What doesn’t kill you makes for a great story – two new memoirs examine the risky side of life
In the final pages of her memoir Datsun Angel, writer and filmmaker Anna Broinowski identifies the book as a “call-to-arms critique [of] the eighties patriarchy”. She questions whether women like herself – that is, the well-educated, sexually liberated beneficiaries of second-wave feminism – are really better off than their 1940s counterparts.
Given the many terrifying encounters her young headstrong protagonist endures at the hands of men as she seeks to make her independent way in the world, it is a question worth considering.
Broinowski – or “Bronco” as some wanky auteur from the Sydney University Dramatic Society labels her – is a first-year law student in search of her tribe. It definitely isn’t the “duckbill loafer” crowd, who sit around the lecture theatre trading professional lineages the way Bret Easton Ellis characters trade business cards. But it isn’t quite the avant-garde art crowd looking for anonymous vaginas to cast in their latest 16mm masterpieces either.
After a series of awkward attempts at finding her place on campus, and feeling thoroughly cynical about the surrounding city’s intrinsic phoniness, Broinowski embarks on an 8000-kilometre, month-long hitchhiking trip to Darwin and back with her good mate and partner in disillusionment, Peisley.
Reconstructed from the travel diary the author kept at the time, the adventure is everything you could possibly hope for in a road trip – provided you (or your daughter) aren’t the one taking it.
Datsun Angel proves the old adage about time and tragedy making for champagne comedy. Kidnapped by amphetamine-fuelled truck drivers intent on raping and then murdering her – or murdering and then raping her – Bronco is saved by a tinny-swilling entrepreneur, whose “crowning achievement was establishing dwarf-throwing as a pub sport in Queensland”. She is passed on to a Vietnam vet driving a stolen Commodore, who has to be roused from slumber with a broom handle because his first instinct upon waking is to strangle.
Structurally and generically, the book follows a well-trodden path. It self-consciously situates itself as a cross between the substance-induced exuberance of Jack Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson, and the provincially impassioned politics of Australian novelist Xavier Herbert.
Tonally, I could not get comedian Julia Zemiro’s voice out of my head while reading (maybe because her name is on the front cover), but the critical thinking on issues of class, gender, race and sexuality owes a debt to the forefathers of the 1980s Arts degree: Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and Umberto Eco.
I will perhaps be accused of reading something that wasn’t there (or even more egregiously, of projecting my own discomforts and biases), but beneath the explicit critique of the patriarchal power structures of Australia’s oldest university I sensed an implicit critique of the modern HR department that has since been erected over the top. For all her progressivism, there is a note of nostalgia ringing through Broinowski’s recollections. Datsun Angel harks back to a looser – dare I say, more enjoyable – university experience.
Written four decades after the fact, in a time when online consent modules are compulsory requirements at the institution where Broinowski once studied (and now lectures), the stories in this book offer a hedonistic counter-narrative to the one now used to swaddle newly enrolled students. The narrative promises, against well-intentioned assurances to the contrary, that what doesn’t kill you will, at the very least, make for a good story later on.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but the target reader for this book is a tertiary-educated, middle-class mother of two, whose young-adult children, currently enrolled in university, roll their eyes and scoff with embarrassment (and a touch of pity) every time Mum gets that wistful look in her eyes and says, You two wouldn’t know the half of what I used to get up to!
Broinowski goes part way towards acknowledging as much when she ends her postscript with: “If you’re male and reading this, kudos. I hoped you would. Please pass it on.” For what it’s worth: I am. And will!
In all seriousness, though, I suspect the real barrier to a more general readership will be one of class and, by extension, education rather than gender. Like many campus novels, you’re either in on the joke or you’re off doing something more productive with your time than reading books. Despite her best efforts (forcing esoteric Freudianisms into the mouth of the truck driver, whose idea of high culture amounts to Kevin Bloody Wilson playing his guitar north of the fifth fret), many of the academic references are likely to be lost on those who failed to obtain a distinction average.
There were a few anachronisms that caught my eye. I am pretty certain “giving zero fucks”, for example, was not something you could do prior to this millennium. And I failed to appreciate the mystical significance of the Datsun angel who visits his aura upon the book’s title and several of its chapters.
But these superficial reservations aside, Datsun Angel is a book that delivers on the promise to take its reader “inside the savage heart of 1980s Australia”, and one that never forgets its chief purpose along the way either – to entertain.
