Nikki Lusk chooses apt soundtracks for classic Australian literature. Here she pairs Kenneth Cook's Wake in Fright with PJ Harvey's To Bring You My Love
Many writers have praised the vast desert that colours in Australias coastal outline, including poet Dorothea Mackellar, who loved this sunburnt country. But others have found the emptiness of the outback rather more horrifying. Kenneth Cook brought this horror vividly to life in his 1961 novel Wake in Fright, in which his monster is an outback town called Bundanyabba. PJ Harveys scorched earth of an album, 1995s To Bring You My Love, is equally as unforgiving.
Long before Wolf Creek, Kenneth Cook recognised the menace in the desert. In Wake in Fright, his schoolteacher protagonist, John Grant - who hails from the coast, where Nature deposited the graces she so firmly withheld from the west - gambles away his train fare to Sydney and is marooned in the Yabba. Dependent on the generosity of the eccentric Yabba locals, Grant descends into a nightmarish haze of endlessly shouted beers and strange sexual encounters, ending up on a brutal kangaroo hunt.
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