The first time I heard of Diana Reid’s 2021 novel Love & Virtue I was — much like its protagonist, at times — on the Murrays. Its title spread quickly through group chats, a subject of discourse at our pre-academic year Common Room Committee ‘retreat’. “It’s so interesting,” we tittered, “what life at USyd looks like.”
Of course, Love & Virtue’s broad appeal and our fascination with it is borne from a degree of universality. ANU’s colleges are not sandstone, nor are they particularly storied, but they are equally filled with private-school Sydney transplants who employ HSCNinja as liberally as Instagram to stalk their acquaintances and equally charge the going rate of $60 an hour for HSC tutoring. Other aspects of the Australian university experiences stick out further: our perpetual informality in addressing academics, for example, perhaps reflecting their de-edification by a musty, unassuming lecture ‘theatre’. Notwithstanding that Love & Virtue is, broadly, easy to read and well-written, much of its appeal lies in a description of Sydney, and Australian campuses, that felt tangible, in the way that American, British and Irish institutions littering the Goodreads to-read lists of my friends often do. Which begged the question: where had the Australian campus novel been before?
It is not uncommon for popular Australian novels to centre on the continent’s landscape. Several recent Miles Franklin-winning novels explore Aboriginal Australian narratives. It is understandable, perhaps, that to foreign audiences these are features that most rapidly communicate key characteristics of Australia: vast, dry, settler-colonial. In a quest for international marketability, Australian media that does not explicitly centre on these themes instead often erases its setting altogether: you could be forgiven for failing to notice that Netflix’s reboot of Heartbreak High was filmed in Maroubra, for example, and the lack of what should be ubiquitous school uniforms seems designed to smooth over an American viewing experience.
This is not to suggest that authors should pay greater attention to the specific universities at the expense of other important critiques and explorations of Australian society. But it seems worthy of comment that popular, critically-acclaimed, Australian novels do not seem to consider a tertiary education system, that over half of the population holds a degree from, in any great depth. This becomes particularly jarring when you consider the enmeshment of the campus novel into the modern literature canon of other anglophone countries. A particular genre of the American university experience — ivy-league, perhaps, exclusive, definitely — is well described in Donna Tartt’s The Secret History and Elif Batuman’s The Idiot, and others — fraternities, sororities, et cetera — are a mainstay of films marketed to our age group. Oxford features in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited and becomes the centrepiece of the aesthetic backdrop in Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn. Sally Rooney’s Normal People has resulted in Trinity College campus and its traditions becoming cemented into global conceptions of university, despite Ireland’s small population.
We could be content with these representations, but the observation that our universities are vastly different from their international counterparts would not elude any Australian student. 80% of Australians work while studying, while student loan schemes in place in the UK and the US result in that number being 56% and 40% respectively. Students who worked while studying in the US were 20% less likely to finish their degrees, but in Australia this was positively correlated to degree attainment, suggesting a fundamental difference in how our universities operated. It doesn’t take keen observation to note that the experience of studying while working differs vastly from treating academic endeavours as a full-time job. And yet, the majority of media we consume insists that paid employment is entirely outside the realm of tertiary education.
The structure of Australian degrees also seems to sit between the rigidity or freedom suggested by popular media (depending on whether you’re reading an American or British conception). The notion of a ‘concentration’ is rightly mocked by those Tiktok videos that satirise American vocabulary, but we have significantly more freedom than extremely-specialised British degrees. These differences create a bizarre clash between our high-school romanticisations of university life and its reality.
Whether or not depictions of tertiary education might be accurate to an Australian perspective is not necessarily an individually pressing issue. But the lack of Australian narratives or genre development about a formative period of many of our lives limits our ability to use literature and stories to make sense of our own experiences or view them reflected back at us. We suffer from the narrowness of a single popular depiction, and, as granular and accurate as Reid’s portrayal may be, the vast majority of Australian students do not pass through university with catered formal dinners at colleges. There is much to be gained from reading literature with the view of expanding your perspectives, but equally as important is its capacity to help us understand ourselves. There are other Australian student stories worth being told.
