Wayne Macauley
Author of The Cook
About the Author
Wayne Macauley is an author who will be featured at the Mudgee Readers' Festival 2015. (Bowker Author Biography)
Works by Wayne Macauley
The Plains: Text Classics 1 copy
Cook, The 1 copy
Associated Works
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Gender
- male
- Occupations
- novelist
short story writer
teacher - Organizations
- University of Melbourne
- Nationality
- Australia
- Birthplace
- Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
- Places of residence
- Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
- Associated Place (for map)
- Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Members
Reviews
I have really loved some of Macauley's trenchant, hilarious satirical books and was looking forward to this immensely. It left me a little nonplussed. Macauley sets up a series of stories within a story structure, with a bunch of middle-aged friends taking a weekend away together to disconnect from the world and tell each other stories. The stories told are compelling and the atmosphere of foreboding builds as they find themselves trapped by bad weather, but the group are quickly revealed to show more be self-indulgent middle class liberals whose lives have been wasted on food, booze and complaining and whose lives are sad, empty and frustrated. It's a brutal book, giving its (at times interchangable) characters a frightful kicking. show less
I've been 'saving' this novel. I really like Wayne Macauley's biting satires, but he's only published six of them and his second novel Caravan Story, was the last one left on my TBR. Now *sigh* I have to wait until he publishes a new one...
(You can see my review of the others here.)
Nominated for the Readings Prize, Caravan Story was first published in 2007, but reissued in 2012 by Text Publishing. This novella skewers the commodification of 'culture' in Australia, deftly exposing the way show more that it's only the arts administrators who can make a living in this country, and not the artists, actors, writers and musicians on whose work they depend...
This is the blurb from the Text website:
One morning, the narrator, (whose name is Wayne) is asleep with his girlfriend in a squat, when he's woken by a bulldozer which has begun demolishing the house. Unperturbed, he makes love to her quietly and goes back to sleep, only to wake up later in a nightmare. Along with a crowd of other unsuccessful arts-funding applicants, he is expelled from the city by caravan, and ends up in a sports oval repurposed as a caravan park, where Polly the sexy arts administrator pulls them all into line. The actors are hived off into one group, the artists are another; there's a group of musicians, and then there are the writers. Polly knows that the writers are going to be difficult because they are the only group for whom she has to set up a game to help them break the ice...
Wayne can see that his partner is having a fine old time with the actors, when Polly comes back to marshall the writers into order. She provides them with a list of topics to write about, with instructions to choose a second preference in case their first choice is taken, and Wayne selects 'A Short History of Laburnum', a suburb not far from where he grew up. (This is typical of the kind of lame subject that writers (or arts administrators) without much experience of reading tend to think will be interesting to other readers. I am pretty sure that the only people conceivably interested in the history of Laburnam are people who live/d there. And even then, there won't be many of them.)
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2021/11/26/caravan-story-by-wayne-macauley/ show less
(You can see my review of the others here.)
Nominated for the Readings Prize, Caravan Story was first published in 2007, but reissued in 2012 by Text Publishing. This novella skewers the commodification of 'culture' in Australia, deftly exposing the way show more that it's only the arts administrators who can make a living in this country, and not the artists, actors, writers and musicians on whose work they depend...
This is the blurb from the Text website:
The first caravans arrive in a convoy. Wayne Macauley’s narrator, Wayne Macauley, is in one of them. He’s one of the artists removed from his home, given a new place to live and the chance to ‘give back to society’. In his strange new community, housed on a footy oval in a faraway country town, he is given his task. To create and be useful. To be thankful for the opportunity. He decides he will not give in to his misgivings; he will write. Then he finds out about the rejection slips already written for the work he has yet to submit…
One morning, the narrator, (whose name is Wayne) is asleep with his girlfriend in a squat, when he's woken by a bulldozer which has begun demolishing the house. Unperturbed, he makes love to her quietly and goes back to sleep, only to wake up later in a nightmare. Along with a crowd of other unsuccessful arts-funding applicants, he is expelled from the city by caravan, and ends up in a sports oval repurposed as a caravan park, where Polly the sexy arts administrator pulls them all into line. The actors are hived off into one group, the artists are another; there's a group of musicians, and then there are the writers. Polly knows that the writers are going to be difficult because they are the only group for whom she has to set up a game to help them break the ice...
Under her instructions we arrange our chairs in a circle and then one of us is given a ball, a medium-sized plastic ball with a tropical fruit motif on it. The person must throw the ball to someone else in the circle, but only, as we realise after two false starts, only after saying the first sentence of a story. The person who catches the ball must then provide the next sentence and so on. It's a story game, says Polly. The first player is an elderly man with a grey beard and his sentence is: As I walked out that day the air was crisp and clear. When it gets to me my sentence is: She took me by the hand and led me down the steps. It seems to go on forever. Polly has left us to our own devices and and gone over to the painters, we don't know whether we are supposed to find our own ending or wait till she comes back. (p.17)
Wayne can see that his partner is having a fine old time with the actors, when Polly comes back to marshall the writers into order. She provides them with a list of topics to write about, with instructions to choose a second preference in case their first choice is taken, and Wayne selects 'A Short History of Laburnum', a suburb not far from where he grew up. (This is typical of the kind of lame subject that writers (or arts administrators) without much experience of reading tend to think will be interesting to other readers. I am pretty sure that the only people conceivably interested in the history of Laburnam are people who live/d there. And even then, there won't be many of them.)
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2021/11/26/caravan-story-by-wayne-macauley/ show less
Wayne Macauley is the author of The Cook, a dark and funny satire which I read and reviewed a year or so ago just as Macauley was starting to gain an international profile, but I have had Blueprints for a Barbed-wire Canoe and Caravan Story on my TBR for ages. I bought them when I heard that Blueprints for a Barbed-wire Canoe was included in Year 12 reading lists and I was intrigued by the title.
I enjoyed The Cook but I found that Blueprints for a Barbed-wire Canoe was a more show more thought-provoking book. I finished it two books ago and (apart from the fact that I’ve been AWOL online this week due to some pressing commitments) this absurdist novella’s been swirling around in my brain bothering me ever since I finished it at half past one in the morning on Monday night (which hasn’t helped with the pressing commitments). Like The Cook, Blueprints for a Barbed-wire Canoe is a satire, one which attacks the sacrosanct Great Australian Home Ownership Dream, and Macauley uses lashings of black humour to make his point. It’s deeply unsettling.
Narrated by Bram, the story takes the reader to a strange alternative society that has formed in a satellite housing development marooned beyond the outskirts of Melbourne. Originally planned as a model suburb, the development stalled because a promised freeway and fuel subsidy failed to materialise, so the car-dependant projected population never materialised either. Before long nearly all of the residents leave because the place is unliveable: no transport links, miles from anywhere, and almost nothing in the way of amenities such as parks, schools, medical services, shops or eateries so there are no local jobs to be had.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2013/02/23/blueprints-for-a-barbed-wire-canoe-by-wayne-... show less
I enjoyed The Cook but I found that Blueprints for a Barbed-wire Canoe was a more show more thought-provoking book. I finished it two books ago and (apart from the fact that I’ve been AWOL online this week due to some pressing commitments) this absurdist novella’s been swirling around in my brain bothering me ever since I finished it at half past one in the morning on Monday night (which hasn’t helped with the pressing commitments). Like The Cook, Blueprints for a Barbed-wire Canoe is a satire, one which attacks the sacrosanct Great Australian Home Ownership Dream, and Macauley uses lashings of black humour to make his point. It’s deeply unsettling.
Narrated by Bram, the story takes the reader to a strange alternative society that has formed in a satellite housing development marooned beyond the outskirts of Melbourne. Originally planned as a model suburb, the development stalled because a promised freeway and fuel subsidy failed to materialise, so the car-dependant projected population never materialised either. Before long nearly all of the residents leave because the place is unliveable: no transport links, miles from anywhere, and almost nothing in the way of amenities such as parks, schools, medical services, shops or eateries so there are no local jobs to be had.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2013/02/23/blueprints-for-a-barbed-wire-canoe-by-wayne-... show less
The first thing that hit me about this book was the punctuation – there isn’t any – a pet hate of mine. I have been known to not read the book and strike an author off my ‘to read’ list if they dare do it. God gave us full stops, commas, quotation marks and the rest for a reason – to use – for clarification and understanding. BUT – there was something about the story that kept me reading despite my scratching my head and reading a paragraph more than once to try and figure show more out the flow. THE COOK is not really about ‘food’ a la Master Chef, it is not really about ‘bad boy made good’ a la Jamie Oliver; what it IS is a look at food as an indicator of money and class and the snobbery and pretentiousness that accompanies it . The sort of person who sits down on a park bench to eat ‘fish and chips’ is far inferior to a person who sits down in a fancy restaurant and dines on ‘poisson frit avec des frites’. Same dish but with foreign name it sounds posh! Be warned, the story is very dark in spots especially the harrowing, stomach turning, blood drenched lamb slaughter scene. The scene however, was necessary to the plot as budding cooks needed to be aware of where their food comes from. Yet despite all this, there was just a nugget of compulsion to keep on reading just to see where the author was going with the story and the unexpected twist at the end is the reward for making it all the way there. show less
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- Works
- 9
- Also by
- 2
- Members
- 137
- Popularity
- #149,083
- Rating
- 3.7
- Reviews
- 9
- ISBNs
- 31