There is a pleasure for readers in walking streets known from the pages of books. Taking literary walking tours in London, Paris, New York or Dublin, readers conjure the worlds of Woolf, Hemingway, Whitman or Joyce. We move through the streets in the here and now, but also amid characters from other times and versions of the city. Our cities are given back to us, expanded and enriched.
Australian writing, once dominated by European settler bush mythologies, has in recent decades seen a major focus on urban and suburban lives. We know ourselves now through the Melbourne of Tony Birch, Helen Garner and Christos Tsiolkas; the Brisbane of David Malouf, Andrew McGahan and Ellen van Neerven; the Perth of Sally Morgan, Tim Winton and Robert Drewe.
The explosion of urban writing set in the cities and towns of Australia allows us to walk amid history, subcultures and alternative visions of urban places – these other lives of the city mingling with our own.
