As a ubiquitous but under-acknowledged setting in Australian fiction, suburbia affords the detailed representation of everyday, local places and landscapes at specific points in their history, even while adumbrating structures germane to globalised capitalist modernity – features arguably also integral to the novel itself as a morphing yet durable narrative form. Abstract dimensions like these become manifest via individual novels that evoke specific suburban places and geographies. Attending to one such geography, a sector of metropolitan Sydney conventionally known as the ‘North Shore’, this chapter works with four novels, reading them both chronologically and collectively, and proposing that, taken together, they constitute a fictional archive of an affluent, middle-class, urban subregion. Through its tight focus on one specific subregion, the chapter makes the argument that novels can be read not just singly but serially, for their sensory evocation of mundane and ephemeral place, and for their unearthing of that which is routinely suppressed by and within settler-suburbia. The novels from which this chapter forms its putative, fictional archive of Sydney’s North Shore are Christina Stead’s Seven Poor Men of Sydney (1934), Patrick White’s Riders in the Chariot (1961), Jessica Anderson’s The Impersonators (1980) and Fiona McGregor’s Indelible Ink (2010).

After World War II, Australians and new migrants rushed to build their dream home and garden. As housing estates proliferated in the suburbs, local authorities struggled to keep pace with increasing demand for water supply and sewerage connection. In all five cities, suburbs were constructed with no roads, kerbing and channelling, or sewerage. New subdivisions had reticulated water, but manual night cart collection continued in some suburbs and septic tanks were common until sewer lines were built. As the housing stock increased and septic systems were replaced with reticulated sewerage, water supplies were stretched beyond capacity. Authorities turned to the well-worn path of dam construction to increase supply, but when consumption exceeded capacity, especially in hot, dry seasons, unpopular water restrictions were implemented, with hoses and sprinklers banned. The sight of green suburban lawns turning brown undermined the myth of unlimited supply at the turn of a tap, but expectations were reinstated as soon as it rained.

Percy’s classic novel grapples self-consciously with the complexities of its relation to a sense of place and its setting in mid-twentieth-century New Orleans. Percy himself was ambivalent about New Orleans, just as the protagonist of his novel is, and chose to live on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain to avoid the distractions of the city, and his deliberate dislocation vis-à-vis the famous city undergirds his deeply philosophic inquiry into the meaning of place, an inquiry tha, for the main character in the novel is tied to the posttraumatic stress disorder that followed his wounding in the Korean War.

Taking a 1962 fan letter that Plath wrote to the poet Stevie Smith three months before her suicide, Noreen Masud elucidates a key context out of which Plath’s work emerged. Drawing on The Bell Jar and ranging through her poetry, Masud argues that Plath owes much to Smith’s gendered perspective, dramatic monologues, and ambivalent but darkly comic engagement with the stifling nature of suburbia.