Damian McDonald (writer)

Biography

Damian McDonald was born in Canberra and raised by his single mother until she married his stepfather when McDonald was five. His one sibling, a sister, was born in 1974. McDonald's stepfather was an alcoholic and abusive, and McDonald and his sister endured years of poverty and violence. This experience would be a theme portrayed in McDonald's writing. In late primary school and early high school McDonald discovered rock music such as Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, Iron Maiden, and Sex Pistols. McDonald bought a guitar and began jamming with like-minded friends and found an outlet for the frustration he was experiencing in his unhappy home life. However, because of his passion for music, McDonald didn't fit in with the mainstream students, and subsequently took out his frustrations on other pupils, mirroring his father's behaviour as he became a school bully, recruiting friends to beat up weaker kids. No doubt he would feel deep shame and remorse in later life, thinking about the violence he dished out to others. In 1986, at age 16, McDonald left school and home, and moved to Sydney where a musician friend had moved several months earlier. His plan was to become a professional rock musician.

Years of toiling in factories and warehouses while rehearsing and playing gigs with Sydney hard rock bands such as Warspite, Detriment and Money Tree Seeds began to take a toll on McDonald, who was seeing his dream of becoming a successful musician eaten away by a lack of support, overindulgence in drugs and alcohol and destructive relationships. In 1996 he made the decision to give music a break for a while. But despairing at the thought of becoming a full-time permanent factory worker led him back to school. McDonald began a Bachelor of Arts in Communication at the University of Canberra after quitting work and returning to the ACT. Without a job, McDonald found accommodation in Canberra's notorious (now demolished) Burnie Court ACT Housing Trust estate. There McDonald met many of the characters that would feature in his work. Growing frustrated with Canberra, McDonald moved back to Sydney and completed a Bachelor of Arts with a double major in English Literature at the University of Western Sydney. Having discovered a passion for reading and writing literature. McDonald then completed a Master of Arts in Creative Writing at the University of Western Sydney, topping his year.

McDonald now lives in Sydney, works as a curator at the Powerhouse Museum, writes for and plays bass in his band Quayleaf [3], and writes literature. He has one daughter.

Fiction

McDonald's first novel Luck in the Greater West was published in October 2007 after winning the 2007 ABC Fiction Award [4]. Luck in the Greater West is a dissection of the lives of a diverse range of people living in twenty-first-century Western Sydney. Through well developed characterisation and strongly evoked setting, the manuscript is a realism piece that explores the themes of multiculturalism, unemployment, employment, drug use and abuse, racism, rape, relationships, sexuality, love, and the diverse socioeconomic milieu of the western suburbs of Sydney. Most fiction novels about Western Sydney don't get much past the inner-west, dealing with a more fashionable grunge/bohemian existence. Luck in the Greater West, however, deals with that vast accumulation of lives that go virtually voiceless as far as literature is concerned.

For the audiobook version of Luck in the Greater West, read by actor Damon Herriman, McDonald composed and performed all the musical cuts.

The novel received good critical review; however, controversy has surrounded aspects of the novel that are quite obviously inspired by the infamous Mohammed Skaf gang rape case in Sydney in which male youths of Middle Eastern backgrounds assaulted and gang raped several young Anglo women in Sydney's south-west in 2000.

The central character of the novel is Patrick White; he is in his early twenties, unemployed, he sells drugs to friends, and lets life tow him along with little questioning. He is intelligent, although a little perplexed by what life offers him. Life soon tows Patrick into trouble with the Western Plateau Local Patrol and the subsequent processes of the law. Patrick is sentenced to do some jail time for possession of drugs, but he deals with it the only way he knows how to: as just another – albeit dark – chapter in his life. Patrick's frank and grounded take on life makes him, despite his uninformed life choices, a character who is thoroughly easy to empathise with.

Senior Sergeant Testafiglia runs the Western Plateau Local Patrol. His strong European values – that have always been his ally – must sustain an equally strong battering when his life, and more poignantly, the lives of his family become complicated by a rape issue he is dealing with at work. Testafiglia's teenage daughter is becoming a woman; and fears that he hadn't fully considered begin to flood into his reality. However, they become the catalyst that sees the humanisation of his character, and a regrowth of the Testafiglia family dynamic.

Sonja Marmeladova migrated to Australia with her family from Russia five years ago. She is in year nine at the local high school, but is quite bored by the students and the curriculum. She is beyond her years in intelligence, and feels she is yet to find a place in her adopted community. The Marmeladovas live in a Housing Commission flat where, by a random incident, Sonja meets a young man who has recently moved into the same block of flats: Patrick White–back out from his completed jail sentence. The two are immediately attracted to each other and become lovers–complicating their already confused lives, and further complicating the cultural shock her family is suffering in Western Sydney. Sonja and Patrick's relationship is deep and devouring but, like a narcotic, has side-effects, and for Sonja, after so much indulgence, a moment of clarity.

Abdullah Najib and his mates love driving through the suburbs in the Subaru WRX, looking for chicks they can all have a lash at. Abdullah is proud to be Lebanese, although he has an increasing dislike for his immediate family who seem to have sunk into the Aussie way of life. He is outwardly very sure of himself, and finds it easy to make people see things his way. But his attitude – like his hormones – is getting out of control. Abdullah's character is a particularly clear example of the way none of the characters in Luck in the Greater West are simply good or bad, but are all complex combinations of qualities.

The lives of all the characters and their situations interweave through the text, and all become involved – with differing perspectives – in the central issues of the manuscript. Each of the narratives of the piece have a conclusion. However, as it is a work of realism, not everything concludes as the narrative trajectory would suggest. Testafiglia, despite his growing hate and disappointment, becomes a better father to his now pregnant teenage daughter. Abdullah, who receives a long jail term for the rapes he and his mates inflicted on numerous young women, becomes enlightened after becoming the victim of a serious assault, and then receiving a visit from the young mother of his soon-to-be-born child–Testafiglia's daughter. Patrick, who has had to deal with the break-up of his relationship with Sonja, begins to put his life back together–in his own way–and moves in with his previous girlfriend, and the reader is witness to the bitter-sweet way this slice of Patrick's life has turned out.

The piece comments not only on contemporary life in Western Sydney, but life in the greater Western world. It deals with dark issues, but is also peppered with humour and intertextuality. The target readership for this piece is young, relatively well-read adults, and those with an interest in contemporary Australian literature; and, of course, anyone who enjoys reading. The book would also be appropriate for study by tertiary literature students as an example of topical, contemporary Australian literature and intertexuality, and also to latter secondary school students as an example of literature that deals with contemporary Western issues.

McDonald has two subsequent works yet to be published: one is a semi auto-biographic novel about life as a struggling rock musician in Sydney's underground; the other is a literature novel concerning a young Middle Eastern woman trying to make a career in the entertainment industry despite the conflicts it causes in her family.

McDonald also has poetry and short stories published in the University of Sydney's Hermes journal, and several independent literary journals published by UWS Press.