I will start at The End. A little bar on Vulture Street in West End that was once a video rental shop.
With many a joyful hour spent playing there with my band, The Filberts, it made sense that it should feature in my writing.
As Venus Burns is my sixth self-published novel, but only the second set in Queensland. Much of the story takes place in Brisbane. West End is home to my protagonist, a sex worker named Mia Cassidy:
“By the time Mia opens her eyes, it’s dark outside. The restaurants along Boundary Street are packed, but she realises she can’t recall what night it is. Friday? Saturday? A boy racer in a blue Subaru cruises past her slowly and they briefly make eye contact. He’s not interested in her; she’s not his particular brand of trouble.”
West End is one of my favourite parts of Brisbane. Eclectic, lively, fun and still rough around the edges, in spite of the gentrification and urban renewal.
Here the past wrestles with the future, in the same way the city is struggling to come to terms with the Olympics in 2032. Do we stick to the old places we know or build something big and bold for a brighter future?
Everybody wants a brighter future. Yet the opposite also lurks in our minds – the possibility that life as we know it can come crashing to an end if we don’t grapple with all those existential threats. The shadow of a dark future is best driven home by its threat to the places we know.
When I drive past beachfront mansions of Mermaid Beach and Currumbin on the Gold Coast, I can’t help imagining what will happen to them if the sea level rises. Will the entire Glitter Strip – our monument to avarice and consumerism – be consumed by the rising tide of future history?
It’s a question I wrestle with in my post-apocalyptic debut novel Blank, in which the West Antarctic ice shelf collapses causing a global tsunami and a five-metre sea-level rise. Bye-bye, paradise. So long, River City.
I began my journalistic career at The Courier-Mail in the mid-1980s during the dying days of institutional corruption. I’m sure moral decay and social entropy clings to my soul, even now. I feel it in my dreams. It colours the tone of my work for ABC News.
It becomes Mia Cassidy’s waking nightmare. As Venus Burns is a prequel to the catastrophic world of Blank. The world is as we know it now, but a dark and rising threat looms. It’s the eve of the disaster.
It’s a slow-burn love story at the end of the world.
ABC presenter and friend Kelly Higgins-Devine sums it up by saying that I have taken her home town of Brisbane “and turned it into the centre of the sci-fi universe”.
Which brings me back to The End. Of all the bars in West End, Mia must walk into this one:
“The End is packed, as usual. She waves at the owner, but he’s busy and doesn’t see her. She walks past tables lining the walls toward a DJ who’s beseeching girls to get up and dance. Two other women are in the dark near the back door, waiting for the toilet. Mia squeezes past. She tries to explain that she’s heading for the rear courtyard.
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“But when she steps outside, the courtyard is gone. There’s only a large retaining wall that, to the best of her knowledge, wasn’t there before. The door to the bar slams shut behind her. At once the night goes quiet. No cars, no music — and no people. But when she turns around, the back door is gone. The entire building is gone. She’s somewhere else entirely.”
In another time and place, to be precise. The End is, actually, just the beginning.
As Venus Burns ( $24.99) is available at Avid Reader, West End, or at amazon.com.au ($25.99).
Matt Eaton is an ABC Brisbane radio newsreader and digital news reporter. He began his journalism career at The Courier-Mail then worked in the Triple J newsroom from 1995 to 2001. He has self-published six sci-fi novels and two novellas.
The Filberts play The End bar, West End, September 1.
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