The dichotomy of cynicism vs millennial earnestness was never a true range of options but a feat of branding, keeping us mired in self-loathing.

In recent years there has been an increasingly apocalyptic flavour to literary fiction, an upsurge in narratives of radical self-reliance in the face of economic, environmental or civil collapse. Given the end-times polarisation of the political climate, the trend is perhaps unsurprising, but in 2017 three debut novels specifically featured teenage heroines schooled in survivalist practices by their fathers.

With his ruby and diamond-studded Rolex, and a fleet of ninety-three Rolls-Royces, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh was the bling guru. He rejected the asceticism of traditional Indian spiritual practice and embraced materialism and sexual disinhibition. It was a clever bit of mystical upcycling targeted at Westerners, and my hometown of Fremantle, WA became a major international hub for his devotees.

Some of the strongest new work of late circles around psychic wounds – wounds of social injustice, or legacies of formative childhood traumas. Four books I read this year share a sense of wounds as instructive, and a hope that pain might be transfigured through acts of intimacy or of art.

If the ‘drift’ narrative belongs to any generation proper, it is to those who came of age in the sixties – swept along, however briefly, upon waves of political dissidence; losing and finding themselves in the wake of cataclysmic cultural change. Curiously, however, there has been a resurgence of this narrative over the last five years in fiction written by women; and with it, a fresh crop of literary heroines who appear to drift romantically, geographically or socially. Exuding an ambiguous, radical mystique, these young heroines are ultimately on the periphery of any group, often hitching themselves to dubiously charismatic men.

The game is ultimately one of endurance: the video-works total six hours screened back to back, and experiencing them is akin to stumbling upon a raucous sorority party, and fighting the urge to simply shut the door. While many of my fellow gallery-goers bowed out of the competition after mere minutes, I persevered, irradiating elitist triumph. Yet the truth was that I too felt alienated by the hyper-verbal characters on the screen before me; that their private speech codes and aspirational posturing made me feel old.