A Love Letter to Australian YA

A Love Letter to Australian YA 

Written by Celine Lindeque 

Growing up, I had no idea Australia had a thriving literary community. All the books I saw stocked in the Young Adult (YA) section of the big chain bookstores were set in the US, with the occasional England-based story. In junior school, I’d paged through chapter books set somewhat locally — albeit always in Sydney or Melbourne. However, I believed the room for those stories had evaporated by my teenage years. It was only when I attended my first Love YA Day that the elusive mystery of where all the Australian YA books were was solved. 

I can remember sitting attentively in my plastic chair and listening to authors and panellists discuss their books and love of literature. I heard authors talk about the setting of their books and my ears pricked up at the mention of familiar-sounding cities and towns. But their books couldn’t be set in Australia, could they? At the time I didn’t recognise any of the names or faces on the small Southbank stage, but I jotted them down for future investigation, my hopes steadily rising.  

One of the authors that year was Steph Bowe, with beautiful blue swirling face paint climbing her cheekbone, who had recently released her third YA novel Night Swimming. I bought the book after the panel and opened to the first page. My finger stopped on the first line of the book: “My name is Kirby Arrow. I was named after the most dissenting judge in the history of the High Court of Australia”. So it was true! Australian YA books did exist! 

I took the book home, huddled my body around it on the couch, and began to read. I didn’t know what to expect. I mean, would the writing be any good? Was the standard of what gets published here as high as I perceived it to be in the US? 

My doubts quickly disappeared as I read on, devouring the book within a few days. I adored the rural Australian town setting and a joyful cast of characters. During my next visit to the bookstore, I eagerly paid attention to the synopses printed on the books. At the sight of anything remotely hinting at an Australian setting, I’d flip it back over and flick through a few pages. I remember picking up a book with a grey cover and bold pink text: Small Spaces by Sarah Epstein. I turned the book over and my eyes caught a hashtag down the bottom, printed above the barcode, reading #LoveOzYA. This hashtag and the Bookstagram (book-Instagram) accounts who used it proceeded to guide my reading expeditions over the next few years until my feet were steadily planted in the online Aussie book world. 

As my to-be-read pile evolved from entirely US-written works and started including locally set stories, I noticed a few key elements unique to Aussie YA lit. In the school-based books I read, topics such as upcoming formals and schoolies were mentioned, along with how the characters were worried about their future ATAR and university prospects. In all honesty, at first I found the name-dropping of concepts I’d experienced but never read on the page before quite jarring. It felt as if the distance between the author of the work and myself as the reader had been crossed. I was no longer consuming entertainment designed for another audience filled with terms I’d never heard used in everyday life. Now the stories I was reading were no longer built solely by my imagination but upon experiences I had lived through.  

Finally, the creative language you find in Australian YA books is truly unmatched. Where else would you find a description of someone throwing “a thumbs up like a wasted Wiggle” (Henry Hamlet’s Heart by Rhiannon Wilde)? Or, such vivid emotional turmoil matched with mental imagery of the Brisbane River in a sentence like “I want to throw myself off the front of this boat and let the disgusting brown water of the Brisbane River take me…” (Social Queue by Kay Kerr) than an Aussie YA book? Authors are given the refreshing freedom to lean into what makes their stories uniquely relatable for Australian young adults in our publishing industry. And in every case, their books are better off for it.  

But if we want to continue reading stories which reflect our upbringing, we have to make sure the demand is there. Books are sold predominately via word of mouth (including social media posts), so we need to be looking out for, posting about, borrowing and buying Australian YA stories. And to know what Australian YA books are out there, bookstores need to be displaying them, and book events need to be highlighting them — which is exactly what the Brisbane Writers Festival does! 

Whether this is all news to you too, or you are well acquainted with Aussie KidLit, come along to Love YA Day on June 1st to hear from Aussie authors across 4 sessions. Who knows? It may be as eye-opening for you as it was for me.