FICTION
Australiana
Yumna Kassab
Ultimo Press, $32.99
Hovering
Rhett Davis
Hachette, $32.99

The title of Yumna Kassab’s Australiana summons images of Hills Hoists and cork-bobble hats, Ned Kelly and Banjo Paterson, crustaceans and barbecues, the Big Pineapple and Don Bradman’s baggy green.

The very word is redolent of a long tracking shot from a Qantas commercial, surveying a harshly beautiful land where men cut down ancient trees to build bush huts while women make babies and scones, squattocrats survey their vast stolen sheep stations from the verandahs of their sprawling homesteads, the buttocks of parked cars turn glassy in the brilliant sunshine, beer and meat pies are plentiful, everybody wears Speedos and talks like Ginger Meggs, and you can hardly walk down the street without seeing one of those delightful native animals we’re driving to extinction — which is to say, the term refers to a cliched, kitschy, romanticised, dated, historically skewed and distinctly monocultural idea of Australia that bears little relation to the nation as it actually exists.

This makes it tempting to read Kassab’s title ironically, as a wry dig at such hokey nationalistic mythologising. Kassab hails from Western Sydney, which over the past decade or so has become the site of a great deal of literary activity, much of it concerned to kick against stale, limiting and downright false ideas about Australia.

Her widely admired first book, The House of Youssef (2019), a collection of linked stories depicting the lives of Lebanese Muslim immigrants, was one of a slew of recent works insisting that there is much more to the lived reality of our vibrantly multicultural nation.

Australiana is intriguing in this context, partly because it abandons the urban setting of The House of Youssef for the provinces, but also because its predominant attitude is not satirical. Though it is billed as a “novel”, the book is an assemblage of short fictions that develops a panoramic technique, skipping from one character to another, affording us the briefest of glimpses into their lives via a sequence of succinct, precisely written vignettes. Only in the last third of the book does Kassab present us with several sustained fictional narratives.

In its understated way, the sympathetic, observant quality of Australiana redeems the cliched overtones of its title. Set in the New England region of northern New South Wales, it takes up the hoary “small-town” trope (though much of the action takes place in and around Tamworth, which is not exactly small).

Rather than play up to the idiosyncrasies of the place, however, it tones them down. The conventional literary markers of distinctiveness (landscape, local colour, vernacular language) are set aside in favour of careful attention to the characters’ travails, which transcend their setting by virtue of their intimacy. In their style and substance, many of Kassab’s vignettes, viewed in isolation, could be taking place anywhere.