Australia’s Neo-Noir Fiction Author Comments About His Woodridge Upbringing

Logan City’s dark fiction specialist talks about his hometown and what it was like growing up in the suburbs south of Brisbane in the 70s and 80s.

“It wasn’t the ghetto everyone says it is,” says Michael Forman, “not to those who lived in Logan back then. To us, it was home. We roamed a lot. We were adventurous kids but rarely naughty.”

In the 1800s, the region was barely a timber village served by a nearby railway stop. Trees were cut down, with eucalyptus oil among the products harvested from them. The population on the ridge grew, and the train siding became a proper station. The suburb of Woodridge took its name from the railway station, which opened in 1917.

“We thought we were tough, but it was a different time for toughness. It wasn’t measured by drug or knife crime. Staying out late and playing Galaga or Space Invaders at the local BP service station without our parents’ knowledge was what we thought was breaking the rules.”

Woodridge was changing while we were growing up. New houses and estates appeared, along with schools, shops and services. Logan City Council records that 472 Housing Commission homes had been built in Woodridge by the end of the 1968–69 financial year. By mid-1977, there were 1,547. That gives you an idea of how quickly the suburb was expanding around us. It was not an abstract statistic to the kids who lived there. It meant new neighbours, new streets to explore and a bigger town spreading out around the places we already knew.

“My ol’ mate Knightsie and I knocked about the streets of a young Logan City on our push-bikes and wreaked video game havoc here and there. If we weren’t doing that, we made cubby houses or played war games in the bush. We made our own fun. Nothing bad happened.”

There were familiar places, but the world still seemed large. A bike could take us down a road we had not followed before, or into a patch of bush that felt like a private territory. We were not looking for danger or trying to make a story out of it. We were simply out together, finding something to do until it was time to go home.

Those memories are part of why going back to a place from childhood can feel complicated. The streets may still be there, but they no longer belong to the same version of you. I’ve written about that feeling in Going Back To The Past, where a return to Brisbane brings old memories close without making the past easy to recover.

“Things have changed since then. It was never Emerald City, but it was safe. There was nothing to worry about. Kids could go out all day, and parents didn’t have to worry. There was no such thing as helicopter parenting. They wanted us to go outside! We came back when it was dark and hungry.”

That is how childhood works in memory: the days seem long, the streets seem familiar, and ordinary things take on a glow because they belong to a time that cannot be revisited exactly. Even the news could become an adventure. When I was a boy in Logan, I remember waiting for Skylab’s fall from space, convinced that pieces of it might come down near our house. We imagined collecting the fragments and telling everyone about it. Childhood could turn a global event into something that might happen in your own backyard.

Logan City was originally part of a large shire covering a wide area between Brisbane and the Gold Coast. The growth around Woodridge and the surrounding suburbs made the old arrangements harder to manage. Logan Shire was formed in 1978, and Logan became a city in 1981. For us, those changes were part of the landscape of growing up: the place around us was becoming more urban, even while we still had patches of bush and open ground to play in.

Woodridge also found its way into my writing. Logan City played a significant role in my novel. I included an area near Armstrong Road, Loganlea, in the narrative and mention a scattering of places between Woodridge and Kingston. I’ve written more about that location in Breaker Breaker. Is There Anyone Out There?, which revisits one of the places that became part of the novel’s setting. The locations matter because they are not invented from nothing. They come from a landscape I knew, even when the story turns that familiar ground into something dark.

The novel is neo-noir. That means it is dark fiction written in modern times. A body count grows as a night killer stalks victims during nights of great thunderstorms.

Strap yourself in. Hell is coming to Logan.

Brisbane and its southern suburbs are part of my writing life in other ways, too. When I returned to the city to research the novels, I took photographs and revisited locations that had stayed in my mind. I wrote about that trip in A Writer’s Research Adventure in Brisbane. Research sometimes means checking a detail, but it can also mean returning to a place and asking what you remember correctly—and what time has changed.

“My English teacher (Ms Todhunter) was at Woodridge High during my senior years. She suggested I keep writing. I dedicate this novel to her.”

That encouragement stayed with me long after school ended. The streets and suburbs of my childhood became part of a novel, but the person who urged me to write belongs to the real story behind it. Woodridge was home. It shaped the places I remember, the stories I tell, and the dark fiction I eventually wrote.

–Michael (Dark Fiction. Author of SEETHINGS (the first book), free for a limited time)