Author of The Campers Maryrose Cuskelly pens a piece for us about her new novel.
The title of my new novel, The Campers, refers to the group of homeless/houseless people who have pitched their tents in a park in a fictional inner-city neighbourhood. However, it’s the residents of The Drove, the cul-de-sac where the novel is set, who readers get to observe more closely. It’s a close-knit community and one I wanted to portray believably, so that readers might recognise aspects of their own neighbourhoods within it.
A clue lies in the cover’s shout line: You can’t choose your neighbours. As is the case in most streets and apartment buildings, the Drove’s inhabitants are neighbours by accident rather than design. Yet the seven households strive to create a sense of community. They’ve adopted the nickname ‘drovers’ for themselves and have an active chat group. They share garden produce and keep each other up-to-date on what’s happening in the street. Among their number are same-sex couples, a single-parent family, a share house tenanted by students, and a range of cultural and ethnic heritages. They’re mostly professional, middle-class people who consider themselves progressive in their values—at least until those values are tested when tents appear in ‘their’ park.
As in any community, the drovers take on different roles within it. Some are invested in shaping what it is to be a ‘drover’, and others are content to follow along with those expectations, perhaps digging their heels in once in a while when they feel they’re being bullied. Then there are those who pay lip service to the understood values of the group while quietly going their own way. Every now and again something happens that provokes dissent, battle lines are drawn and people’s differing positions on an issue are exposed.
An incident I often thought about while I was writing The Campers was the fate of the Brunswick Good Karma Network Facebook page. Brunswick is an inner-city suburb in Melbourne known for its cafés and music venues, and it’s left-leaning demographic. Good Karma Networks aim to foster community by providing a place for people to ask for help, offer knowledge and resources to those who need it, and to spread compassion. Similar groups—neighbourhood Facebook pages, apartment building chat groups and street email lists are relatively common nowadays. I’m a member of several such forums and at their best, they’re sites of altruism, kindness and good deeds. But as anyone knows who has dipped their toe into electronic communications, they can quickly deteriorate. The Brunswick Good Karma group came to the attention of the media several years ago when it imploded due to allegations of ‘toxic positivity, overzealous censorship and racism’ and had to be shut down.
In The Campers, we see schisms appear among the drovers through the chat group as their opinions diverge on what they owe to the people camping in what they consider to be their backyard. Will their cosy community survive the fallout?
The Campers
by Maryrose Cuskelly
An engrossing and provocative exploration of privilege, hypocrisy and justice by the bestselling author of The Cane.
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