Author(s): Anna Broinowski

Biography & Memoir

Datson Angel is a turbo-charged adventure into the dark heart of 1980s Australia: a place completely alien, yet frighteningly similar, to today. EVERYTHING IN THIS BOOK HAPPENED . . . At seventeen, aching to begin her adult life, Anna Broinowski is precocious, naïve and in her first year of Arts/Law at Sydney University. Anna's already convinced she knows how the world works, but O week changes that. She watches Australia's drunk future captains of industry terrorise freshers and the Wesley grapevine starts buzzing with reports that a Sancta Sophia first-year has been gangbanged by the St Paul's seniors, who pinioned her to the rose garden lawn with croquet hoops. Nothing is what she thought it'd be . . . until the Sydney Uni Dramatic Society (SUDS) leads Anna to her people. New dreams are made. Acting, playing violin, auditioning for NIDA, losing her virginity. And then Peisley, a gentle giant with calves as muscly as the Hulk's, talks of a hitchhiking trip up north. And, after agreeing on three rules - Never split up. Remain platonic. Accept every lift that gets them closer to Darwin - Anna decides to go. Hitchhiking the highways leads her to a dystopian dustbowl of raging paranoia and ghastly beauty, a flyblown asylum where outsiders must adapt or perish, and women teeter on an existential knife-edge, between hatred and annihilation. Anna's is a tale of danger, unravelling sanity and blossoming love. It details the extreme things that happen when urban feminism is plucked from the Ivory Tower and forced to confront the toxic misogyny in the guts of the Australian soul. In her travels, Anna will learn that the line between victim and survivor can be as cruel as luck and as random as a shiny blue Datson on a red dirt road. Based on her battered travel diary, Datsun Angel is a riveting and darkly funny true story of a sex, drugs and violence-fuelled adventure through the brutal 1980s Australian outback. It is a feminist Mad Max, told through a #MeToo filter.