Punk, politics and the footy: novelist Max Easton on his stunning debut

"I don't have literature training; I haven't interacted with the literary space very much," explains the scientist-turned-author.

"I had actually gone to visit the publisher the night before to talk about my second book, and they were like, 'we're sorry, but it doesn't look like you are going to be on any of the lists for the awards', and I went on a big row about how I don't really care any way, it's not important to me, it's not why I write - and then the next morning I end up being on the big one after I've just made this big speech."

Novels must present Australian life "in any of its phases" to be eligible for the Miles Franklin. It has been won since its inception in 1957 by writers such as Patrick White, Peter Carey, Thomas Keneally, Thea Astley and Elizabeth Jolley. On the 2022 longlist, Easton, with his novel The Magpie Wing, is in the company of such luminaries as 2008 Man Booker Prize contender Christos Tsiolkas and two-time Miles Franklin winner Michelle de Kretser.

While 34-year-old Easton didn't make the shortlist of five announced last Thursday, he is unfazed - see earlier comment, and this one too: "I am very pleased about [being longlisted], but it's never something that I have aimed for. It is not like a goal met. I am actually quite confused - I don't understand how it got on there in a sense. They see something in it that I don't think I do."

Nonetheless, just making the longlist is enough to announce his arrival on the national literary scene. Critics had already signalled as much - an "original, exceptional novel," said The Guardian. "A work of art," said The Sydney Review of Books. Briohny Doyle, a fellow 2022 Miles Franklin longlister for Echolalia, said this: "A unique voice speaking from the under-cultures and margins of neoliberal Sydney, articulating its conflicting desires and disaffections with wit, insight and heart."

The Magpie Wing is set in south-west and inner west Sydney, revolving around three characters - siblings Walt and Helen, and Walt's friend Duncan - who grow up in Liverpool in the 1990s and 2000s playing rugby league and barracking for the Western Suburbs Magpies. In young adulthood they move to the inner west, seeking to establish, according to the book's blurb, "new artistic, sexual and political identities". It has been described as a coming of age story, which Easton, again pointing to his lack of formal literature training, doesn't get: "I said to my editor, 'I am so sick of it being called a 'coming of age'." Of his characters, he says: "No one grows. Well they grow, but they don't improve."

Walt is described as scrappy and idealistic, and with his sister becomes immersed in the inner west's underground music scene, while being "pushed around Sydney by the whims of the rental market: from Enmore to Annandale and Ultimo, across to Redfern and then back to Marrickville via Stanmore". Walt is also a writer of political treatises, most notably The Manifesto of the Western Sydney Separatists.

Like his characters, Easton grew up in Liverpool - Casula, to be precise - across the Hume Highway from the Crossroads Hotel. Easton's next novel will be even more hyper-contemporaneous; it is a sequel to The Magpie Wing and he is writing it right now about the year 2022, responding to its events as they unfold.

Easton, again like his characters, also played junior league with the Magpies and moved to the inner west in his early 20s, where he became involved with the underground music scene as a member of no less than six punk bands and creator of the podcast and zine series Barely Human, and circled around Marrickville, Enmore and Newtown as a renter for about 10 years, before settling during the pandemic at Summer Hill (in a rental) with his partner.

Even so, Easton says his novel - tapped out in inner west share houses and the corners of western Sydney pubs - is "not very autobiographical".

"There are definitely elements of my experience within some of the characters there, and a couple of scenes which are real-ish, or have some element of my own life," he says.

"I think I have split my personality into a few different parts. I think Walt is an exaggeration of some tendencies that I might have had, those antagonistic elements. Myself, I can pull back, but some things with Walt, it's like, 'what if I went all the way through with it?'

"I probably relate more closely to Helen than anyone. Duncan is more of a flawed younger-self version of me in a way, someone I have moved on from."

Inner west references proliferate through the novel.

Walt - with a "fervent belief in both punk and rugby league's radical potential" - watches the 2009 NRL grand final at Petersham Inn; books an experimental noise gig at the Marrickville Bowling Club on 2014 grand final day; and drinks a six-pack in Camperdown Park each New Year's Eve with his sister. In the early hours after a drunken night, they both get kicked out of Marrickville's Royal Exchange Hotel.

At Enmore's Warren View Hotel Helen has a first-date with disturbingly normal Mike who is "one paisley pattern away from a Pulp Fiction poster on the wall". Down the track, at a gig at the Vic on the Park where Helen and Walt's plan "is to create four hours of continuous noise to torment the venue's patrons and management", she crowd-surfs her way out of Mike's life.

Years later, at the Petersham Bowling Club, Helen attempts an intervention with her angst-ridden brother who, she notes, hasn't brought along his Contemporary Communists of Punk banner "even though PBC shows fit his qualifier for CCP banner approval".

"I have never seen any fiction writing about rugby league when I was writing this, and I've seen very little about underground music communities," Easton says. "Even things like splinter communist and anarchist and socialist parties I don't see much in fiction, so to me it was very important to not let those things disappear, because I think they are fundamental components of my experience of working-class Sydney life."

One thing that sets Easton apart from his rag-tag fictional protaganists is the day job he had as a younger man - as a research chemist who would write short stories while waiting for experiments to run. His PhD was on green battery technology based on zinc and bromine instead of lithium, an invention which he has co-patented and is now being commercialised by a small company.

So the writer is a doctor, too, "although the only time I've ever been called Doctor has been in Centrelink letters - I don't get it from anyone else".

In high school, Easton did very well in chemistry, "and I also wrote, but were there going to be any job opportunities in writing? I went to the local public school, and university seemed like a trade certificate - dad's a builder, mum's a nurse, and I wanted a degree that led immediately to a job, and then ironically I went and did a PhD in chemistry, and my qualification got so specialised I couldn't find any job, and I had to move overseas to work."

He no longer works in academia, for a number of reasons. "It is not a good place a lot of the time; it's very high stress, very time consuming. I was so unhappy is the way to boil it down. The realities of having to do deal with investors and make a scientific finding marketable ... that is not why I got into science, especially green science."

We photograph Easton for our cover story at Ashfield's Pratten Park Oval, which was the pre-1970s home to the Western Suburbs Magpies, and venue for Easton's book launch in December last year.

As a kid, Easton lost a certain interest in the NRL when his beloved Magpies merged with Balmain Tigers in 1999 to become the joint venture club Wests Tigers, which has its Leagues Club a four-minute-drive from Pratten Park. He never lost his passion for playing the game, and dreamed as a teenager of going pro. His prowess as a hooker delivered him a $100-a-week scholarship at University of Wollongong, and he only gave up the game at 24 due to chronic neck pain: "I miss it all the time," he says. "I still go to bed and think about it."

In a case of life imitating art imitating life, Easton since he began writing the book has reconnected with the Magpies, playing a role in the club's push to establish a heritage brand, similar to the Newtown Jets' outstanding success in recent years at weaving itself back into the inner west community, decades after they were kicked out of the NRL in 1983.

"I grew up playing as a Western Suburbs junior, trying to make the development squads, and going to the Magpies NRL games in their last couple of years, and once they merged I didn't really follow them so much, but it was in writing the book and trying to base these characters in the late 1990s, in Liverpool, that it really stuck out to me that they would have been Magpies supporters; they would have had some historical connection to the club like I did," Easton says.

"It was also really interesting to use that as an illustration of how market forces have changed some of those things of the heart - that thing the kids grew up to love was the Magpies, and that family connection to the club too; and the financialisation changed what they can connect to."

You can't help but think that what Easton is getting at - that ripping asunder of a sports team from its community and how it reverberates through decades - has a grim symbol in the decrepit, burnt-out ruins of the former Balmain Leagues Club. As an entity the club is now amalgamated with the Wests Ashfield Leagues Club and may never return to the Darling Street site it was forced to vacate in 2010, and which has become a blight on its community.

Since the merger, Wests Tigers have won one premiership, in 2005. This year they sit third-last on the NRL ladder, having won 3 out of 14 games so far. Coach of more than three years Michael Maguire was sacked early this month.

"I guess my feelings around [Wests Tigers] are, it has been a long time and they are still trying to figure out who they are. I don't think they know who they are yet, and they don't admit that."

Easton's role as partnerships and promotions co-ordinator for the Magpies is one of two part-time jobs he has; the other is with the ABC's record label.

He has no intention of becoming a full-time writer because he likes being connected to the world. "So much of my writing is about connecting with people, I don't want to disappear into my own bubble," he says.

The inner west is home now. His parents moved to the South Coast five years ago, and while he misses the south-western Sydney of his childhood, he doesn't really have friends there any more. His role with the Magpies takes him to Lidcombe Oval and Campbelltown Stadium, which plays a pivotal role at the start of the book.

"There's kind of a mournful quality to it now, when I go out there. It's something I have unintentionally moved on from by moving to the inner city to explore more creative arts I guess," he says.

The next book centres on a four-bedroom share house in Hurlstone Park, rundown and overlooked by apartment blocks, that Easton came across in real life and thought would be a perfect place to set his second novel. As it turns out, it's right next to the Canterbury Hurlstone Park RSL where Prime Minister Anthony Albanese declared victory last month.

"The new book is going to be very much about different ways of looking at the left of politics from different angles inside this house," Easton says. "By accident I think it will be kind of an appropriate setting."