Some of the most celebrated novelists of the past half-century died this year, including Cormac McCarthy, A.S. Byatt, Martin Amis, D.M. Thomas, Milan Kundera, and Kenzaburō Ōe. The deaths of those writers justifiably generated numerous tributes and appreciations in the pages of the world’s most venerable newspapers and magazines. I would like to take time here to remember three writers who also passed away in 2023 but whose deaths did not receive the attention they deserved.

Gabrielle Carey (1959–2023)

Australian novelist Gabrielle Carey, who died in May of this year, was born on January 10th, 1959. At the age of just 20, Carey and her close friend Kathy Lette published a scandalous autobiographical novel titled Puberty Blues about the exploits and misadventures of under-aged girls who strayed into the mostly masculine world of mid-20th-century surf culture. In discussions of Australian literature, Carey and Lette’s provocative coming-of-age tale is often compared to The Catcher in the Rye.

Both authors were born in Sydney (Lette was just two months older than Carey), and their novel is set largely in Cronulla, one of the city’s beachfront suburbs. Girls were welcomed into surfing groups so long as they fetched food and towels, ran errands, and made themselves available for any kind of sexual activity the boys demanded. The novel’s 13-year-old protagonists, Deb and Sue, duly endure a series of often degrading experiences at the hands of the surfers they long to call their boyfriends. Sadly, their home lives are so dull that these experiences strike them as an exciting change.

The novel opens with this:

When we were thirteen, the coolest things to do were the things your parents wouldn’t let you do. Things like have sex, smoke cigarettes, nick off from school, go to the drive-in, take drugs and go to the beach.

The beach was the centre of our world. Rain, snow, hail, a two-hour wait at the bus stop, or being grounded, nothing could keep us from the surf. Us little surfie chicks, chirping our way down on the train. Hundreds of us in little white shirts, short-sleeved jumpers, thongs and straight-legged Levis covering little black bikinis. We flocked to the beach. Cheep. Cheep.

Carey and Lette didn’t sugarcoat surfie chick life, and the frank discussions of sex (usually referred to as “rooting”) made the book notorious from the moment it was published. The most painful scenes occur when Deb, the narrator, describes her attempts to give some boy or other the sex he wants, despite the fact that her 13-year-old body clearly wasn’t yet ready to be used in this way.

As Deb explains:

You didn’t necessarily have to like a guy to go out with him. If he was part of the gang and he chose you, you felt privileged. You’d go out with him about three times… well, you wouldn’t actually go out with him. You’d go out with his gang to a party and when everyone else paired off, for a pash [make-out session] on the front fence, or a finger behind the Holden [an Australian model of vehicle], or a “tit-off” down the other end of the hall nearly in the linen press. You wouldn’t talk, you’d just “be with” him. From that night on, you’d know you were going around with him.

The various beaches in Sydney are ranked according to their desirability. South Cronulla is the least prestigious of the beaches. North Cronulla is slightly more attractive. But the real goal of every surfie chick was to attract a boy who surfed at Greenhills, the most exclusive beach in the area. The more desirable the surfing spot, the more the girls were willing to do to get there. Here’s Deb again:

At South Cronulla we’d let the boys “tit-us-off” and occasionally get a hand down our pants. At North Cronulla we’d progressed to dry roots. When we graduated to our new gang at Greenhills, we’d hit the big time. It was time for the spreading of the legs and the splitting up the middle.

You had to “go out” with a guy for at least two weeks before you’d let him screw you. You had to time it perfectly. If you waited too long you were a tight-arsed prickteaser. If you let him too early, you were a slack-arsed moll. So, after a few weeks, he’d ask you for a root, and if you wanted to keep him, you’d do it.

While Deb sits in the front seat of the surfers’ panel van awaiting her turn to be deflowered, she listens “to the suppressed screams of agony as Sue lost her virginity to Danny in the back. That’s the way it goes for girls. Every car in the parking lot was doing it… the panel-van bop. Then it was my turn. I couldn’t say no. Bruce had picked me out of all the other girls. Bruce was the top guy of the gang. Even better than Darren Peters. He was the eldest. He had a car, a job, money, and the biggest prick.”

Hip and profane, Puberty Blues made instant celebrities of its two young authors, and for a while they wrote a column together for the Sun-Herald under the byline “Salami Sisters.” But soon they drifted apart, and fell out of contact for 20 years. Although they both went on to write more books, they never again collaborated on one. Carey wrote one solo novel in 1994 titled The Borrowed Girl and then retreated into obscurity. The pair reunited for a TV profile in 2012, when Puberty Blues was being adapted as an Australian TV series.

A 2020 profile of Carey by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation notes that: “The public reaction to Puberty Blues was one of outrage and incredulity, and the media hovered over the girls constantly. While Kathy embraced her growing fame, Gabrielle felt a strong urge to escape it. She moved to Ireland, then lived in Mexico for many years before returning to Australia to build a career as a writer and academic.”