Anna Broinowski
Datsun Angel

Anna Broinowski’s memoir, Datsun Angel: A true-story adventure inside the savage heart of 1980s Australia, begins in the hallowed residential halls of the University of Sydney. Hazing rituals, sexist humiliation, class snobbery and drinking cultures are in full swing. Broinowski manages to be a misfit in this environment quite by accident – by being, saying or doing the “wrong thing”, according to the North Shore Old Boys’ culture. This culminates in targeting and bullying, until she ends up the victim of a horrific hazing ritual.

A chance encounter in the women’s toilets leads her to finally find “her people” at the uni – the Dramatic Society crowd. It’s via these interesting and creative types that Broinowski’s world is expanded. The pictures she paints of her friends from this time make for delightful reading – whether they are feminist non-conformists constructing vagina-centric art films, or creative men not interested in fitting masculine norms. A moment of self-reckoning and disillusionment leads to her deciding to hitchhike to Darwin, with a male friend from this crowd.

What happens on the road creates an interesting juxtaposition between the untamed wild lands of the Australian interior and the sandstone buildings of Sydney Uni. A horrendous encounter with truck drivers reads like what might have happened had they dropped a woman in the middle of Wake in Fright. You recognise the layered violence in it, while being all too familiar with the tactics women use when navigating similar situations. Contrasting this experience, however, with her earlier recollection of uni boys laughing about the seeming pack rape of a girl in yet another “prank”, you’re left chewing on the “acceptability” of the latter, due to the different context. Perhaps the harsh light of the outback brings abuse and discrimination into sharper relief?

Broinowski’s work is compelling. She will drop an act of misogynistic brutality into a paragraph, actively mirroring how casually it was spoken about at the time. The ways in which she introduces us to the people in her story gives us incredible insight into how each of them affected her.

Broinowski’s experiences, unfortunately, remain timeless and relatable. We still hear of hazing rituals and sexual assaults on campus. We still lose at least one woman a week to men’s violence. And we still see the racism and class dynamics permeating our society. Nowadays they may be documented via Instagram live rather than in a tattered journal, but they are still present. Perhaps the feeling I was left with most was how little we’ve changed in nearly 40 years, and how far we still have to go. 

Hachette, 320pp, $34.99