Death in Brunswick
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BOYD OXLADE
was born in Sydney, and educated by the Jesuits in Ireland and at Xavier College, Melbourne. While at boarding school he developed a love of reading and began to write fiction.
Oxlade attended Monash University in Melbourne during the heady years of student protests, then lived in Carltonâfor a time in a converted chicken shedâbefore the suburb became gentrified. He worked occasionally as a cook and as a gravedigger, but was mostly on the dole: once for nine years straight.
Hoping in vain to make some money, Oxlade wrote
Death in Brunswick.
It was published by Heinemann in 1987 and acclaimed for its finely tuned comic depiction of Melbourne's ethnically diverse northern suburbs.
He co-wrote the screenplay for a film adaptation of the novel with the director John Ruane. Released in 1991, the movie starred Sam Neill, Zoe Carides and John Clarke, and became a cult hit. Its grave-digging scene remains one of the most famous moments in Australian cinema.
Oxlade subsequently wrote screenplays and stories, âmostly with no success'. He has had poems published in overseas magazines, and has returned to work on a project called âRon Elms, the Flying Butcher of Alamein'.
SHANE MALONEY
is the author of the award-winning and much-loved Murray Whelan seriesâ
Stiff, The Brush-Off, Nice Try, The Big Ask, Something Fishy
and
Sucked In
âwhich is characterised by a strong sense of humour, and an acute sense of Melbourne's political and cultural nuances. He has been published in the UK, Germany, France, Britain, Japan, Finland and the US.
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The Text Publishing Company
Swann House
22 William Street
Melbourne Victoria 3000
Australia
Copyright © Boyd Oxlade 1987
Introduction copyright © Shane Maloney 2012
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
First published by William Heinemann Australia 1987
This edition published by The Text Publishing Company 2012
Cover design by WH Chong
Page design by Text
Typeset by Midland Typesetters
Primary print ISBN: 9781922079800
Ebook ISBN: 9781922148001
Author: Oxlade, Boyd.
Title: Death in Brunswick / by Boyd Oxlade;
introduction by Shane Maloney. Series: Text classics.
Other Authors/Contributors: Maloney, Shane.
Dewey Number: A823.3
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CONTENTS
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Grave Laughter
by Shane Maloney
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IN 1980, give or take, I was a booking agent in the music business, pitching rock bands to a circuit of Melbourne's inner-city pubs and outer-suburban beer barns. The bands were forever changing their names or breaking up, the money was terrible, the venues were fleapits and the promoters were vile. It was great.
The largest and most prestigious venue in the inner north was Bombay Rock, a former wedding reception centre on Sydney Road just past the Brunswick Town Hall. The Bombay's blank façade was painted black and you entered through a side street, up a flight of bare concrete stairs. The door was tended by bouncers only recently descended from the trees. Raised by pit bulls and selected for their stupidity, violence and eagerness to take offence, they took great pleasure in pitching luckless punters down the stairs headfirst like ballistic missiles. In those days, there was nothing hip about Brunswick.
Licensing regulations dictated that alcohol could only be served if accompanied by a substantial meal, so the punters got a ticket entitling them to choose either an all-leather dim-sim or a wedge of mystery pizza from a bain-marie at the bar. The food was cooked eight weeks in advance and lit like a crime scene. You had to be blind drunk or starving, or both, to go anywhere near it. But the crowd wasn't there for the cuisine and the joint was usually packed.
When I wasn't selling rock bands I occasionally took a drink at certain watering holes in the FitzCarlton vicinity, an area not yet entirely gentrified. Boyd Oxlade drank in some of the same places. He had a mop of black hair, the demeanour of a private schoolboy going to seed, a watchful eye and a sarcastic turn of phrase. He made for convivially misanthropic conversation over a glass or three. Apart from that, I knew nothing about him. If he had literary ambitions, he kept them under his coaster.
Eventually pub rock was killed by stand-up comedy, poker machines and food poisoning. I found other work, got older and moved into Brunswickâa suburb still industrial, ugly and woggy enough to be affordable. Boyd Oxlade drifted off my radar.
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Death in Brunswick
appeared in 1987, as if out of nowhere. Boyd Oxlade had been hiding his light. Set in a recognisable recent past, the novel was vivid and raffish and mordantly funny. It attracted an immediate readership. Its production for the screen seemed both natural and inevitable, and a film adaptation was released in 1991. Starring Sam Neill, Zoe Carides and John Clarke, it became the
Death in Brunswick
that most people know. The corpse-stomping scene in the graveyard remains one of the most darkly comic moments in Australian cinema, but an add-on happy ending took the sharper edge off the book.
The novel's resurrection as a Text Classic provides an opportunity for new readers to go slumming and old readers to reacquaint themselves with the flaccid Carl, one of the most unlikely protagonists in Australian literature. The title alone is worth the price of admission. Forget Venice, it declares. Step aside Mann and Mahler, Visconti and Bogarde. Here is a book primed to take the micky.
At thirty-seven, Carl is a washed-out barfly-bohemian, a man whose never-promising future is well behind himâalong with a lesbian wife and their child. He can still squeeze into skinny black jeans, but his hairline is retreating and fiasco haunts his loins. At the fag end of his prospects, he slaves three days a week as the cook at a Brunswick music club called The Marqueeâinstantly recognisable as Bombay Rockâand gets around, like Nora in Helen Garner's
Monkey Grip,
on an old pushbike, albeit with considerably less pleasure.
His only friend, the staunchly proletarian Dave, is a gravedigger at Coburg Cemetery with a monstrously PC shrew of a wife. Carl lusts after a sassy seventeen-year-old Greek barmaid at the club, Sophie, and owes Turkish Mustapha, his kitchen hand, money for drugs. His boss, Yanni, is a fat suck and the thuggish bouncers terrorise him. Perennially hungover and broke, Carl invites his mother to stay for a couple of weeks while she recuperates from a heart attack. She chainsmokes and plays a recording of Mahler over and over again. He resents her and steals her medication.
Carl's Brunswick is a purgatory of shoddy houses inhabited by surly, vaguely menacing immigrants. It swelters in the summer heat, empty cans rattling along its bluestone gutters. Mahler's Fifth drones in Carl's ears, and in the greasy claustrophobia of the club kitchen true romance is a handjob against the coolroom door. Carl dreams of escape to the kind of comfortable middle-class life he already despises. Only when he hits rock bottom does his luck begin to change.
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He looked at Sophie again.
My God!
He heard not so much the bat squeak of sexuality as a low cockatoo's shriek. She looked so young and healthy.
Maybe I...
She had finished the pots and was leaning against the sink; she wore his short apron. He saw her in profile, a very Greek profile, he thought; her round, soft face was dominated by a strong hooked nose.
Jesus, what a conk!
It was a bit intimidating, really.
But what about that pouter-pigeon chestâthat big shapely bumâthe uniformâeven the apronâGod, she looks like something out of one of those magazines!
He felt predatoryâlike that well-known molester of young Greek girls, Lord Byron. However, not having the social advantages of that aristocratic harasser, he put a note of special appeal into his voice:
âSophie, listen, go and get us another drink, will you? A double, ay?'
She smiled.
God, look at those teeth.
He thought of his own: twenty-eight left and sore gums.
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In the 1970s Helen Garner blazed a literary trail through an inner-urban milieu of sexual politics, drugs and drift. Boyd Oxlade's Brunswick lies a bit further down that trail, just a few years on. The low life was becoming a rite of passage and a new generation of writers stuck their heads in the bucket. By the time Andrew McGahan's
Praise
appeared in 1992 they were calling it Dirty Realism.
Brunswick is much changed since Boyd Oxlade invoked its name as an ironic counterpoint to a more famous book, a more redolent setting. The factories are gone, the houses cost a small fortune, the pizza is thin-crust artisanal and only the faintest traces remain of the feminist graffiti. But scratch beneath the hipster bars and snazzy apartment blocks and you will find, not far below the surface, that
Death in Brunswick
still haunts the placeâconniving, paranoid and laughing grimly up its sleeve.
