Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/1959.11/14467
Title: An End to the Way: Pulp Becomes Classic Down-Under
Contributor(s): Fisher, Jeremy  (author)
Publication Date: 2013
Handle Link: https://hdl.handle.net/1959.11/14467
Abstract: In Australia, all of which lies south of the Equator, the summer break is between November and February and covers Christmas and New Year. These holidays and the warm weather combine to slow life down. Nothing much happens in Australia in January. Everyone is in a holiday mood. The country parties. In the summer of 1974, when I was nineteen years old, my lover and I went on a vacation. I was on break from university, and my lover had taken leave from his job as a psychiatric nurse. We'd decided we would travel north from our home in Sydney, in the state of New South Wales, to Queensland, one of two Australian states named after Victoria, whose successors still take their place as Australia's constitutional monarch. Victoria's prurient influence looms large in Australia; she was still queen (for another 22 days) when Australia became a nation on January 1, 1901. Since we had the usual family commitments for Christmas, my lover and I proposed to set out for Queensland after New Year's Day. I hadn't been there since I was a young boy, when my family lived in a tropical town just south of the state border. My lover had never been that far north. He had grown up in Wollongong, an industrial city eighty miles south of Sydney. (Sydney, in turn, is about 640 miles south of Brisbane, which is the capital of and the biggest city in Queensland.) Being the age we were, we didn't plan our trip in much detail. We simply bought second-class train seats for Brisbane and traveled north overnight. The train, then and now, takes about seventeen hours to make its way from Sydney's Central to Brisbane's Roma Street station. We had to sit up all the way, since we were in second class. Traveling that way wasn't much fun, we decided as we rested in our dingy Brisbane hotel after our arrival. We spent a day or two in hot, muggy, and rather dull Brisbane; then, again without much thought or reasoning, we booked a train farther north to Cairns. We again booked second-class seats because we saw that the train left Roma Street at 10:00 a.m. and arrived in Cairns at 2:30 p.m. We were so green we didn't realize that the 2:30 p.m. was actually two days after the train left Brisbane, as the distance between Brisbane and Cairns is almost twice that from Sydney. But as we looked once more at our timetable, this became clear to us about half an hour after we left Brisbane. We didn't want to spend two nights sitting up, so we grabbed our bags and alighted from the train at the next stop.
Publication Type: Book Chapter
Source of Publication: 1960s Gay Pulp Fiction: The Misplaced Heritage, p. 292-311
Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
Place of Publication: Amherst, United States of America
ISBN: 9781625340443
9781625340450
Fields of Research (FoR) 2008: 200502 Australian Literature (excl Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Literature)
Fields of Research (FoR) 2020: 470502 Australian literature (excl. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander literature)
Socio-Economic Objective (SEO) 2008: 950203 Languages and Literature
Socio-Economic Objective (SEO) 2020: 130203 Literature
HERDC Category Description: B1 Chapter in a Scholarly Book
Publisher/associated links: http://trove.nla.gov.au/version/201634759
Series Name: Studies in Print Culture and the History of the Book
Editor: Editor(s): Drewey Wayne Gunn and Jaime Parker
Appears in Collections:Book Chapter
School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences

Files in This Item:
3 files
File Description SizeFormat 
Show full item record

Page view(s)

1,088
checked on Aug 20, 2023
Google Media

Google ScholarTM

Check


Items in Research UNE are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.