hatecore (australian teen fiction)

rc-am rcollins at netlink.com.au
Wed Jan 19 22:50:47 PST 2000



>Turner Diaries, typical male adventure fiction with "ideological
>tracts" clumsily pasted in. He makes the Star Trek Novels look like Melville.
>mcapri

How popular and/or mainstreamed are the Turner Diaries?

Here in Aust, a series of novels by John Marsden, recount a band of teens taking on invaders from some unspecified (though obviously Indonesian) invasion, where the invaders are described variously as "scum", "vermin", "cancer", "filth"... It's like a serialised version of that D-grade anti-commie fantasia film called 'The Wolverines" or somesuch -- scout-boy, rural expertise wins out against people with funny accents.

One of the characters says, "We've got all this land and all these resources, and yet there's countries a crow's spit away that have people packed in like batery hens. You can't blame them for resenting it, and we haven't done much to reduce any imbalances, just sat on our fat backsides, enjoyed our money and felt smug."

It's all there: the constant australiana motif of a flat-earther malthusian fear of gravity; deflection of guilt at colonisation; projection of envy and bad colloquialisms like "crow's spit"... but, the narrative drive is all about how the kids get to a position were they can ignore any kind of guilt they might feel and become instead gleefuly adept at slaughtering the 'invaders'.

Marsden's books are on the state-licensed high school curriculum.

Angela



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