An understanding of class as a relationship and a process, and the expanded terrain of class struggle that comes with it, has the potential to unearth or reappraise key events and narratives in our colonial pasts.

The total value of residential real estate in Australia currently stands just shy of $10 trillion. People’s class position and life chances are now significantly shaped by their share—and often their parents’ share—of this extraordinary wealth.

If the pandemic has taught us anything, it is that a vast majority of people who do the essential work of keeping things ticking along are largely invisible—save for national emergencies, when all of a sudden cleaners and supermarket workers are wheeled out in front of us to ‘tell us what it’s like’. The idea that these same people have larger lives and stories though, is still something that Australia’s literary world struggles to grasp.

Once more, the substantial population living in contamination zones on land they don’t own are left to their own devices. There is no state to save them, no legal enterprise assured of victory to fund their fight. The only option provided by the powers that solely exist for this type of catastrophe is to surrender to the elements.

Anyone who works in hospitality or customer service knows what a Karen is – the person who deploys the privilege of the customer to establish a sense of superiority, articulated against the worker’s inferiority.

‘New York Millennial can’t afford to move to DC before her job in Congress starts’ read a recent headline in VICE for an article on how Congressmember-Elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez couldn’t yet afford to move to Washington DC, as the rents in the city are so high. Not a week goes by without a media report revealing how difficult it is for young people to afford a house; simultaneously, we’re inundated by articles on disgustingly wealthy baby-boomers.

In Victorian times, the pauper funeral signalled abject poverty and low morality and in order to avoid this stigma, many working-class people made great sacrifices to pay regular and relatively significant amounts to burial clubs. What lingers today is the common misconception that overspending on funerals has a direct correlation to dignity.

I am originally from a small provincial town in northern Italy, and one my generation’s last native speakers of a fast-disappearing language, Bresciano, a non-standard variety of Italo-Romance.

The idea being tested is simple enough: one’s tastes in art, music, film, literature, television and so on is largely a function of class (sometimes age, sometimes gender). These tastes are reproduced through a cycle of inheritance. If one is from a well-off background, the theory goes, one is more likely to be inoculated with highbrow tastes, and this well-off background also means one is more likely to get into university and further develop their highbrow tastes.

There is a growing wave of back-to-the-land millennials seeking to engage with a slower, more humble, more natural lifestyle that look towards agricultural self-sufficiency – but questions of education and options (often socioeconomic in nature) are pivotal here. Not only does such thinking show a glaring lack of historical reckoning, it also reveals that the modern appropriation of peasantry hides a warped understanding of class, because peasantry was never about romantic walks behind the plow and gleaning fallen fruit.

In the late 1970s in New Zealand, a group of young people in their twenties left their middle-class lives and got working-class jobs, joined working-class unions and lived in working-class communities. Why? They were activists and communists and they wanted to bring radical politics to the working class, to shift their focus from the university campus to the industrial workplace.

Those of us involved with political organising often harbour the belief that we are more politically aware than others; that the ‘ordinary people’ who exist outside our theoretical and organisational worlds are apathetic, or apolitical, or unenlightened. I have never found this to be particularly true. Like many people, those I met in Logan had lost faith in politics, but they were highly politicised.

As Millicent Weber pointed out a little while back in Overland, ‘literary festivals are complex beasts’. Particularly in recent years, they appear to have become more politicised, more contested spaces – exemplary of the tension that results when a ‘cultural project’, with presumed egalitarian aims, has a light shone on it by the market model it operates on, which doesn’t favour all people equally.

Despite coming formally under the control of voters, the reality is that the propertied classes use the state to impose their interests on the majority. It is an observation with a long history. ‘Civil government supposes a certain subordination,’ wrote Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations, ‘so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.’

My desire to write has often been met with a concoction of pity and disbelief. When I first started University at eighteen, I thought I would practise law during the day and write at night, like Franz Kafka or Elliot Perlman. By the time I realised I wanted to work in the arts full-time, I was too far in, HECS debt too large, to quit.

The spate of recent attacks on certain Footscray businesses by perpetrators as yet unknown feels quixotic: smashing in a few windows and spray-paining ‘fuck off hipster scum’, or throwing a bag of rotting meat at a business, cannot be expected to reverse the tide of gentrification. Such actions misunderstand the relationship between gentrification and hipsterdom, construing as they do hipsters as active agents of gentrification rather than their presence as an epiphenomenon of it.