Western Sydney

‘When my collection, An Elegant Young Man came out, I think it virtually sent me around the bend.’

In November 2016, Michael Mohammed Ahmad published an essay in the Sydney Review of Books titled ‘Lebs and Punchbowl Prison’….

Introduction Six Degrees from the City is a podcast about writing in Western Sydney, hosted by the writer and critic…

Noir has long offered a space for airing working-class grievances, and for smuggling in queer and feminist subtexts. What, then, does noir do for contemporary Western Sydney, and what can it do for the children of migrants and working-class queers in Australia?

‘Going back and living in South-West Sydney is very much in keeping with the way I have this very fluid relationship with Bankstown, with the Western Suburbs, I’m part of it but also not part of it too.’

In Felicity Castagna’s No More Boats, we are repeatedly reminded that the novel’s locale, Parramatta, marks the shifting aqueous site in Sydney’s Western suburban landscape where ‘saltwater meets fresh’. Historically, this is the place where Australia’s early colonial explorers, travelling up the Parramatta River from Sydney Cove in 1788, could take their boats no further. It is also one of numerous sites of resistance to European invasion by the Aboriginal warrior, Pemulwuy. In Castagna’s hands, this rich and multi-layered history of place is embodied in the topography of the Parramatta River and its intricate estuarine environment, creating a wonderfully nuanced metaphor.

‘That’s how I write: from place. And it’s the place itself that drives who the characters become, and how the narrative shapes itself.’

It’s a truism about suburbia that it’s defined by the distance between work and home. But that distance, for me, became a conceptual distance, and artistic distance, one that I thought I’d like to try and overcome somehow.

If you listen, self-representation in our Western Sydney communities sounds like this: Talofa! Bula! Mālō ē lelei! Aloha! Sole! Cuz! Uce! Uso! Toko! Skuxx Deluxx!

‘In this essay, I will tell you about the ‘was once’ generation: my generation of young men at Punchbowl Boys High School who the teachers, politicians, community leaders, parents, and local law enforcement decided needed to be locked up, for the safety of our community and for our own safety. I will also tell you about the journalists and filmmakers who believed we needed to be put on the front pages of the newspapers and on prime-time television. Who were we? The scholars and academics will tell you we were working class and underclass Australian Muslim males from Arabic-speaking backgrounds, but on the streets of Western Sydney we went by another name – Lebs.’