Christos Tsiolkas’s first novel, Loaded (1995), was hailed as a profound example of the short-lived ‘grunge’ genre in Australia in the late twentieth century, but his work since that point is not typically viewed in that context, nor is that genre generally considered to have continued or evolved since the 1990s. This chapter returns to Tsiolkas’s grunge roots and demonstrates the continuation and evolution of the grunge genre across Tsiolkas’s oeuvre as well as its influence on the work of other contemporary Australian writers. Through comparative discussions of several practitioners of grunge, this chapter examines Tsiolkas’s influence on and development of a critical genre in Australian literary history, arguing that the evolution of Tsiolkas’s grunge and his influence on other grunge writers depends on a simultaneous absorption in and disruption of the myths and identities of the nation in its contemporary literature.

David Malouf and Christos Tsiolkas represent very different generations of gay men with migrant backgrounds, but both use the novel form as a way of articulating gay experience. Malouf, born 1934, started out as a poet, and continued to publish poetry for his entire career. His work is exquisitely styled and highly verbally self-conscious. As opposed to the meditative, scholarly Malouf, Tsiolkas, born 1965, is far grittier and rancorous in his approach. Loaded (1995) details a world of drug use and casual sex, whereas Dead Europe (2005) overturns the traditional Australian nostalgia for and even pretention about continental Europe by examining its sordid post-Cold War reality. Though Malouf and Tsiolkas are very different writers, their concern with aesthetics, history, and what it might be to live in a community make their juxtaposition not just heuristic but inevitable. This chapter explores one convergence between them: their queering of mateship.