Set around Cessnock in the New South Wales Hunter Valley, camping underground is a brutal, lyrical and cinematic narrative that lays out the scattered fragments of Kelly Edwards’s life before and after the political violence she is implicated in unleashes a viral pandemic and societal collapse. Surviving the wreckage, moving amid the chaos while searching for her niece Ruth while she has time, a mute, traumatised Kelly responds with violence of her own, as conflict and control dance around in the aftermath of the virus.‘McLaren has written the Great Australian Apocalypse. camping underground is a vernacular lament for our country’s past, present, and possible futures, but it never succumbs to cynicism: it feels urgent, affectionate, and beautiful, full of despair and love and a biting sense of humour. I read it in one sitting, completely spellbound, and it made my heart both shrink and stretch.’ —Fiona McFarlane‘McLaren’s verse grabs you like an accident, like the blood smell of metallic paint, or the flecks of hair and scalp behind a twisted steering wheel. His country towns, like his Australia, are human versions of a wrecker’s yard, as if all the violence and unlived life of their inhabitants concentrated in that instant before death, and exploded. This poem is a record of that explosion.’ —John Hughes
