We All Lived in Bondi Then

November 28, 2023
We All Lived in Bondi Then is the last publication of new work by Georgia Blain. This collection comprises nine previously unpublished stories written between 2012 and 2015, before Blain’s death from cancer in 2016. It is difficult not to read the collection with a sense of foreboding—its sorrows, deaths and illnesses uncomfortably prefiguring the author’s own suffering following her diagnosis late in 2015. The sometimes suffocatingly bleak themes echo in the description of fog in one story, which ‘rises from the river, thick and damp, resting like a flannel on her mouth and on her lungs’. Yet the writing never wallows in sentimentality; instead, its portraits of the ordinary toils of life are glassy-clear and smooth, making the scarce moments of optimism or humour almost euphoric. Suffused with tired resignation, protagonists look back—on childhoods, affairs past, and halcyon days before life transitions or traumas. They survive in the present through griefs and shadowy absences—amnesias, losses of lovers, love, and loved ones. A long blackout, an unspecified apocalyptic event leaving few survivors, or simply the numbing daily grind of life—the settings generate nostalgia for times when other futures were still possible. Yet there is a sense that the past (as Charlotte Wood’s introduction characterises it, ‘the brutal clumsiness of youth’) was rarely idyllic, but that struggle is a simple truth of existence. The collection offers readers a final gift of the lucid, observant, occasionally wry examination of modern life and the human condition for which Blain is celebrated.