Launched on 31 October 2025 at Gleebooks, Sydney, this post focuses on the book by Brett Heino, Literary Geographies and the Work of David Ireland, which will be followed next week by a commentary from the same evening delivered by Adam David Morton.
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I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how I should start today. There is a lot of pressure with a launch – how am I going to set off on this thing, what do I talk about? I’ve decided that the best way of getting moving this evening is to reflect on the strange twists and turns that the life of an academic sometimes takes. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about ironies of history, and I think the fact that we are here today launching this book is one of them. I started my PhD at the University of Wollongong in 2012, and I had a number of colleagues who worked in the broad law and literature discipline, so articles on jurisprudence and readings of Harry Potter, or neoliberal senses of justice and superhero graphic novels, for example. And I remember thinking at the time, “well this is a bit superficial isn’t it?” Here I was engaged in a Marxist history of labour law in Australia, which I took for the real, the material, the concrete. Studying cartoons or books to understand law just seemed like foam on the waves – it just didn’t seem serious to me. Fast forward thirteen years, and here I am launching a book about literature, the state, law, political economy, the whole kit-and-kaboodle. So, I want to explain how I got to “here” from “there” in launching Literary Geographies and the Work of David Ireland: An Australian Atlas with you all today.
We got our article published in the Journal of Australian Political Economy and I got hungry for more. We hatched a plan to write a book about representations of Australian industrialisation in literature, and as part of that Terry Irving advised that we read David Ireland’s 1971 Miles Franklin prize-winner The Unknown Industrial Prisoner. Sadly, like many Australian readers nowadays, I had never heard of David Ireland nor read any of his literature, so I was going into this book a complete greenhorn. It is not overstating the point to say that reading that book changed my life and certainly the course of my academic career. It is set in a fictional oil refinery based on the old Caltex refinery at Kurnell and follows the lives of the legion of blue and white-collar characters who make this refinery tick. Now, I have lived my whole life in Wollongong, which, as anyone who has been there would know, is dominated by the Port Kembla steelworks. My grandfather worked there, my father and brother both work there to this day, so even though I am not a factory worker per se, that industrial working-class lifestyle and history is my heritage. The world Ireland depicted was a world that I recognised through my family. Most importantly, I realised that the whole novel was absolutely laden with an exploration of spatiality – how the production process is organised in space; how the division between intellectual and manual labour assumes a spatial form; how capitalism impresses itself on the natural and built worlds and organises it according to its dynamics; and how Australia fits within the global division of labour. At that point I had only heard of literary geography as an approach to both geography and literature, but I knew enough to realise that The Unknown Industrial Prisoner would be a literary-geographer’s dream. The problem was no-one was really doing any work into David Ireland, so I thought “why not me?”
As a result, the past few years I’ve been teaching myself geography and literary studies, neither of which I actually studied as an undergraduate. I wrote a book in 2021 applying some of what I had learned to The Unknown Industrial Prisoner, but that was always a stepping stone to this book, which is a study of David Ireland’s entire corpus, stretching from 1968 to 2016.
Rather than regaling you all with a detailed account of the nitty gritty of the book, I want to foreground some of the key findings crystallised within it. The basic animating essence of the book is that we can learn a lot about a society’s spaces and places through its literature. Angharad Saunders has noted that literature ‘knows things’ about the geography of the society into which it is born. The question is what it knows and how it knows it. Now, if 2012 Brett had of turned his mind to this, he would have said that this knowledge was of a basically representational sort – there are real, material spaces here, there is literature over there, and literature would basically function as a mirror, reflecting in some way the real world (something it would presumably do well or poorly depending upon the author and depending upon the text). Today, I think such a view is at best a gross simplification, and at worst actually misleading. Now, there is an amazing book, The Production of Space, by French geographer Henri Lefebvre, who I reckon Adam will have some things to say about later. He really opened my eyes when he took issue with the dominant, basically Newtonian, view of space in Western societies, that it is a dead, inert vessel within which things happen. Space is not just physical, on Lefebvre’s score – it is a mental and social phenomenon as well.
This invocation of the mental and the social aspects of space I think really brings in the role of ideology. In the book I draw very heavily on the work of Louis Althusser, a French structural Marxist whose greatest contribution to Marxist thought in my eyes is his work on ideology. The vision of ideology he created completely revolutionised its treatment in Marxist circles. Until the 1960s and 1970s when he was developing this account, ideology was seen by many Marxists as pure illusion, a smokescreen created by evil puppet-masters who were trying to pull the wool over the eyes of exploited classes and blind them to their true interests. Althusser completely explodes this notion. He defines ideology as ‘a system (with its own logic and rigour) of representations (images, myths, ideas or concepts…) endowed with a historical existence and role within a given society.’ Ideology on his score is never pure illusion or pure truth – rather, it is an imaginary relationship which governs how people actually relate to the material reality of their lives. So, it is simultaneously illusion and knowledge wrapped up as one.
What does this mean for literature, for space and for David Ireland? Frederic Jameson, who many of you may be familiar with, once said that the Real, by which he means the real historical process in its totality, can’t ever be accessed directly. Goonewardena draws the next step:
…if society were actually transparent, that is, if the totality of the structure of social relations were directly accessible to everyday human consciousness—then there would be no pressing need for an ideological representation of it. But it is clearly not so. So we (all of us) have no option but to have recourse to representation.
Jameson agrees with this formulation – the Real, although it is fundamentally non-narrative, can only be grasped through narrative, through representation.
Let’s put Lefebvre, Althusser and Jameson together here. Humans must always have recourse to ideology, to representation, to understand their world. Ideology is thus inescapably part of the human condition. Through Lefebvre, we know that spatiality is in part a mental and a social phenomenon, which means it is intrinsically ideological. All we have to do now is throw in the structural Marxist literary scholars, people like Terry Eagleton, Pierre Macherey, Juan Carlos Rodríguez, and we have completed the circle. Those scholars have claimed that the very raw material of literature is ideology. When authors sit down and write their texts, they aren’t opening a channel through which the Real, real history, embeds itself unmediated on the page. That is what a strictly representational view of literature might subscribe to, seeing the author as some kind of omnipotent documentary recorder. Rather, the form of appearance the Real presents itself to authors is in the form of ideology. This ideology is worked into a text by specifically literary devices, such as narrative paradigms, genre, and conventions. These devices are themselves ideological, allowing Eagleton to describe literature as an ‘ideological production to the second power.’ The result is that ideology invests literature root-and-branch.
The account of this process is the subject of Chapters 2 and 3 of my book. Broadly, this view of the relationship between literature, ideology and space combines in a new concept I have called “the spatial unconscious.” All texts contain a spatial unconscious, which is the inherent imprint of the spatiality of the society into which they are born which we can mine for spatial knowledge. The idea of the spatial unconscious is so much more than just “David Ireland lets us know about the layout of a 1970s oil refinery, or what a 1970s Australian pub looked like.” Literature on my score is not a perfect mirror that reflects the spatial structure of the world in which it was written. Rather, it reflects the ideologies that help to constitute that structure. As I’ve already intimated, ideology helps to create space in the first place. Lefebvre used to talk a lot about what he called the “representations of space” – when state functionaries, engineers, planners, cartographers, capitalists etc., set about trying to create their world, they do so with dominant ideological conceptions of what space is and how they can use it. Perhaps the best example I can think of is Jeremy Bentham’s famous Panopticon, the circular gaol with the tower in the middle so that inmates thought they would be constantly watched. That carried with it a view of how to reform those prisoners and the kind of social order you were thus trying to create.
If we accept this view, then literature can play a much more interesting role in understanding spatiality than being just a mirror. Think of the spaces and places of our world as a giant LEGO building – the individual bricks are Lefebvre’s material, mental and social senses of space, all coming together to form the structure. When an author is writing a text, they are crafting it out of some of the same bricks that are part of that structure. The same ideologies that inform the construction of space in the material world are the same ideologies that authors are working with in the text. In this sense, I think literary texts are less a mirror of the real world and more a type of spatial artefact, a preserved entry point into the spaces and places of the society in which they were born and to which they contribute. The role of the scholar here is more akin to that of an archaeologist, digging away at the text, getting it to reveal the ideologies it trades in and understanding how the author, knowingly or unknowingly, reveals the structures, the contradictions and the purposes of those ideologies.
That is how I have approached the corpus of David Ireland in this book. I am not going to go into detail about my concrete findings, both because I think Adam can talk more to the content and also because I want people to read the book. However, what I have done in the book is plot the very complex ideological constellations facing Ireland in the world in which he was writing and which he creates in his literature. Just as a taster, I variously look at how Ireland:
- models the spatial organisation of the labour process in the Puroil oil refinery in The Unknown Industrial Prisoner, showing how the text captures the abstracting and alienating qualities of that process on workers and how it relates to Australia’s place within the global economy;
- treats the state and law over nearly fifty years, looking at how he goes through several phases, starting from a vague left-nationalist approach to an outright right-wing authoritarian account in his later texts, each with profound spatial effects;
- depicts the penetration of capital into landscapes, and how capitalism uses ideology to make natural and built landscapes move in accordance with its rhythms and dynamics; and
- focuses on social forces such as the working class, lumpenproletarians, women and Indigenous Australians and investigates how they try to resist capitalist abstraction and alienation, often through projects of placemaking, trying to make meaningful, concrete and connected social places.
Across all these fields, my contention is that David Ireland provides us with a kind of Australian atlas, a map of how the landscapes of Australian capitalism of the past, present and future are made and remade. Whether I’ve been successful in bringing that atlas to the surface is a judgment I leave to the readers, so now would be an opportune time to turn to one of them in the form of Adam Morton.
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