The larger industrial factories David Ireland worked at and wrote about needed oceans for their runoff. Those machines are the shape of his second novel, and his first of three to win a Miles Franklin award, The Unknown Industrial Prisoner.

In the long term, schools need to be fundamentally restructured to align with the needs of the communities they serve. The humanistic and economic arguments that inform the way we think about learning are fundamentally misaligned with the social realities many students are faced with.

Stead left Sydney in 1928, and had lived in Europe for almost six years when Seven Poor men of Sydney was published. The novel's vision of the antipodes is as much a view of interwar Europe as of Australia; it  finds in Sydney's errors the greater failings of the unstable phenomenon of 'Western civilisation' which tears the bodies of earth, water, and flesh that constitute it. Through that century and into this.