Books
Cameron Hurst, Sally Olds and Oscar Schwartz
Exclusive! Dispatches from The Paris End
In Australia, serious writing faces a gamut of challenges from a lingering suspicion of any elevated register to a shrinking literary market overshadowed by ravenous LLMs poised to ingest any work the moment it emerges. Now our second oldest literary magazine, Meanjin, has announced its impending closure, it leads me to wonder in darker moments if serious Australian writing has a future at all.
Into this breach step three writers, Cameron Hurst, Sally Olds and Oscar Schwartz, who met in a pub just as Melbourne was reopening post-lockdown. There they hashed out a fortnightly Substack, The Paris End, named after the ritzy part of Collins Street. Unapologetically hip, intellectual and local – mostly Melbourne but with occasional foreign filings – it’s a little queer, a little Jewish and very clever, covering everything from raw milk to male lesbians to traditional Catholics. The newsletter survives on wit, reporting and writing, and the best dispatches are now released as a book: Exclusive! Dispatches from The Paris End.
The writing is best shown by example. Of London: “hard-Brexiting into little more than a Monopoly board of sandwich franchises for the pallid underclass and private members’ clubs for the finance guys and their consorts”. Of a micro-fashion designer: “looks as if Lana Del Ray went in and out of a pencil sharpener – still gorgeous but more angular”. Of Frank Moorhouse’s ageing body: “It would be gauche to look too closely, like peeking behind curtains at intermission.”
Many subjects would be an easy phone-in. This is Substack. Even when a story is on the computer screen, such as the JFK-esque forensic close reading of a video titled Lesbian Landslide, shoe leather (probably vegan) is spent reporting from the real world. Olds’ work on Nightingale ethical housing is particularly tenacious. Of the other two, Hurst might be the better writer, while Schwartz is the more willing to go gonzo and put his faith, body and mind on the line. Illustrations by Aaron Billings insert a welcome breather.
I felt the usual jealousy that creeps through my innards whenever I read excellent writing, but here was something else. Was this the Melbourne I had moved to in hope of finding? A place where doofs cross-pollinate with the art world and pubs host Lacanian reading groups? One might assume coolness came at a price either through sneering cynicism or disaffected vocal fry, but somehow this book offers earnestness and humour without pretension.
Giramondo, 324pp, $34.95
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on November 8, 2025 as "Exclusive! Dispatches from The Paris End".
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