Early birds worm their way through the pre-dawn murk. A bakery worker braids the day’s doughy ropes, deep in the heartland of the family pullapart. The distant M1’s thrum gathers intensity, drawing raw torque from garage after garage lined up along the kerbless verge of civilisation. Early-a.m. joggers, wheezing in the interpretive-panelled wetlands, hooked on true crime, scan the reflected mass of paperbarks for bodies surfaced overnight. Drive-thru coffee queues cross over and clog the main arterial. Eventually, the first rays of sunshine begin their transit, breaking up the morning fog, drip-feeding photovoltaic kilowatts into the grid until at last the boat-riddled streetscapes of our coastal centres’ outer reaches have materialised before us.
The question is, what exactly are we looking at?
Not the familiar image of suburbia that echoes through our films and literature. The mass commuter exodus is no longer comprised of necktied, behatted men. The scores of children bussed off into the humming yellow dawn remain, but their image is a little less composed. And where are these legions of women left to their devices, forming intimate relationships with their appliances? These are the outmoded images and associations of postwar marketers tasked with retailing the Australian (fashioned after the American) Dream—picture postcards sticky with As-Seen-On-TV 1950s nostalgia. How they’ve endured the long-running reality of suburban life in Australia is quite the mystery.
Truth is, the suburbs where large numbers of Australians can afford to rent and buy (five million of us live in ‘the fast-growing suburbs on the outskirts of our capital cities’) never really resembled the cliché. Furthermore, the suburbs themselves have spent a hundred years spreading out into furrows and footholds up and down this continent’s paradoxically immeasurable and yet precisely measured and parcelled-out coastline. In doing so, large numbers of our urbs have become distinctly more ex- than sub-. The distinction, paraphrasing the relevant entry from WikiDiff.com, is this: a suburb is of the city, whereas an exurb is outside it. So while the exurban landscape still has its picket fences and perfect lawns, out here in fringeworld these symbols of conformity are juxtaposed against the radical untidiness of the scrub, the romantic decline of publicly neglected parklands and footpaths and the crocodile-cracked flesh of the endless road system’s furthest terminuses.
This is a world of two-, three-, even four-car families. Of regional eisteddfods and muted trumpet lessons. A place of churchyardless megachurches serviced by industrial-scale memorial parks way beyond the populated parts of our postcodes. A network of familial nodes separated by six degrees, six-foot fences and several hundred square metres of dandelion-riddled buffalo cooch. Facebook republics ruled over by a hyperlocal democracy whose two core functions are the name-shaming of dog-dirt deserters and the informal preselection of volunteer moderators as independent candidates for local elections.
To think of these as suburbs is to miss a crucial point of disconnection: the tyranny of distance. Even if the kids can catch a bus (or two, or three) to the city or urban centre, the cost in time and money is a significant disincentive. Even if the parents can catch a train to work, they probably won’t, because navigating the regional commuter car-park is often as bad as the freeway. This is a question of accessibility. Other distinctions could be made in terms of liveability, walkability, sociability, scalability and so on, but the radical break between suburban myth and exurban reality isn’t a question of a different -abilities. Like many questions of myth versus reality, it’s a matter of flatness versus roughness. When the mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot wrote that ‘clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth’,i he might have added: the places where people live are never flat, nor uncomplicated.
The image that arises from the suburban myth—the gated community, the named estate, the master-planned lifestyle community—is a complete edifice. Fulsome and smooth. Cul-de-sacs collapsed to their most efficient topologies to extract maximum yield; whole hillsides, valleys and plains of efficiently tessellated 400-square-metre blocks serviced by efficiently co-located trunk infrastructure. The exurban landscape, by contrast, is radically incomplete. These are places defined by a surfeit of space between their parts, most of which appears unfinished and untidily organic. I hesitate to reach for the overused descriptor ‘liminal’, or to characterise the between-spaces as ‘uncolonised’ patches; they aren’t empty, given the artefacts they contain, or untouched, given that they’re anything but, and neither are they abandoned, having never been loved, nor forgotten, having never been given a single thought.
Together these fractal gaps account for the gross negative space between houses and businesses—vacant lots and pocket parks, forgotten testamentaries, land-banked foreign investments, easements, nature reserves, fire breaks and contaminated sites of former industry, e.g. ex-landfills and quarries. This is the nucleic emptiness that gives the landscape its ultimate form, and the site where space is opened up for radical divergences from suburban norms. At one end of the spectrum these places provide desire-paths for dog walkers, vaping grounds for tweens. At the other extreme, they are backdrops for illicit sexual encounters, well-hidden clearings for covert tent settlements. Here the archaeology of the exurbs expresses itself in bags of dogshit tied to tree branches, vape cartridges, used condoms, empty tins and old fire drums. Most of the good burghers who live nearby will never pass through these contingent spaces, but those who do may come to understand, as they flee from one of several varieties of aggressive swooping birds, the extent of their departure from persistent notions of suburbia.
It’s not just the utopian vision of a crisp white suburbia that’s out of date. Even well-trodden inversions of the template have become clichés in their own right. From The Stepford Wives to Blue Velvet and more recently Don’t Worry Darling, writers and filmmakers have been possessed by the notion that something funky lurks beneath the suburbs’ spotless façade. But here in the Australian exurbs, there’s been no great effort to keep the underbelly covered. Like the proverbial shirtless neighbour’s protuberant midsection, the exurban underbelly sits right out in the open for everyone to see. Unemployment lives here. Alcoholism is rife. Depression is real. In the low-doc mortgage belt or the not-quite-affordable rent-o-sphere, there’s no denying disadvantage can compound faster than interest. That the people here are real people, and therefore imperfect, is no secret, let alone a hidden one.
When the truly gruesome facts of life come to bear, as they do from time to time in all cities, suburbs and rural areas, the news trucks come rolling down avenues ribbed with council-grade tibouchinas. Eyewitnesses emerge. Those responsible for the latest local atrocity are described by neighbours as having kept to themselves. In a media landscape that—to be optimistic, quite rightly; to be pessimistic, rather sensationally—is obsessed with domestic violence, there’s no way this wide a band of Australian domestic life is exempt from the glare of the spotlight. Which is not to say that unseemliness is any more likely here, just that there are fewer illusions to shatter when something goes wrong. There’s an inherent gritty realism in the true image of the exurbs, and almost none of the suburban cliché’s bright veneer.
If there is some sinister force behind the surface here, it’s not what happens between the walls or out in the open of the in-between spaces. In my ideal exurban literature, these are mere texture. The latent threat lies in what’s coming down the freeway—the very image of bland unending suburbia itself. The wheels of capital that threaten to steamroll the last council-unapproved patios and infill the quarter-acre lots and agistments with heat-island architecture. Land-bankers who cash their investments at the top of the market and hand over our emptiness to master-planners, developers, franchisees. Forces that conspire to construct their outdated image of suburban life, ignorant of its failure as an organising image in the lives of suburban people.
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If our ever-expanding and infilling exurbs are to be reimagined in film and literature, it’s probably safest to leave the whole suburban myth behind, even as a departure point. The wide-open streets and incomplete environs of real exurbia provide a much fresher, more open and realistic setting for the story of our prevailing alienation, not from the means of production—after all, the last vestiges of Australian industry are just around the corner in vast decaying estates of their own—but from the means of human communion. The subdivided landscape has become, in many ways, a shared site of isolation—one of the core paradoxes of our age, and something our literature and film will inevitably have to reckon with.
Perhaps it’s an asinine observation, but the more connected we are to our devices, the less we are to each other—a condition exacerbated by the COVID-19 lockdowns that normalised hermeticism and decentralised a good percentage of our present forms of productive labour. In my patch of exurbia alone we’ve got an IT support technician working on retainer for a tech startup whose offshore recruitment division took the pandemic as an opportunity to explore ‘the collaborative dimensionalities of decentralised work’. There’s a precariously contracted typist whose inner-city office never reopened, whose job quietly morphed into a work-from-home gig training the very AI system that will inevitably sublimate the value of their labour, and a media and communications consultant whose communications are increasingly mediated through channels that are rapidly diversifying and getting themselves tangled up like next door’s empty lot’s lantana.
At least, that’s who I imagine is out there beneath all these spaced-out Colorbond roofs—to be completely honest, I don’t know my neighbours. I’ve spent a lot of time at the computer, working. I’ve spent a lot of time in the backyard listening to the birds, getting to know their names, songs and habits—honeyeater, mina, currawong, and my favourite, the spangled drongo. I’ve been listening to a distant neighbour-child practicing trombone in their parents’ wardrobe. I’ve been reading the interpretive signs, walking the dog and nodding politely to passers-by along the wetland trails.
Sitting at my desk, looking out through the Crimsafe mesh across the nutgrass and thistles that break up my ideal image of a perfect lawn, I spot a mackerel tabby slinking along the fenceline like a tightrope. Out on the road a ginger cat is sunning itself on the bitumen. A tortoiseshell licks its anus on the neighbour’s patio, one rear leg saluting the parade of satellites and space junk sailing invisibly beyond the troposphere. If the exurbs belong to anyone, it’s our cats. The men and women are all at work, the children are at school, even the dogs are in daycare. Some of us, unbeknownst to each other, are still working from home, and as the sun slides behind the hodgepodge rows of HardiPlank homes, some of us are even beginning to write exurbia into our poems.
i Benoît Mandelbrot, The Fractal Geometry of Nature, New York:W.H. Freeman & Co., 1982.