THE BOY FROM OZ: THE BLOKE WHO CALLS STRAYA HOME

Anthony O’Connor has a way with words. Just ask any of the filmmakers who’ve felt his slings and arrows as one of the nation's leading film critics, most recently at FilmInk; or the actors (amongst them, Nicholas Hope and Jessica Napier) guided by his scripts Redd Inc. (2012) and Angst (2000), respectively. Now, O’Connor has turned to...let’s call it, ‘Down Under dystopia’, for his first novel, Straya, an anarchic and raucous ride through the bowels and other organs of a post-apocalyptic New Sydney.

O’Connor’s alter-ego is Franga, an affable young mutant providing for his mutie kids, who must defend his hometown of New Sydney when an ancient artifact unleashes an unspeakable horror that threatens all of Straya. Released May 8 (geddit?), O’Connor offers some keen insight into crafting the world of Straya and what it took to get his debut novel (available in paperback, ebook, and audiobook) out of his head and onto the page...

SCREEN-SPACE: Can we assume 'Franga' is Anthony O'Connor in a little mutie bundle?

O'CONNOR: Look, there’s this thing writers do sometimes, where they talk about how a character came to life and somehow wrote their own story, against the author’s will. And I always think, “You affected wanker, shut your lying noise hole.” But I swear a version of that happened to me writing Straya. Franga was originally a glib smart arse, aloof and cynical, and yet as I was writing he just kept being kind. Eventually, I just leaned into it, and embraced the fact his kindness was his strength. So, yeah, Franga is lovely and wonderful and I am definitely not him.

SCREEN-SPACE: From which dark corner of your psyche did Straya emerge?

I had the idea when I was twelve or thirteen. The concept was broadly speaking, the same. Ruined city, personality-absorbing monster, shenanigans ensue. It was called Body Chute and the premise was a cop from the Big End of Town and a cop from the Inasiddy would team up to try and take the monster down. I was obsessed with 2000AD comics, Judge Dredd, and Blade Runner, so I was doing my best to ape those influences. [But] I didn’t know, or much care, about cops and I certainly didn’t have any insights to offer about them. Around 2017, I started thinking about a troupe of teenage mutants who put on plays in the ruins of a city. Then, emerging like a beast from the Downlow, I remembered Body Chute and thought, “Hey, let’s smush those two together and see what happens!” (Pictured, above; O'Connor at a book read for the launch of Straya)

SCREEN-SPACE: Tell us about creating the language of Straya...

O'CONNOR: I’ve always been obsessed with Australian slang, accents and colloquialisms, so as soon as I worked out who Franga was, I knew he had to talk a certain way. The balancing act was finding a way to make it engaging but comprehensible. I used books like A Clockwork Orange and Trainspotting as guides, because they pretty much set the benchmark for made up languages and phonetic Scottish respectively.

SCREEN-SPACE: Some would say the developers paradise that is contemporary Sydney often looks like a wasteland. How easy was it to world-build a future Sydney from scratch?

O'CONNOR: [I did] lots of walking around Sydney, imagining how things could be used by a makeshift, devolved society. It’s been a lifelong obsession, imagining a post-apocalyptic society. I was a nipper during the 1980s, so I caught the full brunt of that Reagan-era nuclear war terror and never quite shook it. The specifics of the apocalypse in Straya are deliberately vague, but the notion of it comes from that decade when we all cowered in the shadow of the mushroom cloud that thankfully never arrived.

SCREEN-SPACE: Did novel writing feel like a natural progression for someone who has written both scripts and film reviews?

O'CONNOR: I’m a voracious reader and I’ve always wanted to write books. But there was an element of necessity too. The Aussie film industry, as it currently stands, doesn’t want to tell the Mad Max-style genre stories it used to in the 70s and 80s, or even the weirdo indie yarns from the 90s. And that’s fine, times change, but I wanted to tell an odd, ambitious, apocalyptic story that resists easy categorisation, and a book seemed the ideal medium. I’d be more than happy to knock out the screenplay, of course. Someone get George Miller on the phone!

SCREEN-SPACE: Straya advocates strongly for an arts sectors or, as Franga puts it, 'Yarts', particularly for the disenfranchised. Is that the book's social conscience?

O'CONNOR: Oh, absolutely. Look, the arts should be for everyone. This notion they’re a preoccupation of the idle rich is maddening and relatively new, historically speaking. I don’t know how you’d make them accessible across the board, but I do know that as long as you have to hock a kidney to be able to afford a trip to the Opera House, they never will be. The arts enrich us, and I reckon everyone deserves to be enriched. Except people who use their phones during plays. They can get stuffed.

SCREEN-SPACE: Apart from Franga, what character resonated the most with you?

O'CONNOR: It’s 100% the monster. One. Hundred. Percent. I’ve always empathised with the monster. When I was kid, I saw Clash of the Titans (1981) and I was absolutely inconsolable when the Kraken died, because to my young mind it wasn’t evil, just misused by one dickhead God or another. All monsters are tragic in a way; Straya’s monster certainly is. They’re usually victims of circumstance, or humanity’s hubris. It’s what makes them so interesting.

STRAYA is available at Amazon, Abbey's Bookshop and wherever all good books are sold.