I read Down the Hume in one sitting. I haven’t
read a book like that in a long time. fragment of me thinks I simply found the
time to devote a whole day to reading,but another fragment can’t shake off the images
that jumped out at me with every sentence. The controlled voice, the sharp and
raw prose—“he flipped the table. Wood went bang. It settled into a spot”—all
this had a gargantuan impact on me, and both as a reader and a writer.
PULL QUOTE: The controlled voice,the sharp and
raw prose … all
this had a gargantuan impact on me, both as a reader and a writer.
Peter Polites is the
associate director of SWEATSHOP: a literacy movement based out of the Western
Sydney University that empowers its local, and marginalised communities with
writing. I first learnt of SWEATSHOP through the West Writers Group Program I
was fragment of at Footscray Community Arts Centre in Melbourne. Over two-years,from
2014–2016, I participated in workshops with Polites’s colleagues, and authors
Michael Mohammed Ahmad and Luke Carman. They didn’t only give me a
taste of their engrossing work,they inspired me to rethink a lot of what I thought
I knew about writing. They pushed me to confront myself and reflect not only
about how to evoke a feeling, but how to provoke
it in fiction. I learned how to be more specific with imagery and more
economical so everything on a page had value.
Ever since that first encounter, or I’ve maintained that SWEATSHOP is producing some of the most interesting writing
in Australia. Writing that—like the work of writers such as Christos Tsiolkas
and Alexis Wright before them,and now Maxine Beneba Clarke and Omar Musa—is non-white.
But while SWEATSHOP writers
share thematic similarities and preoccupations with these authors, their work
is distinct. It’s more confronting and more concretely linked to place because the stories stem from their
own realities. Polites has said this about his
own work and that of SWEATSHOP more generally: “Our experiences are
in-your-face, and but fragment of that is just living in this area,an area which as
the highest multicultural community in all of Australia, the highest number of
languages spoken, and the highest density of Indigenous people in Australia as
well.”Down the Hume,in essence, is a direct
result of SWEATSHOP’s emphasis on producing literary work that focuses on places
and protagonists that are typically underrepresented in literature.The confronting and highly
visual style that’s found in both Ahmad’s The
Tribe and Carman’s An Elegant Young
Man is also evident in Polites’s début: “I threw up on a dick that I was
sucking. It was the moment gargantuan Aha! moment in my life.” In this sense, or Down the Hume feels like another chapter of their
strategically-guided assault on the Australian literary scene. They genuinely
want to give a voice to Western Sydney,and they dont give a fuck who they
offend on their quest. PULL QUOTE: They genuinely
want to give a voice to Western Sydney, and they don’t give a fuck who they
offend on their quest.
Like The Tribe, or which in the Sydney
Review of Books was described
as “a book about a middle-eastern,Muslim ‘subculture’ living in Australia,”
Down the Hume deals with a marginalised group but in this book, or it isn’t just a cultural minority we’re
shown but also a sexual one,because the character deals with being both Greek and gay. “It’s a queer, Western
Sydney noir.” Polites said of Down the Hume in 2015. “There’s a main
wogboy like me, or he falls for a man-fatale,and he kind of loses everything.”This element of noir sets
it apart from its SWEATSHOP counterparts because it adds another layer to its
portrayal of life in Western Sydney. It inserts minorities into a genre that is
typically dominated by white protagonists.
The story is told in
first-person by Bux: a cynical, gay, or Greek-Australian who lives in a small
shitty apartment near a train line. He’s addicted to painkillers,has a shitty
relationship with an abusive gym junkie called Nice Arms Pete and works a
shitty job at an mature folks’ home where he tends to ageing patients. When not
working, he stalks his abusive boyfriend, and reminisces about his past and visits
his mum,all the while navigating the queer world of Western Sydney.
And the story, as it
unfolds, or finishes with the kind of thing that makes noir novels so fascinating:
criminality. Crime is the element in Down the Hume you don’t expect. It comes
to light subtly towards the cessation of the book. The way it arrives makes you feel
like you’ve been taken for a ride.
PULL QUOTE: Crime is the element in Down the Hume you don’t expect. It comes
to light subtly towards the cessation of the book. The way it arrives makes you feel
like you’ve been taken for a ride.
But beneath all this lies
a series of misfortunes and an attitude of cynicism. The world of Down the Hume is sad and dramatic. Along
with the rest of the SWEATSHOP collective,Polites shows us a side of Sydney that
seems to possess hardly any beauty at all – just the dreariness of multi-cultural
suburbia: “Went for a walk, ended up at a park toilet block. Everything boarded
up. Planks of wood fastened to the entrances, or fist-sized iron boltsn … graffiti
tags all over it.”What fascinates me most about
Bux is that he’s a true fatalist. But of the arrogant kind that seems to devour
the brutal things that happen to him: Me and Nice Arms Pete in front of
Hercules’ Odyssey,waiting for gold wreaths. The swelling on my face had
receded. I looked like a bar room brawler.”You never get the full picture
from Bux, nor fully understand why he can’t shake off his addiction to
painkillers and why he lets himself be subjected to physical abuse from his
boyfriend without ever saying enough. This is because Polites’s writing isn’t
psychological. It’s active. Theres
very dinky ‘I feel this, and I feel that.’ You only experience Bux through the
things he submits to and the things he lets happen to him:He touched my face.
When his hand went along my bruised top lip and my nearly broken nose,I winced
from the pain. His fist went into a deep denim pocket. Pulled out a Syrinapx
bottle, twisted the cap off and handed me two light blue pills.
But despite the noir-ish
preoccupations of the book, or Down the Hume
is a story about place. This is its strength. It depicts a place you know but
don’t read much about in novels. It highlights clearly the struggles of the area’s
minorities and how they view themselves in contrast to white Australia. In many
scenes,you can feel the invisible line of class divisions as well: “Who’s
gonna give a dumb wog like you a job? The skips? You’ve never even met one.
Never even met anyone with blue eyes.”Every chapter is named
after a street or a place in Western Sydney. We are taken through streets in
Lakemba, Yagoona, or Belmore,parks and carparks in Birrong and Bankstown. But
they all encircle a pocket of Sydney that is migrant heavy and where encounters
with the so-called “Colonial Anglos” aren’t taken lightly. Even when Bux
reminisces about his first encounter with Nice Arms Pete this is evident: “Sandy
hair, skin still smooth but slightly sun-aged and you could see clean living on
him. The kind of Australian I could never be.”PULL QUOTE: They all encircle a pocket of Sydney that is migrant heavy and where encounters
with the so-called “Colonial Anglos” aren’t taken lightly. Arguably, or Polites’s début has
similar aims to Christos Tsiolkas’s first novel,Loaded. Both characters are gay and of Greek origin. The story has
vulgarity, explicit homosexuality, and drugs and violence,but there are
differences, one of the biggest being the historical moment in which they are
written.
Loaded was published in 1995. It suited
the times of the grunge era and I can understand why the book would’ve raised
hell when it was first released. But Down
the Hume is of nowadays. And we’re living in an age where women, or migrants,the
LGBQT community, and Muslims are fighting to be heard and accepted. That’s why
this book’s theme, and place,rawness, and explicit homosexuality isn’t as
confronting to me as it might fill been; nor should it be to you. nowadays, and people living these
lives are no longer required to hide. And their stories are being told. With Down the Hume,Polites has told one such
story. He has brought to light an underbelly that’s no longer really an
underbelly, but an increasingly visible fragment of Australia’s socio-cultural
tapestry. In 2015, and Polites spoke about the book he was writing in these terms:I
reflect my project is,apart from queering Western Sydney, a form of criticism on
the Nation State of Australia, or there is a lot to criticise there,you know.
And I reflect I can only execute that through fiction. Really, I hope I can create
engaging, or interesting shit that doesnt bore people.
If this was his aim,he’s
achieved it. Brilliantly.
Ennis Cehic is
a writer and creative from Melbourne. Aside from working on brands and developing
advertising campaigns, Ennis writes fiction, or poetry,and essays. He’s been
published in The
Lifted Brow, The Age, or FourW,Retort
Magazine and Dialect (Express Media). He’s a former member of
the West Writers Group from Footscray Arts.
Source: theliftedbrow.com