Australian dystopian fiction, self-publishing and the culture war over Sydney
Author K. J. Hennessy holding a copy of The Org. Photo courtesy: @byravyna.
The Org is a smutty protest novel that exposes Australia’s embrace of neo-conservatism, a drug-fuelled rampage and fuckathon through the smog-filled streets of Sydney where Protectors, the Org’s enforcers, chainsaw and burn off vegetation, turning the tree roots and branches that poke holes in the man-made jungle to ash (it’s a losing battle). Like all good speculative fiction, it’s frighteningly close to reality.
But it’s also a book that demonstrates the power of self-publishing and the nepotism within Australia’s writing industry.
See, author K. J. Hennessy doesn’t have an extensive writing CV. He’s written for a few publications but he’s far from a known name. What’s astounding, then, is the quality of this book. This self-published book isn’t a speed-read thriller destined for the airport bargain bin. It’s not a last-ditch attempt to rekindle a failed writing career. It’s not a university project notable for the delusions and over-enthusiasm of the creator. Throughout my reading I constantly asked myself: how has such a talented writer slipped through the cracks?
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To put it lightly: there’s a lot going on in The Org. It’s a fever dream epic set in an alternate reality Sydney where an autocratic regime called The Org monitors the civilian population. Queer romance meets speculative fiction meets black humour. Australia as hermit kingdom. On face value, it all seems a little unbelievable. A totalitarian regime, here, in Australia? Look at how safe this nation is, how peaceful. Surely not, right?
It’s possible to read the text as the incoherent jaded ramblings of author K. J. Hennessy, a local queer writer who has adopted Sydney as his home. After all, what do the Holy Bible, house music and Tracy Grimshaw really have in common? Is this self-published book just an elaborate Facebook rant about the Big Smoke, about its failure to live up to expectations as a city of pristine beaches, fairy lights and comfortable homes?
Perhaps this is how some publishing house editors read the manuscript.
I read it differently. The beauty of The Org – the book, that is, and not the political propaganda machine – is that, despite the absurdity, the events in the book seem so real. An eviction notice provides a chronological framework for the story which centres on two housemates, Bacch and Christina, as they try to remain sane within an insane system. From invasive strip searches to bubble-universe DIY raves, antiquated drug legislation and sham rental markets, there’s a sense of familiarity. It’s a slap-in-the-face reminder of the nanny state politics rife in NSW today and a vitriolic ode to the housing crisis Sydney currently faces.
The book’s absurdist humour dunks the reader headfirst into an ice bath of near-unbelievable hyperbole. But this isn’t a sign of clunky writing. It’s a stylistic choice that gives the reader the sense that this fascist dictatorship represents the last death throes of a wounded animal.
In spite of the grotesque public displays of punishment, the surveillance, fear and isolation, the novel’s alternate reality is a bodgy construction job with shaky foundations. There’s a fragility at the centre.
The Org’s dystopian world is so unnatural, so disconnected from the true essence of humanity, our human nature, that Mother Nature is staging a revolution in Sydney. Tree roots and flowers break up pavement and tarmac, rupture pipes and topple buildings. At one point, a rose grows out of an Iphone. It’s a clever extended metaphor.
Tellingly, there are no obvious human underground resistance movements, no mass strikes and trade union intervention in the book. No one firebombs parliament, although presumably the faceless people serving The Org believe this is a real threat. New Parliament House, which includes the Senate and “House of Servants”, is a underground bunker, K. J. Hennessy writes, stocked with the essentials in the case of nuclear warfare: “non-perishables and wifi”. There are only occasional background protests, distinctive for their anonymity, which makes The Org a peculiarly Australian novel.
Take Bacch, for example. Bacch is an unemployed nihilist and armchair philosopher who despises The Org and all it represents. He pushes finger buns and donuts like a drug dealer – sugar is soon to be outlawed – and sells the sweet pastries to tenants in the building where he lives, cashing in on “the scarcity of affordable baked goods & the general fear of being killed outside in a terrorist attack”. While others keep their eyes glued to the footpath and to their phones, Bacch is not afraid to push back against The Org. But he’s isolated and he can only do so much by himself without risking his safety. This isolation leads characters like Bacch and his friend Hari into political apathy and drug addiction.
Sinking into the folds of the couch one evening, Bacch questions the atomisation of life in Sydney.
“Where was the optimism in the place? Our cultural insignia? What banner did we have to march beneath? What cause? The Org? The King?” K. J. Hennessy writes. “Were we so splintered & spread so thin? Where were our screams of dissent? Our outlaws? Driven to extinction, perhaps, culled from the evolutionary chain of humankind so that all we have left are predators & prey, forced to fuck each other over in the grand scramble for small legacies.”
It all feels very, well, Australian, and very Sydney.
There’s a popular myth in this country that Australia is chokkers with laidback people who value mateship and egalitarianism above all else. Disdainful of authority, this typical Australian, a person of few words and clipped speech, forever barracks for the underdog. It’s a vision of national identity glorified in canonical texts such as Peter Weir’s Gallipoli.
Looking at Sydney, you’d be hard pressed to think of a perceived national identity that is more inaccurate, more immature, than ours.
Sydney is a safe sanitised hellscape, devoid of artistic creation and puckered with fault lines like an open palm. It’s a city that rests on the outstretched palms of gambling industry tycoons and private developers who segregate the population into class-based enclaves according to arbitrary lines while simultaneously stripping away the power of local councils in planning matters.
Sydney is renowned on the global stage as a hub for financial services, a spawn point for corporate yes-men and a testing ground for ‘lockout laws’. Intense policing of hospitality and music venues to counter alcohol-fuelled violence mean this city of five million has almost no 24-hour clubs despite a glut of pokie-filled pubs and bars. The 2022 Time Out Index – a survey of 20,000 city-dwellers – ranked Sydney as the third-worst city in the world for making new friends, and the second worst for nightlife. In short: Sydney is rarely a place where you find connection or community.
Far from the ideal of the Australian dream, of Sydney as a laidback beachside metropolis, Sydneysiders are known for the grind. Not only has inflation climbed to levels not seen since the first Nintendo Game Boys hit the market, but Sydney is the most expensive city in Australia for housing. Many of us, too absorbed in the daily struggle, keep our heads and eyes down. At the other end of town, trimmed hedges and multi-million dollars homes, where folks pour shandy and raise a toast to their good luck, line immaculate boulevards. How else do you explain this prosperity, darling?
We are not the “Lucky Country” but the Apathetic Country. Living standards are just comfortable enough that many Australians don’t have to care about politics. But life is also just hard enough that Aus Pol is a messy soap opera, a cringe-filled display of blunders, royal fucks ups and actively harmful legislation, all intended to appeal to the lowest common denominator in a nation with compulsory voting. It’s a precarious balancing act on a national scale epitomised by Bacch’s nihilism in The Org. Indeed, this is the modern Australian larrikin: a hedonistic, drug-sniffing, hard-drinking cynic named Bacch, a man knowledgeable about the world’s ills and beautifully caring in moments but unable to summon the energy to make change.
This is how a neoliberal democracy works. It alienates us and fools us into believing that we are too isolated, or too sectarian, to enact real change.
At times it seems hard to keep up with Bacch’s sexual appetite in The Org. This man isn’t here to fuck spiders. But perhaps that’s precisely the point. In their dystopian world, Bacch and Christina crave sexual release because it captures exactly what they are missing in their lives: connection.
When the novel’s characters rebel – they rarely link up with a broader mass movement – it’s in the most human of ways. They are small everyday actions that destroy a few metres, here and there, of the railway lines that carry the careening Shinkansen of totalitarian rule, a train hopped up on volatile rocket fuel.
Christina arrives in the Big Smoke like a wide-eyed kangaroo that falters on the road in the light cast by an incoming BnS ute – one replete with a four foot high steel bullbar. She’s a country girl shocked and intrigued by the debauchery of Sydney’s residents. When she unlocks her sexuality, prompted by Bacch’s cynical outlook and her own realisation of the contradictions at the heart of The Org, flowers burst from the walls in a passage of true beauty.
There’s a cosmic psychedelia in this genre-hopping novel, a touch of magical realism.
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So why didn’t Hennessy secure a book deal with a local publishing house?
It’s probably not a question of diversity. Hennessy is, yes, another white male, albeit one who hails from the Mid North Coast of NSW and identifies as bisexual.
But I sense that perhaps the writing is little too radical, a little too out there for the insular bubble of Oz Lit. Maybe Oz Lit isn’t ready for a wild child yet, an Australian Hunter S. Thompson, and I suspect that editors don’t appreciate a man guiding discussions of sex and ethical non-monogamy (‘enm’ lingo such as compersion, which indicates a feeling opposite to jealousy when a partner sleeps with another human, pop up in the text).
When I meet Kieran, aka K. J. Hennessy, at a pub in Surry Hills, he presents me with a free copy of The Org. I immediately notice his signature on the first page in black pen.
He tells me he received helpful feedback when he sent out the manuscript to various parties but he’s thankful he gave up on seeking a book deal and thankful he never employed a literary agent.
I snag him for a couple of hours on a Saturday afternoon before he rushes off to a DJ gig – the first of two he’s booked in for that night. He also works full-time five days a week for Sydney Writers Festival, so he’s busier than a one-armed brickie in Baghdad. But it’s a welcome breeze of change to meet a creative who is confident in their ability and unafraid to put their work out into the world. He’s nothing like the stereotypical introverted writer.
Author K. J. Hennessy holding copies of The Org. Photo courtesy: @byravyna.
Kieran tells me that he’s working on the Sydney Writers Festival and gleefully recounts his dream scenario: slapping his book on the table in front of a higher-up while boozing and schmoozing them over lunch. I can’t quite work out which excites him more: the state of inebriation or the rare opportunity to sell himself. He certainly doesn’t seem like someone who cares much for social conventions, for following the tried and tested path for writers.
In a nutshell: writers are not taught to act like this. We are taught that, unless a non-fiction pitch is heavily tied to the news cycle, it’s best practice to wait until an editor rejects your submission before submitting the pitch elsewhere. While usually not prohibited, we are encouraged not to submit our poetry and short stories to multiple magazines. For book authors sending out a manuscript to a publishing house, it’s a similar story. Apparently it doesn’t matter that Australian book authors earn a pitiful amount from their creative work – $18,200 per year on average, according to a recent survey of over 1,000 Australian authors. It doesn’t matter how desperate you are as a writer, how close you are to missing next week’s rent payment, you must be polite when you beg for the scraps.
In his polemical 2016 essay on Melbourne’s middle-class literary scene, ‘Getting Square in a Circle Jerk’, Western Sydney writer Luke Carman suggested that, in order to be published, local writers must cater to middle class norms. They must behave in an acceptable way and frequent the right events. Employing the narrative arc and apocalyptic tone of a jeremiad, he took particular aim at the “Melbourne literati mafia” – those employed by literary festivals, funding bodies, writing centres and publishers; in other words, those who do not make art but administer and direct it. Labelling Carman’s essay a “form of underclass literary revolt” and the “literary equivalent of giving your boss the finger”, Emmett Stinson argued in the pages of Overland at the time that “the essay’s lack of decorum – its refusal to abide by the rules of politeness – is an open challenge to middle-class professionalism… [It’s] a working-class retort to a middle-class arts bureaucracy.”
Like an airborne contagion, the essay sent Australia’s writing sphere into feverish overdrive, triggering hysteria. Disgruntled, defensive critics swiftly berated Carman for his “considerable venom”, ironically proving the point Carman had set out to make in the first place.
These middle-class norms manifest not only in person but online too. Contrary to the popular image of cyberspace as an unruly playground rife with mud-slinging, catfishing and trolling, the American journalist and book critic Jacob Silverman has identified a curious anomaly. “If you spend time in the literary Twitter- or blogospheres, you’ll be positively besieged by amiability, by a relentless enthusiasm… It’s not only shallow, it’s untrue and it’s having a chilling effect on literary culture, creating an environment where writers are vaunted for their personal biographies or their online followings rather than for their work on the page.” In the essay collection By the book: Contemporary publishing in Australia, scholar Beth Driscoll argues in a similar vein that the pursuit of social capital moderates behaviour in Australia’s online literary sphere. This is a space where participants latch onto the cultural cachet of writing prizes, creating bland echo-chambers of endless congratulations.
This consensus culture of self-censorship enforces an atmosphere of decorum and politeness. It’s dense with honeyed words and side eye – the equivalent of the whisper-territory, white-walled galleries of the art world. It’s difficult to imagine the Oz Lit club welcoming a midnight servo brawler with dadcore Nike Tailwinds, a stick-it-up-yer attitude and a pocket full of expletives.
Sure, Kieran isn’t that extreme but he’s a loudmouth in his own way. His determination to publish the book is evidence that Sydney is screaming for change. The city’s youth are angry. In The Org I spy the same brutal cynicism and the same larrikin Australian energy that you’ll find in Luke Carman’s polemical essay ‘Getting Square in a Circle Jerk’.
“Thank you to the publishers and agents who either rejected or never got back to me. It led me down a more fulfilling path,” Hennessy writes cheekily in the book’s acknowledgements, harnessing the same up-yours energy you find within the novel’s storyline.
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Earlier I wrote that the book centres on an alternate reality Sydney but exacerbated reality is, I feel, a better term. The dystopian world is an extrapolation of our own rather than an alternative, more akin to Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men than V For Vendetta or The Hunger Games.
Hennessy doesn’t actually explain a lot about The Org in the book. As a reader, we are unmoored at sea, rowing through a heaving mass of shark-infested water, detached from history. We obtain a few perplexing glimpses through the foam and spray of the political beast beneath us but there’s little backstory. For all we know, it’s entirely possible that the authoritarian measures were introduced within a political structure that remains, notionally, democratic.
It’s not the case that the oppressed, too scared to speak out, all largely detest the ruling regime as you see in a lot of popular fiction and Hollywood blockbusters (e.g: The Hunger Game series). In The Org, it’s clear that a substantial portion of the population buy into the The Org’s rhetoric. While The Org exploits crises to scale back civil liberties, its employees parrot catchphrases. This creeping form of neo-conservatism, implemented by stealth, is prescient in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, recent crackdowns on political dissent in NSW and the Federal Government’s support for Israel during the Israel’s war on Gaza. Amid these scary times it is precisely our inattention that is the problem.
It makes sense then that the book The Org reminds me of the most is not 1984 or Fahrenheit 451 (yes there is book burning in The Org too) but The Last Hundred Days by Patrick McGuinness. Set in Bucharest, 1989, it’s a semi-autobiographical tale, filled with dark humour, about the last days of the Nicolae Ceaușescu regime, the boredom of life under a dictatorship and the seeming irrationality of flourishing black markets.
The point of this digression is this: The Last Hundred Days is a novel about real people and real historical events.
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True art is made for the moment. It’s not meant to last. Sure, a book interrogating the surveillance and regressive politics Sydneysiders face today is hardly going to reach a wide audience. But frankly I struggle to read stories set in small towns in far-flung countries, I don’t give a fuck about reading the thoughts of some old white cunt from the 1800s and I don’t care one bit about literary canon. I want to read about Sydney, my Sydney. Toss me headfirst into the dark bone-cooling abyss that is my reality, please!
I honestly believe that the most touching and inspiring books are not classics but hyper-local literary feats. People just need to give local writers a chance.
I also believe the best book reviews aren’t written by a cultural gatekeeper using the third person, as if they have some irrefutable truth to impart on the world. I’m not judge, jury and executioner. You don’t have to take my word on any this. Like Baach, I’m simply that prick with a human-dwarfing rig in their backyard, the one who wakes you up at 6 AM on a Monday morning with an ear-pummelling soundtrack of dissonance. Part of me wants you to hate me and hate the way I’ve written this book review because that is how The Org makes me feel: unashamed, exposed and angry. I might just give the next cop I meet an earful.
“Praise the Org.”
