Sydney and Its Waterway in Australian Literary Modernism

Cusack's characters endeavour to navigate the "wild tides" of their contemporary existence, and Brayshaw focuses on Cusack's attempts to realistically represent the lives of modern urban women with an emphasis on "relationships and sexuality, and bodily and intellectual autonomy in a social milieu that has not yet evolved to reflect new values for living" (73). Cusack's strength lies in her ability to weave such complex theory into a middlebrow plot, and her belief that the modern urban novel "can be about both the social relations of young women and the fundamental principles of quantum physics" (102). Brayshaw outlines how this porousness in perspective and time creates a sense of multitemporality, utilising Ross Gibson's theory of "aqueous aesthetics" to consider how Waterway could be read as a "changescape" that "models and responds to the dynamic relation of natural, social and psychological forms in the technological domain of the modern city" (108). Foveaux offers a tale of urban renewal from the perspective of some of Sydney's poorest residents, and Brayshaw repeatedly draws attention to the ways in which the "intervention of working-class lives can subtly undermine dominant definitions of progress in urban modernity" (144).