Book Review: Barry and the Fairies of Miller Street by Barry Dickins and Jenny Lee

Barry Miller's pseudo-autobiographical tale Barry and the Fairies of Miller Street is a tangy narrative mix of vim, innocent wit, and matter-of-fact reportage into the goings-on of 1950s working class Melbourne suburbia, and all garnished with a sprig of whimsy and a jus of the fantastic.

Barry's visit to his grandparents' Preston home puts the much-maligned and -dissected Great Australian Ugliness is on full and unabashed display: his visit is a blur of Vegemite sandwiches and ANZAC biscuits, his Pop's endless stash of cigarettes, and visits from laconic neighbours, all with a veneer of cream brick and speckled laminate.

But as is so often the case, there's far more going on here than meets the eye, and while tales such as this can easily crumble into nostalgic nothingness (rather like a stale lamington at the local church fete), Miller's is infused with a merry knowingness and a penchant for finding the unusual in the maddeningly mundane. It's a classic tale of the success of the underdog, with a narrative that resembles The Castle and 45 and 47 Stella Street and Everything that Happened.

But Miller unleashes the imagination of his childhood on to whitebread suburbia, populating it not only with larger-than-life family members and neighbours whose quest for a fair go knows no boundaries, but also with a dash of the fey folk. Yes, fairies. As you do.

The result is not always successful, with the fairies in question being surprisingly rather less interesting than Barry's perusals of comic books and his adventures in buying fish and chips, but his evident need to create a sense of the whimsical and the unusual within such an otherwise soulless, empty context fascinates: without imagination, how is one supposed to survive in such a setting? Surely not on jaffles alone?

Between the fairies, Barry's grandfather's death from cancer and an evil council plot to redevelop the area, Miller offers a glimpse into the machinations of what is to most an insipid setting unworthy of deeper examination. It's with a curious mix of critique and exaltation that Miller does so, reminding us that behind those uniform pale brick fences and beaten weatherboard exteriors are individuals whose can be bestirred beyond a life of primetime television and oversugared instant coffee to heights that may seem utterly out of reachsuch asthe Preston Hump that is so central to this story.

Rating: (good)