The 2019 federal election result confirmed that housing prices, upward mobility, tax cuts, and limited immigration are powerful motivators for Australian voters. Peter Polites’s second novel, The Pillars, with its themes of social and material advancement in Sydney’s western suburbs, captures this spirit of the time perfectly. Pano, the main character, studies people – those better off, more favoured, those who thrive and make it look easy – and wants a better life for himself. Tertiary educated and an avid observer, Pano has studied the habits, codes, dress, and attitudes that will disguise his second-generation Greek migrant status. He knows how to read a room and knows the room is always reading him, right down to his choice of labels, how he grooms himself and his vocabulary.

A struggling writer and poet, Pano has left his Bankstown roots to live in the new, cookie-cut suburb of Pemulwuy in western Sydney. The houses are identical; the gardens are sparse; the roads have no potholes; neighbours rarely meet. Named after an Eora man, the historical Pemulwuy was a warrior in Australia’s bloody but unrecognised frontier wars. Insights into Australia’s complex history abound in the novel and include the dispossession of the owners of the land, ruthless land speculation, bushranger hangings, waves of immigration, interclass struggles, and a constantly shifting palette of faiths, colours, and social conventions.

Pemulwuy is a place of aspiration, a community gated not by walls but by the force of will of its homeowners to keep property values high. It is a suburb where Australians escaping their class and second-generation migrants escaping their families dream of social advancement and erase inconvenient facts from their past. Here, Pano can maintain his mask as an aspirational urban gay, while spying on residents in their houses at night.

As a teenager, I was a Greek tragedy tragic. While my friends had crushes on George Michael and Boy George (in retrospect, not the most promis­ing objects of desire), I was crushing on Sophocles. It was 1983: shaggy perms, rolled-down leg warmers, cheap syn­thetic leggings, winklepickers, and a school Portakabin that reeked of fumes from the paraffin heater. It was a miserable Tuesday in January, with nothing but three more months of winter and a new set text to look forward to. The text was Sophocles’ Electra.

We began without much enthusiasm. Our hennaed, green eye shadow-wearing, CND-lapelled teacher allo­cated parts and we started to read. Frankly, it was dull: two blokes talking about a shrine to some god and one of them being like an old racehorse, all conveyed in the toneless nasal drone of adolescent girls with runny noses. But then, something extraordinary happened. At line eighty-two, a cry from inside the palace – a woman’s cry, one of total pain that the men ignore as they turn their backs and walk away. For the next 800 lines we live with the echo of that cry, entering the world of women and words, of pas­sion and hatred and desire and agony and humiliation and defiance and despair and yet more unending pain.

And that was it; I was smitten. I had fallen for Sopho­cles’ Electra, the twisted, degraded, haggard remnant of the most dysfunctional of all families in Greek mythology – a character with such an extraordinary ability to seize the whole expanse of being that she stole my passions whole.

I was in love, I was obsessed, and I had to do everything in my power to make that love requited. So I learnt Greek every Saturday morning with our retired vicar, devoured books on acting, and wrote letters to the artistic directors of the Royal Shakespeare Company and National Theatre begging them to program the play. Three years later, I found myself studying Classics at Cambridge, still trying to make a go of a relationship with my beloved.

In January 1989, my wishes, I thought, came true. The RSC was to do Electra, with Deborah Warner directing and Fiona Shaw playing the role. I was already a fan of both: I’d regularly binged on RSC productions at Stratford, staying at the youth hostel and hanging around the stage door to talk to my acting idols (Fiona included). I had been turned into a gibbering mess by Warner’s extraordinary Titus Andronicus (1987) that had left me feeling more sick and more exhilarated that any production I’d ever seen.

The production was agony, not because it wasn’t good, but rather because it was so good. Or at least Fiona’s perfor­mance was. She was my Electra – the raw, endlessly picked scab I had imagined and had longed to act. She had stolen my beloved and made her her own. But the revelation that came from watching that performance, in its naked, brutal honesty, was a sudden understanding of what acting could be. Not the attitudinising I had thought of as great acting, but the ripped-open vulnerability of a performer who lays herself bare, who delves into the abject so deeply that she becomes sublime and the ugliness makes of her pain a thing of beauty.

Three years later, my relationship with Fiona Shaw and Electra entered a whole new chapter. The production was to be remounted and so, of course, I bombarded Warner with letters until she agreed to meet me and then cast me as company understudy. ‘This will be the most painful job of your career,’ she warned me, and she was right. I held eight separate roles in my head with only the faintest of chances of ‘going on’, I made tea for everyone, gave Fiona shoulder massages, nightly screamed the death cry of Clytemnestra (who didn’t want to strain her voice), and sat in my under­study’s perch watching each nuance of Fiona’s performance. I admired her tricks, I watched her technique, I noted the waxing and waning of energy, and I learned more from that experience than from any drama school training.

Ten years later I did end up playing Electra on a six-month national tour that was more gruelling yet more exquisite than anything I could have imagined in my teen­age fantasies. This was now a new Electra, my Electra, but I remembered what Fiona had taught me. I remembered to search for the beauty in the ugliness and the sublime in the abject. I remembered the epiphany that she engendered, and for that I’ll always be grateful.

Andrew McGahan’s final book, The Rich Man’s House, opens with an apology. ‘It’s a finished novel – I wouldn’t be letting it out into the world if it wasn’t – but I can’t deny that my abrupt decline in health has forced the publishers and I to hurry the rewriting and editing process extremely, and that this is not quite the book it would have been had cancer not intervened … for once I can fairly plead – I was really going to fix that!’

Exactly how long before his death from pancreatic cancer in February 2019 these words were written isn’t clear, but McGahan’s concern was unfounded. While it’s impossible to say what changes he might have made had he had more time, the novel as it stands feels neither rushed nor unfinished.

At its heart is the brooding physical presence of an imaginary mountain rising from the Southern Ocean between Antarctica and Australia. Christened the Red Wall by Captain Cook, but now known as ‘the Wheel’ due to a typographical error in the first edition of Cook’s Journal, the mountain is of truly astonishing proportions: more than fifteen kilometres taller than Everest, taller even than the vast Olympus Mons on Mars, it rises almost twenty-five kilometres above sea level, stretching far up into the stratosphere, its top so high it can be seen only indistinctly from its base.

Writing a line, as if from bed, on a lovely, handmade
organ based on Gerald Murnane, the Goroke novelist
last seen pouring a glass of amber silk and swaying
imperceptibly enough to be called coincidental to Hot
Chocolate. I would not be the writer I am if I forebore to
mention the snowy peaks outside, being an analogy of
actual peaks. You see me out there gesturing at their
anti-poetic line, my hand perhaps making a mosquitoey
movement in the air, a veritable range-splainer or
Attenborough in Asia  Sentences erode like

ripped earth, as if an editor or technological malfunction
(how can a malfunction be bad when it sounds so good?
you can’t spell a-b-c-d without b-a-d) were large yellow
machinery with the name Cat, or Komatsu. Do you
believe like me, in a different way, in Spinoza, in deco-
nstruction? It is not, to return to the trope of the hand-
made musical instrument, as if wood is dead, I mean
wood as word or key. Call science (but how? where?)
romantic then, I may add there are rows of yellowing as-
pen in clear view like I might – going blonde in midlife

  It started with a kiss and if a lengthy
trial must be undergone, it is not too shabby a thing to
wake in a room like this. What, I’ve been asked is the
tension between a sentence and a stanza? (Or you might
say: between a block of flats and a plaza.) This is a
question for the infinite forest to ignore, but I must give
it some thought, in order not to begin to sound like a
mechanical monkey, however cute, based on Broken Hill
essayist Evan de K – not their real name, last seen drop-
ping a dingleberry into someone’s coffee, perhaps at the

height of their humour, and irony  So I begin to chop
in earnest as if I earn money from making salad, or it’s
my passion: lettuce under the knife, just needing freshly
roasted advice to bring its yellowing heart back to life
  Should prose rhyme? Another question I’ve never been
asked, but on a night when you know that sleep will make
you ill, and road fatality statistics arise like clapped-in
topiary at an impatient neocon convention – I’d marry
Time, but I just turned seventeen and by the next day
the voice on the radio says it doesn’t remember me