About this publication: The Sprawl of Quality is a publication by me, Lucas Smith (and occasional guests). I will primarily post on books (old and new), aesthetic culture, Christianity and creativity, the practice of creative writing, and my own fiction and poetry. I will do my best to speak the truth as I understand it. My immediate sphere of interest is contemporary Australia but there will be many trips further afield and back in time.
Fiction and poetry are the wind-blown embers and flicked cigarettes in the dry wheat of civilisation. The sparks need our help to grow. There are many things of quality happening in our world and culture today but they are spread far and wide, sprawled across many large and small communities. This publication takes its name from “The Quality of Sprawl” by Australia’s national poet Les Murray (1938-2019). These are the first seven lines:
Sprawl is the quality
of the man who cut down his Rolls-Royce
into a farm utility truck, and sprawl
is what the company lacked when it made repeated efforts
to buy the vehicle back and repair its image.
Sprawl is doing your farming by aeroplane, roughly,
or driving a hitchhiker that extra hundred miles home.
It is the rococo of being your own still centre.
The Sprawl of Quality will attempt to be its own still centre.
About me: I am a writer and poet (which I believe to be distinct vocations) from Orange County, California and Country Australia. “If you’re not living in Sydney, you’re camping out,” Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating once said. I’ve been camping out for the last sixteen years, first in inner-Melbourne and now in a seaside town near the geographical bottom of the Australian mainland.
My work has appeared in many journals in Australia and overseas including Australian Book Review, Meanjin, Quadrant, Island, Southerly and The Rialto. In 2024 I was the Wiseblood Books Writer-in-Residence and my first book, Spare Us Yet and Other Stories, will be published in June, 2025 by Wiseblood Books.
I am also the co-founder and EIC of Bonfire Books in Melbourne. You can find more info about us at our Substack Fanning the Flames or at our website. There will be occasional cross-posting about Bonfire but this is a separate project.
