From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
Newcastle
Newcastle is the coastal Australian city in which the first half of Beach Surgery takes place, and the narrator's real home in the frame story. He calls it a "bite-sized labyrinth" of "ontological incompleteness" — a place of buildings that seem to vanish when you look away, such as Rose House, glimpsed only from certain angles.[1]
Key locations include Bolton Street car park (where the story opens), the public baths (the astronaut's alarm-clock baptism), the Watt Hotel, Styx Creek, and the Dampened Cardboard jazz club. The city's psychogeography has spawned its own strand of city tours.
The Literary Atlas of Newcastle
Newcastle is not only the setting of Beach Surgery but the recurring ground beneath C. W. Smith's entire body of work — the same streets, baths, headlands and car parks are walked again and again across the novel, Antinomicity, Pastoral Scanlines, Fellow Disjecta and Everyone I Love is Alive in the Unlimited Present of the City and its Waters. The map below plots every real place named across those works. Each pin records which work (or works) surface it, with the passage in which it appears; a pin grows as more works return to the same spot. It is, in effect, the city seen through the whole oeuvre at once — the literal-geographic face of the cycle.
The densest clusters fall where the writing lives: the Civic precinct (the Conservatorium, TPI House, Civic Park, the doughnut-shaped council building), the coastal edge from the Ocean Baths and Bogey Hole around King Edward Park to Nobbys Lighthouse, and the Bolton Street ridge where Bolton Street car park gives "the most uninterrupted view of the city" and the embedded story begins. Beyond the city, a scatter of regional pins — Maitland, Lake Macquarie, Forster, the Narrabri dishes — marks the further reach of the frame narrator's memory.
See also
References
- ↑ Smith, C. W. A Complicated Surgery…, 2020.