Sydney was the original site of British settlement in Australia and its largest city in the twentieth century. With a reputation for hedonism, Sydney’s identity became entangled, to a marked extent, in its sexual cultures. The preoccupation with whiteness ensured that attitudes to birth control were closely related to settler racial aspirations. State regulation of sex work and female sexuality was also connected to concerns about preserving racial vigour, but it helped to secure a powerful role for organized crime and police corruption in the city’s sex industry. Key Sydney sex radicals and reformers took their place in British imperial and, to an increasing extent, global networks. Gay (or ‘camp’) male subcultures emerged in the middle decades of the century and, after a period of greater freedom during the Second World War, attracted repression in the 1950s. Lesbian subcultures emerged more slowly, but were discernible by the 1960s. At the same time as the contraceptive pill was transforming heterosexual relations, Sydney emerged as Australia’s major centre of gay life as well as a place of notable ethnic diversity and sexual variety. By the end of the century the city’s identity was bound more tightly than ever to its sexual cultures.

In a review article for the West Australian in 1939, a literary critic known as ‘Norbar’ proclaimed that in the recent past, the ‘most outstanding of Australian novels ... have been novels of city life’. This was a welcome development, Norbar maintained, a sign that Australia had ‘ceased to be a mere colonial appendage to Europe ... and [was] rapidly becoming an expanding industrial nation of the south’. Much of this ‘outstanding’ literature was produced by women (Modjeska; Sheridan). In quick succession, Eleanor Dark, Dymphna Cusack, Kylie Tennant and M. Barnard Eldershaw published novels set in contemporary Sydney, capturing the city in a period of rapid development as it attempted to move from colonial chaos to modern rationality. In these novels, women’s position in urban space is unstably located at the nexus of participation and exclusion, reflecting the writers’ status as both insiders (as white settlers) and outsiders (as women) in the colonial-capitalist-patriarchal project of Australian urban modernity. This chapter shows how the architectonics of the novel and topography of the city interacted at a time in Australia when both forms were emerging into modernity.

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).

The realization that radio astronomers could detect radio galaxies that were well beyond the limits of even the most powerful optical telescopes suggested that radio observations might be able to distinguish between the two competing cosmological models. The commonly accepted big-bang model required that, since the Universe continued to evolve with time, so the distant (younger) Universe should appear different than the nearby modern Universe. By contrast, the steady-state theory required that the Universe is, and always was, everywhere the same, so distant galaxies should look the same as more nearby galaxies. An intense controversy developed between radio astronomers in Sydney, Australia and Cambridge, UK over the distribution of radio sources and their implication for theories of cosmology. The Australian radio astronomers, who had better data than the Cambridge research workers, found no evidence of cosmic evolution. The Cambridge group, led by Martin Ryle, misunderstood the effects of their instrumental errors and used an incorrect analysis – but got the right answer, arguing that the Universe is evolving with time, contrary to the expectations of the steady state-theory.