Andrew McGahan - Notes from Pig City

Tribute to Andrew McGahan, Brisbane Writers Festival

Miscellaneous / September 30, 2019 / 9 minutes of reading

I’ve said for a long time that Praise was to Brisbane literature what the Saints’ album (I’m) Stranded was to music. In fact, I first made this analogy on the last page of my first book Pig City, a book in which I quoted Andrew at several key points.

Why the comparison to Stranded? It seems pretty obvious to me. The rawness. A voice that blew away all the surrounding bullshit – the boredom and stasis and sweat of Brisbane – with short, bullet-tipped sentences.

Demolition girls, nights in Venice. Paralytic tonight, Pig City tomorrow.

Praise described a town I recognised, but hadn’t been in for very long. I got here on Christmas Eve of 1986 on a Greyhound bus. It took a while to find my feet, and my way around. On the surface, there didn’t seem to be much happening. Underneath it was a different story.

Praise is a bit like that, too. There wasn’t much of a plot, but all the main characters seemed to be in various stages of losing it. That was a good metaphor for Brisbane around that time. Those characters and Andrew’s language were what gave his debut its narrative propulsion.… Read more..

Tribute to Andrew McGahan, Brisbane Writers Festival Read More »

Andrew McGahan 1966-2019

If you grew up in Brisbane in the 1970s and 1980s, Praise, the debut novel by Andrew McGahan, was to the city’s literature what the Saints’ (I’m) Stranded was to music. Appearing in 1992, when it won the Vogel award for best unpublished manuscript, it captured the town’s torpor and the ambivalence of its inhabitants better than any book since David Malouf’s Johnno.

But whereas Malouf luxuriated in detailed poetic descriptions and may have been the first writer to describe Brisbane as a “big country town” (and Johnno moved at about the same pace), Praise was full of pent-up energy. A classic of Australian dirty realism, it’s a novel in which not a lot happens – but like Brisbane itself, all the action is happening beneath the banal facade, fuelled by frustration and repressed rage.

“Look at this city,” complains one of its minor characters, on holiday from a bigger, brighter world. “There’s nothing happening. There’s no one on the streets. How can you stand it?” Gordon (whose very name is used as a metaphor for the town’s plainness) replies that things are happening: “You just have to look a little harder. At least no one bothers you. There’s worse places than Brisbane.”… Read more..