Ornithologist Heico Brandsma first opposes the mosque development because it neighbours a site where he and his colleagues have been monitoring migratory birds. While there is anti-Islamic feeling among some in the community – a feeling that intensifies over the three-year battle, especially in the wake of the Cronulla riots – and while these people (‘suddenly bird-friendly’) do latch on to Heico’s campaign to legitimate their protest, Collins’s focus is elsewhere: on Heico; on Salema, the architect of the proposed mosque; on Nahla, a new member of the Islamic community; and on Julian.

Central to this dispute is the question of belonging. For Heico, himself the son of a migrant, the migrating birds belong here. Salema sees the architectural project as an opportunity to provide a home for the Islamic community, and her design is intended to reflect the landscape around the new building, to ensure that it too belongs there. For Nahla, the mosque also offers the hope of a home. ‘Without the mosque,’ she tells the local council, ‘we can’t really be here, we can’t grow here, because there is not room for our roots.’ And across these ideas of belonging cut the words of Aunty Jill, a traditional custodian of the land, who gives the long view: ‘The land and the waters will be here when we’re all long gone and that is the lens we need to see this through.’

Repentance by Alison Gibbs

Scribe, $32.99 pb, 304 pp

Alison Gibbs’s novel Repentance is similarly concerned with conflicting claims over land ‘ownership’, and like Collins she is careful to view such narratives of entitlement through a wide lens. Set in 1976 in Repentance, a small timber town in the Great Dividing Range, this novel relates the escalating conflict between residents, mill workers, and environmental activists over the logging of old-growth forest. Like Collins, Gibbs is committed to presenting all points of view. As Joe Spender, a local saw doctor, says, ‘we all love this place, don’t we, in our different ways’, and Gibbs captures these different attachments to place well.

Much of this novel is narrated from the perspective of two thirteen-year-old girls: Joanne Parmenter, whose family have lived in Repentance for generations; and Melanie Curtis, daughter of one of the ‘hippies’ who have moved into the town and are protesting against a new road that will allow loggers access to parts of the forest, in what mill proprietor Sandy Mitchell describes as a ‘routine management operation’. Joanne and Melanie’s star-crossed friendship sets the tone for the town’s mixed feelings about the forest and who ‘owns’ it. Gerard Ansiewicz, a ‘hippie’ to the locals, is a botanist and militant force behind the growing protest movement. His and Sandy’s attitudes towards the land are wholly at odds. Where Sandy describes trees as ‘carabeens’ or saw logs, and values them according to their ‘grain’, Gerard sees ‘a magnificent tree that was already a century old when Captain Cook sailed past here’. And where both the mill workers and the environmentalists argue over ‘our forest’, the local Aboriginal community speaks of ‘care for country’. ‘Joanne found this an odd thing to say. Whose country: my country, our country?’ But, as Aunty Jill makes clear in The Price of Two Sparrows, beneath all of these different ways of valuing Repentance and its surrounding forest, the land and the non-human creatures that inhabit it persist: ‘All of this continues, whether people are there or not, with or without the Latin labels and the metaphors we apply.’

Low Expectations by Stuart Everly-Wilson (Text Publishing, $32.99 pb, 320 pp)

At first, it might appear that Stuart Everly-Wilson’s novel Low Expectations differs from those of Collins and Gibbs, with their community-minded approach to place. Low Expectations is an irreverent Bildungsroman chronicling the coming of age of fifteen-year-old Devon Destri: by his own account a ‘fucked-up faulty body, [with] a rape-victim lying idiot of a mother and rapist father’, who is hell-bent on avenging himself and his best friend, Big Tammy, against ‘pet bully’ classmate Peter Novotny. Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations is Destri’s favourite book; his motto, borrowed from Joe Gargery, is: ‘On the rampage, Pip, off the rampage, Pip – such is life!’ With his ‘wrathful, seething, sulphurous, molten fury’, Destri is definitely on the rampage, and he sets out to record his story of revenge despite the general assumption that he is ‘hard of speaking’.

The question of belonging and the ability to tell your own story, on your own terms, is narrower in Low Expectations, which is narrated by Destri ‘without any extraneous unnecessary shit. Like objectivity.’ But despite Destri’s best efforts, his revenge narrative is deeper than he realises, incorporating the lives of his mother, his grandfather, and the now-dead industrial complex of the brickworks in the western Sydney suburb of Auburn, where the Destris have lived and worked for generations.

Friends and Dark Shapes by Kavita Bedford (Text Publishing, $32.99 pb, 256 pp)

Like Low Expectations, much of Kavita Bedford’s Friends and Dark Shapes takes place around western Sydney (or the idea of it). As in The Price of Two Sparrows, this is Sydney in the aftermath of the Cronulla riots. Bedford and her unnamed narrator – a freelance journalist – seek to contest media representations of the west as a site of ‘gang violence and Islamic radicalisation’. Bedford is writing against the clickbait journalism that sees only ‘conflict’, ‘pain’, and a ‘refugee angle’ in the story of a vibrant Syrian woman who has established her own fashion movement in suburban western Sydney. She complicates any stereotypical ascription of identity, the sort that asks of the novel’s Australian-Indian narrator what it is like ‘growing up’ in Australia but only wants to hear ‘what it’s like being brown and a woman’.

Bedford explores the question of belonging, but where Collins, Gibbs, and Everly-Wilson focus their narratives upon one particular place – a development site, a forest, a neighbourhood where old grudges die hard – she takes on a city in its entirety: Sydney. Friends and Dark Shapes turns its lens onto diverse views of Sydney and reveals a compellingly complex place. From the outset, Bedford’s narrator is inhabiting uncomfortable territory. A year after her father’s death, she moves into a share house on ‘The Block’, a once-notorious part of Redfern now undergoing gentrification. The narrator and her housemates live precariously according to the laws of the gig economy, working multiple, often freelance jobs, and The Block – with its dark history and shifting terrain – amplifies this precarity. From their shared home, the narrator and her friends feel their allegiances torn between the ‘layers’ of the neighbourhood: the ‘Indigenous community, the housing commission folk, the students, the young professionals’. But, as Bedford seems to suggest, this layering of community, of histories and identities, of ways of belonging (or not), is not something to be afraid of.

As on the site of the proposed mosque in The Price of Two Sparrows, as in Repentance, as in the Destri family history and for all their Low Expectations, Bedford shows us that it is this very layering that gives a place a language of its own and which is ‘all around us if we choose to read it’.