The belonging in abject communities: a new understanding through sewerage ghost towns

ABSTRACT Sewerage town communities often experience discrimination because of their association with sewerage, and yet they flourish on their abject margins. A recent study of sewerage town communities in Australia and the UK and specifically, the community that grew on Melbourne’s Metropolitan Sewerage Farm, established on the Australian city’s outskirts, highlighted that sewerage town communities are inclusive and highly connected. A poetics of creative writing research methodology supported many elements to come together to explore the abject through these sewerage town communities. The study highlighted the strength of the power vacuum that forms within the community living in a state of abjection, for a belonging existence. These powerful attributes remain once the community abandons the town, as a spirit or essence that continues to emanate as a haunting in the sewerage ghost town. The poetics methodology granted a rethinking of how sewerage towns survive and thrive in their abject margins and what happens once the community abandons the sewerage town, for a paradoxical aesthetic and haunting truth of the sewerage ghost town. Even the murk of mustarding waters, devoid of air but teeming in critters that thrive in the souring stench, and the poor blighter disappearing within those waters of olive and brown, can be beautiful. Insights can be applied to any marginalised or abject community and company town.