Fiona Kelly McGregor

I am writing this essay out of frustration that few people understand the daily working lives of artists and writers and persist in dreamily thinking that our jobs are all dreamy thinking.

Working Hot is a novel about dykes in Sydney, written with an experimental verve that still dazzles today. Author Mary Fallon was 38 when she published it. I was 23, writing short fiction, working in Abbey’s Bookshop to pay the rent, and unsure of my sexuality. I remember reading The Kinsey Report out the back during lunch hour and being blown away by all the gay sex in 1950s USA. If, I calculated, there was the proverbial 10 per cent back then, surely now there were that many more. Indeed, in late 1980s Sydney, it didn’t take long to find sexy dykes, for this was the beginning of an explosion of queer female performativity in bars and at parties, overtly and often abjectly sexual, that has never abated, despite myriad oppressive forces. What the wildest girls did on stage infected our entire community, making Sydney one of the dirtiest, dykiest places on earth, if not the.

Watch the sun set on the most oppressively hot days, when the western plains trap pollution over the city and the sun pulses through a fierce chemical red. The textile district lingers in cheap clothing stores and tiny back lane shops that embroider patches or sharpen scissors. Greenfields warehouse, a four-storey paradise of fabric and haberdashery, has barely changed since opening over sixty years ago. From my bedsit on the edge of Paddington ($33 pw), I walked to the Trade Union Club on Foveaux Street, alto sax slung over my shoulder.

Iris reconsiders our official, public-record history – its absences and silences, its misshapings and misrecognitions. And it also offers a reconsideration of a woman whose position within this history is complicated, doubly, by her queerness.

‘Buried Not Dead is a study in the forces that can both create the conditions for art and cultural flourishing, as well as the conditions for its inhibition and decline.’

The work of a novelist is hard, menial and often dull work. Despite this, the work of a novelist at least cuts against the dominant temporalities of work. Through a queer commitment to craft, and by showing us this process in A Novel Idea, McGregor gets us to think harder about what drudgery means, not only for her and her work, or even artists and cultural workers more generally, but for any life and any work.