, while parents will always try to choose the best school for their child, some parents have a lot more means to make that choice than others, a reality and privilege that Amelia Westlake does somewhat shy away from showing. The main characters given awareness of their privilege express it in deeply frustrating ways. Will lashes out at the Rosemead system, simultaneously hating it and still unable to recognise how significantly she is benefitting from it and her own privilege as the child of successful, upper-middle class parents. An exception to this is the character of Nat Nguyen, the impassioned editor of the Messenger, who works as a diverse voice among the largely white feminism of the novel. Nat’s reactions and growth throughout the book are effortless to read and feel deeply authentic, as she risks her future by publishing the AW comics and works to lift other voices up.

In her wake, Will’s characterisation as a state-school kid on a scholarship sits uncomfortably. Will doesn’t sound like the girls I went to school with, or like someone readers will recognise in their class. This is exacerbated by the depiction of a private school that sometimes comes across less as an Australian school than a re-purposed Downton Abbey with all of the attached classist undertones and distaste for the masses. With the occasional Aussie slang thrown in, this setting is captured in Beth’s line, “What’s the point of going to this school if we still have to mix with the povos?” While keeping an adaptable setting helps Amelia Westlake achieve the difficult nod of being picked up internationally, it also does a disservice to what could have been a critique of an Australia-specific private school culture, shielding it behind a global face. The book’s blurb also edges toward the cliff of misleading plot lines, branding the story as a “heist”. This leaves readers searching for the plot line they missed and overall, blurbs that promise things their book can’t deliver get confusion instead of praise.

But with that said, one thing is still true, and that is that we need to see more Australian YA like this. Erin Gough might not have hit every nail straight on the head, but Amelia Westlake is a funny, touching, and deeply meaningful novel, which doesn’t let queerness define the story of its characters. It also acknowledges the uncomfortable truth that young women need more powerful books like this that acknowledge the severity of the issues young women face. That know that in our current world, we can’t completely protect them – but that we can empower them to speak out. I really enjoyed reading this book, and I’ll barrack for every Australian queer girl story I can, especially the rebel girls. Maybe, with a few more of them, many of us would have felt less alone.

Other notes:

  • My high school is now better known as Glennridge Secondary College by Aunty Donna, which is cooler than a professional footballer going there.
  • WYS NERO stands for ‘Why You Should Not Eat Raw Onions’. My friend was politically ahead of her time.
  • Check out other Golden Inky shortlisted titles here.
  • If you’re keen to take in some more local queer content I recommend checking out Melbourne-based queer history podcast Queer as Fact.

by Sarah Layton

‘White Vanishing’: The Town by Shaun Prescott

The Lit Sponge is written on the lands of the Wurundjeri people and acknowledges them as the traditional owners of this land, which was never ceded. I would also like to pay my respects to their Elders, past and present.

My generation walked to school in the last few years of the Safety House Program. It had been in effect in Victoria since the 80s as a way to combat child abduction—as though children didn’t have more to fear behind the closed doors of their homes and churches. But a broader fear of children snatched from bus stops and shopping centres was easier to talk about, a fear of children vanishing, so we drove neon yellow signs into the turf in front of unfamiliar houses with the faith that our organised community could ward off the unknown.

It made sense to be afraid of disappearing, we always have been.

The trope of white people vanishing into the Australian landscape has filled our country’s collective literature since the 1790s. Even in a built-up urban environment, far from picnics at Hanging Rock, there remains an ever-present anxiety. Ever since we arrived as colonisers and convicts, we have never fully trusted this landscape to care for us. Maybe it’s because we know deep down that we never really subdued it.

These thoughts were close to my mind when I first read Shaun Prescott’s debut novel The Town, which delves deep into this on-going battle in the White Australian psyche.

Its retro, matte cover and colour palette has the feel of a cult classic at the back of a second hand store, but its content is modern Australian myth making.  

The town that Prescott describes is deeply familiar. Reading it, I felt I knew its streets as well as my childhood beat in northern Victoria—an amalgamation of every small town I’ve bought fish and chips in or stopped by on a longer journey through the heartland.

It is also the fullest embodiment I’ve seen of our cultural fear of disappearing.

The Town is a book about annihilation: not the explosive, memorable kind, but […] the annihilation that comes from fading away.

Alex Tighe, Neighbourhood

Alex Tighe, author of Neighbourhood says “The Town is a book about annihilation: not the explosive, memorable kind, but […] the annihilation that comes from fading away.” The citizens of the town have long since stopped trying to meaningfully inhabit the landscape around them, and their repetitive motions of daily life no longer fill this space. As pockets of pavement outside the RSL disappear and great translucent portals fill the Main Street, Prescott reminds us that the town has never really belonged there, and that its citizens’ failing community is not enough to hold it together.

A large-scale vanishing is in process.

While Prescott only subtly engages with colonial narratives, the town, set in the Central West region of New South Wales, is undeniably white. We meet Rob who is ‘enthusiastic about sport’ and The Town’s unnamed protagonist drinks longnecks in the street while avoiding a bashing in the local pub from town bully Steve Sanders. Local history has no importance in local consciousness; more important is an unflinching belief that belonging can only come from a life spent in one community. Even a community whose identity has stagnated. Even a community that is beginning to disappear.

It was this atmosphere that immediately drew me to this book. I was excited to see the magical realism that I’d enjoyed so much in Murakami’s Tokyo reborn in an Australian setting. But if I expected something purely Murakami-esque, I far underrated what The Town had to offer. Streets flanked by Woolworths and Michel’s Patisserie, the Golden Arches and the BP on the road heading out, made the town feel mundane. And yet the atmosphere Prescott builds is subtly horrific. There’s a dread among the townspeople that they are unable to name or act upon, which manifests in moments of extreme violence. As the town vanishes, disappearing people are as accepted and unremarked upon as the boarded-over gaps in the pavement. In this, The Town becomes somewhat of an apocalyptic novel for White Australia’s colonial identity.

As Steve Sanders says, ‘This is how things are going to be from now on. This is how they’re going to stay. History can end, you know. It doesn’t have to keep going […]’

*

Prescott’s writing flows in much the same way as the mysterious piano music Ciara plays on the town radio station, lulling readers into a sense of deeply repetitive—if not slightly unhinged—normality, a small town going through motions that haven’t held meaning for a long time. He also chooses to avoid regular chapters, instead splitting the book into three distinct sections: The Town, The Disappearing Town and The Disappointing City. Without these breaks, this novel might struggle to draw readers through its prose. Instead the feel it has is of one unending thought, making for a compulsive reading experience.

However, while the prose fits with the slowly building atmosphere of inertia and ambivalence it also makes this book difficult to resolve. In fact, there is a deliberate lack of resolution at the end of The Town that Prescott rounds off with a broader fatalistic commentary: that white Australians do not belong anywhere. The people of the city and of the country are ‘united only by the truth that they are there, connected by the dirt they claim to own.’ And for all of our literature’s hyper vigilance and fear, it feels apt that in Prescott’s moment of vanishing we feel nothing but a deep sense of inevitability. 

I do have a couple of gripes with The Town, but they’re largely mitigated by its many strengths. The style of Prescott’s writing is an acquired taste that sits more comfortably as you read further, but its uncompromising slow beat might take a few chapters to adjust to for readers used to fast-paced commercial reading experiences. More frustratingly though, the blurb of The Town bills this story as a race against time, where the townsfolk must find ‘the truth about their collective past’ before the town disappears, a drive that is deliberately missing from its writing style and plot. The Town is hardly the first book to use a misleading punchy sentence to sell more copies, but this assertion is completely discordant with the book’s tone and central question.

This is my first foray into Brow Books’ titles from the last year and The Town has only made me more eager to read more from this publisher and author. It is an experiment in discussing the un-discussable: a fear that we have no place here—something that, even a year on from The Town’s publication, feels increasingly important.

The white Australian community continues to struggle to come to terms with the fragility of our belonging in this colonised country. But in starting to think more about it and critique the dominant myths at the heart of our culture, The Town is a good place to start.

Some final details:

  • If you’d like to read more about Australian literature’s trope of white people disappearing into the landscape, Elspeth Tilley’s book White Vanishing is a good starting point.
  • Ciara’s hoarded cassette tapes are a bit like T.S. Elliot’s ‘These fragments I have shored against our ruins’, and while that’s not super relevant, it’s a cool idea.