camping underground

Set around Cessnock in the New South Wales Hunter Valley, camping underground is a brutal, lyrical and cinematic narrative that lays out the scattered fragments of Kelly Edwards's life before and after the political violence she is implicated in unleashes a viral pandemic and societal collapse. Surviving the wreckage, moving amid the chaos while searching for her niece Ruth, while she has time, a mute, traumatised Kelly responds with violence of her own, as conflict and control dance around in the aftermath of the virus.

McLaren has written the Great Australian Apocalypse. camping underground is a vernacular lament for our country's past, present, and possible futures, but it never succumbs to cynicism: it feels urgent, affectionate, and beautiful, full of despair and love and a biting sense of humour. I read it in one sitting, completely spellbound, and it made my heart both shrink and stretch. - Fiona McFarlane

McLaren's verse grabs you like an accident, like the blood smell of metallic paint, or the flecks of hair and scalp behind a twisted steering wheel. His country towns, like his Australia, are human versions of a wrecker's yard, as if all the violence and unlived life of their inhabitants concentrated in that instant before death, and exploded. This poem is a record of that explosion. - John Hughes