In the words of author Steven Herrick, The Bogan Mondrian is the story of a boy on the “wrong side of the highway” in North Katoomba who befriends a much wealthier girl whose Dad perpetrates domestic violence.
The 59-year-old writer has lived in working class Katoomba for 25 years. It’s the second book he has set in his home town.
“I hope it doesn’t make me unpopular in the suburb ...when I talk of the North/South Katoomba class divide which I have probably overstated. I love Katoomba.”
Herrick moved to the area after completing a residency at Varuna.
“We could afford it. It was cheap .... I’m never leaving.”
The book’s hero is Luke. He wags school, swims illegally at the reservoir and eats too much takeaway pizza, while grieving his Dad. That is until Charlotte – “who has a way of putting people offside without trying” – shows up with her own problems.
“As far as the community knows Charlotte’s Dad is a charming, upstanding, powerful man – ‘a good bloke’. But good blokes do not harm anybody, the community needs to recognise that.
“The statistics are absolutely frightening. One in six women have been subjected to physical violence by a current or previous partner. It’s the real terrorist in our midst.”
Herrick said he “deliberately flipped the masculine role” to show domestic violence happens everywhere.
“It cuts across class and culture. An author inhabits the grey, we inhabit the area in between to find nuance.”
Domestic violence is one of many themes Herrick has tackled – love, sex, death, self image and homelessness are others. Coping with loss is another theme – something he writes from the personal experience of losing his brother when he was 14.
“I do write the personal, not the polemic.”
The novel’s first draft was adapted into a play and won a film scriptwriting competition last year. It had a public reading at The Carrington Hotel and he’s now hawking the film script.
Herrick has published 24 books. He loves to write teenage characters and visits 150 schools annually.
He is also a child of the Whitlam era. He dropped out of school in Year 10 but then was paid by Gough Whitlam to go back to school and onto university.
Herrick’s books have twice won the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards and have been shortlisted eight times for the Children’s Book Council of Australia Book of the Year Awards.
The novel is published by the University of Queensland Press.
