This week turns our spotlight to fiction, highlighting the 1994 novel by Leonie Stevens, Nature Strip: A story of love and revenge.

Post written by Polly Grant Butler

Walking to work after being in Europe for over a month, I watched the streets widen and flatten before my eyes, so unlike the twists and bends of Portugal. The leaves on the trees looked crisp, a reminder of the drought and bush fire season ahead, and I thought of all of the things I don’t like about this country. The sterility, the cleanliness; how effusive people are, how repressed. How we willingly eat boiled vegetables without any seasoning. How we keep trying to demonise bread.

Despite these things, I never stop loving the art we produce here. Our strange cities might be smooth, but they often make brilliant settings for novels. Our grunge-lit writers knew this, painting vivid pictures of suburban streets as characters passed between share houses, often in search of drugs, like in Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip or Andrew McGahan’s Praise. Or Nature Strip: A story of love and revenge by Leonie Stevens.

Written in first person, Nature Strip immediately brings you into the voice of protagonist Caitlin, who has just arrived in Melbourne: ‘The little I could see of the town from the taxi window made me doubt the sanity of Melbourne’s town planners. Tiny cottages were squashed along boulevards wide enough to carry whole armies. Even the side lanes were bombastic.’

Caitlin and her group burst from the page. Hedonistic and adventurous, their dialogue is distinctly Australian, meaning the characters are usually roasting one another. Yet there’s also plenty of romance in the book, with Caitlin absorbed by her intense friendships, the kind you have in the stage between teenager and adult when the world is opening up, and there is endless time for fun.

Leonie’s prose is short and sharp, intelligent in her references and sardonic in her observations. It’s a novel of sex, drugs and rock n roll, as well as death, grief and growing up. Easily read in one sitting, Nature Strip is a book worth revisiting.

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