As a ubiquitous but under-acknowledged setting in Australian fiction, suburbia affords the detailed representation of everyday, local places and landscapes at specific points in their history, even while adumbrating structures germane to globalised capitalist modernity – features arguably also integral to the novel itself as a morphing yet durable narrative form. Abstract dimensions like these become manifest via individual novels that evoke specific suburban places and geographies. Attending to one such geography, a sector of metropolitan Sydney conventionally known as the ‘North Shore’, this chapter works with four novels, reading them both chronologically and collectively, and proposing that, taken together, they constitute a fictional archive of an affluent, middle-class, urban subregion. Through its tight focus on one specific subregion, the chapter makes the argument that novels can be read not just singly but serially, for their sensory evocation of mundane and ephemeral place, and for their unearthing of that which is routinely suppressed by and within settler-suburbia. The novels from which this chapter forms its putative, fictional archive of Sydney’s North Shore are Christina Stead’s Seven Poor Men of Sydney (1934), Patrick White’s Riders in the Chariot (1961), Jessica Anderson’s The Impersonators (1980) and Fiona McGregor’s Indelible Ink (2010).

Expatriate women writers Henry Handel Richardson and Christina Stead produced field-defining novels of transnational scale and aesthetic ambition that engaged both the matter of Australia and the locations from which they produced and circulated their writing. For Richardson, the provocations of the ‘modern breakthrough’ in Scandinavian literature were central to her work with the realist novel. Stead’s girlhood saturation in gothic fairy-tales, the French novel and the Australian tradition expanded into restless experiments with the novel in the avant-garde circles of Paris (1929–34), before her negotiation of literary debates in France, England and America. The narrative strand of Kunstlerroman in Richardson’s The Fortunes of Richard Mahony (1917–29) and Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children (1940) introduces the developing provincial subject as crucial to the vision of familial and national development, principally in the relation between child and parents. Stead and Richardson produced groundbreaking versions of the Kunstlerroman narrative, disrupting a stable nineteenth-century structure centred on stories about young artistic men. These women writers produced narratives of talented colonial subjects – young colonial children and provincial teenage daughters – situated outside these structures of power, and foregrounded their disruptive perceptions of flawed patriarchal-imperial modes of authority.

‘Vitalities’ describes the creative-destructive energies of the globalised harbour city with its geographically sprawling, culturally diverse suburban mosaic. Yet as ground zero of British invasion in 1788, Sydney is also ‘haunted’. Dispossessive colonisation ghosts not only its colonial archive but can be glimpsed in the city’s landforms and topography. ‘Haunted vitalities’ recur in settler, sojourner and migrant writings that thematize Sydney Harbour’s vertical sublime and the city’s horizontal suburban sprawl. Working from the interwar period to the present, this chapter reads settler texts about Sydney alongside texts by First Nations people. Beyond interwar, harbour-centric works– Christina Stead’s Seven Poor Men of Sydney (1934), Kenneth Slessor’s elegiac poem ‘Five Bells’ (1939) and Eleanor Dark’s novel Waterway (1938)– the spatial frame is widened to Greater Metropolitan Sydney, moving from Eleanor Dark’s reimagining of British invasion in The Timeless Land (1941), to Ruby Langford Ginibi’s memoir Don’t Take Your Love to Town (1988) and Julie Janson’s novel Benevolence (2020). With Gail Jones’s Five Bells (2011), the chapter returns to the harbour to consider how this contemporary novel not only reckons with Sydney’s settler-colonial past through a world literary frame but also attends to the presence and voice of First Nations people.

This chapter considers Christina Stead as a transnational writer, who travelled across continents and through political contexts. It argues that her work is bound together by a “marine aesthetics” and surveys how this plays out in the key phases of writing life: an early period in London and Paris, a middle period in America, and late period, in Europe, England, and Australia. Stead is a political writer of the twentieth century, but also a formal realist whose works continue to challenge the novel genre today.