It’s 2024. For Helen, things are going sideways at best. She used to manage a cinema; now she works in a bottle shop. She’s moved from her chaotic sharehouse to an anonymous apartment with disaffected sound guy Pat, who only leaves the couch to go to gigs. Meanwhile, her former housemate Sunny continues to obsess over their ‘anti-hardcore’ band, and has moved in with their drummer, Sio, the only one of them who seems to have their life even halfway together. These characters’ lives intertwine through the underground punk scenes of Sydney, a rising protest movement, and their endless efforts to find a creatively fulfilling life in a city which seems to have no interest in supporting any such thing. Then, out of the grimy air of one of the city’s worst arterial roads, a dilapidated palace looms: an icon of faded glory, which promises the chance that one last radical act will cement their place in radical history. Traversing anarchist collectives and experiments in autonomous living, political protest and DIY activism, Max Easton’s third novel continues his thirty-year portrait of working-class life in subcultures and music scenes, exploring intergenerational political solidarity, and the ever-present risk of disillusionment under the heavy hand of the state. Now, Autonomy is a novel about the echoes of the past in the present; about the way in which history repeats, even if the lyrics don’t always rhyme.
