The word ‘plot’ smells of the library. It conjures a writer at a desk, nudging characters through a sequence of events toward some kind of resolution. But in Australian music and visual art, plotting is often a more material business. It’s the order of songs on a record, the hanging sequence of paintings in a gallery, the route a band takes between regional towns. It’s shaped less by narrative theory than by the Hume Highway, the cost of freight, the timing of the last train, and the floor plan of a weatherboard house. This essay is about that kind of plotting—the kind that grows out of place and infrastructure, not out of a three-act structure imported from somewhere else.
Take the tracklisting of a Paul Kelly album. On Deeper Water (1995), the songs don’t follow a dramatic arc so much as a journey through a landscape. The opening track, ‘Blush’, is a humid, close-up thing—a love song set in a single room. By the time you reach ‘Deeper Water’ itself, you’re out in the ocean, and the album’s final stretch moves through drought and distance (‘Gathering Storm’, ‘Difficult Woman’) before closing with the exhausted tenderness of ‘I Can’t Believe We Were Married’. The sequence isn’t random, but it isn’t literary either. It’s topographical. It moves the way a long drive moves: from interior to exterior, from intimacy to exposure, and back again. Kelly has spoken about sequencing records as a process of “feeling the weather” between songs. That’s a plotting method that owes more to the Bureau of Meteorology than to Aristotle.
The same logic turns up in the hanging order of a Fred Williams exhibition. Williams’s landscapes aren’t framed vistas; they’re scatterings of marks that resolve into a sense of ground only when you stand back. In the 1987 retrospective at the National Gallery of Victoria, the curators hung the works not chronologically but as a kind of topographical map. The Lysterfield paintings sat together, their ochre and grey-green dots building a cumulative sense of that particular patch of earth. The You Yangs series occupied another wall, its darker, more vertical marks suggesting a different geology. Walking through the exhibition felt like walking across country—not a story, but a traverse. The plotting was spatial, not temporal. It trusted the viewer to read the room the way a bushwalker reads a ridge line.
These aren’t isolated examples. They point to a broader pattern in Australian creative practice: the tendency to structure work according to the logic of place rather than the logic of narrative. A setlist in a regional pub is plotted around room acoustics and audience fatigue. The fast songs come early, when the crowd is sober and the PA is still fighting the concrete floor. The slow songs come later, when the beer has softened the room and the singer’s voice is starting to fray. A touring exhibition of sculpture is plotted around freight costs and the width of doorways in country galleries. A zine is plotted around the photocopier at the local library and the number of pages you can staple before the spine gives out. In each case, the structure is a negotiation with material conditions. It’s a form of local knowledge.
This isn’t about romanticising constraint. The Hume Highway is not a muse. It’s a long, straight, often boring road that connects Melbourne and Sydney, and for decades it has been the spine along which Australian touring culture has been forced to arrange itself. Bands drive it because there is no other way. Galleries ship work along it because air freight is too expensive. The highway’s rhythm—the servo stops, the roadside motels, the sudden appearance of the Dog on the Tuckerbox—becomes part of the work’s structure. A tour is plotted not around ideal audiences but around the distance between Albury and Goulburn, between a 9 p.m. load-out and a 10 a.m. soundcheck the next day. The plotting is logistical before it is artistic. And yet, over time, that logistics seeps into the art. You can hear the Hume Highway in the flat, driving rhythms of Australian rock from the 1980s. You can see it in the serial repetition of certain landscape photographs, the way the road becomes a compositional device simply because it is always there.
The same principle applies to the visual art that emerges from regional Australia. An artist working in Mildura or Warrnambool plots an exhibition differently from an artist in Fitzroy. The work must be freighted further, insured for longer, and often installed by a volunteer committee in a hall that doubles as a polling booth. The hanging order is determined partly by the available wall space and partly by the fact that the largest painting must go on the end wall because that’s where the only power point is not. These aren’t compromises; they’re the conditions under which the work takes its final shape. To ignore them is to misunderstand the work.
What does this have to do with criticism? Everything. A critic also plots. A piece of writing has a structure: an opening move, a sequence of observations, a turn, a close. And just as a band’s setlist can be flattened by a touring schedule that leaves no room for improvisation, a critic’s argument can be flattened by an imported template. The five-paragraph essay, the hot-take formula, the review that must end with a star rating—these are the narrative equivalents of the Hume Highway. They get you from A to B, but they can also smooth out the local texture, the unexpected detour, the observation that doesn’t fit the predetermined shape.
This is where digital tools enter the picture, quietly. A a plot idea generator that fits the project can, in the right hands, function as a diagnostic instrument. Feed it the bones of an essay and it will show you the skeleton: the three-act structure, the rising tension, the resolution. What it cannot show you is the dust on the road, the particular light, the way a sentence turns because the writer remembered something that happened in a pub in Castlemaine in 1997. The generator exposes the generic shape, and in doing so, it reveals where the local detail has been squeezed out. That is its value—not as a replacement for thinking, but as a way of seeing what thinking has been replaced by. The Authors Guild, in its AI best practices for authors, notes that AI outputs are “generic mashups of pre-existing works.” That is precisely the risk for a critic who leans too heavily on a structural template. The mashup is efficient, but it has no weather in it.
Reedsy’s plot generator, for instance, offers a range of story structures—three-act, five-act, Save the Cat, the Hero’s Journey—and invites the user to lock certain acts while regenerating others. It’s a tool built for fiction writers, but its logic is instructive for anyone who builds arguments. The process of locking and regenerating is a way of testing which parts of a structure are load-bearing and which are merely habitual. A critic might use a similar process, not with software but with a red pen: circling the paragraphs that do real work and asking whether the rest is just scaffolding. The difference is that a critic working from an Australian vantage point must also ask whether the scaffolding itself is imported. Is the argument shaped by the actual terrain of the subject, or by a narrative template that was designed for a different climate? You can see the same generic scaffolding exposed by a plot generator like Reedsy’s, which lays bare the bones of a story so clearly that the absence of local flesh becomes obvious.
Consider the way Australian art criticism has historically been plotted. For much of the twentieth century, the default structure was comparative: Australian work was measured against European or American benchmarks and found to be either derivative or, in a patronising turn, “surprisingly original.” The plot was always the same: arrival, imitation, belated achievement. That structure was not neutral. It was a colonial hangover, a way of organising cultural value that assumed the centre was elsewhere. It took decades of work by critics, artists, and curators to dismantle that template and replace it with something more attentive to local conditions. The replacement was not a new universal structure but a willingness to let the work dictate its own terms. That’s a harder kind of plotting, because it requires the critic to know the place as well as the work.
Knowing the place means knowing the infrastructure. It means understanding that the reason a particular band never played in Brisbane is not aesthetic but economic: the cost of flying five members and their gear from Melbourne to Brisbane for a single show was never going to be recouped at the door. It means understanding that the reason a regional gallery’s collection is strong in prints but weak in sculpture is not curatorial preference but the fact that prints can be mailed in a tube and sculpture cannot. It means understanding that the reason an artist-run initiative in Footscray programs performances on Thursday nights is that the venue is a warehouse with no heating and the crowd needs to be home before the temperature drops below eight degrees. These are not footnotes. They are the plot.
The best Australian criticism has always understood this. When Robert Hughes wrote about Sidney Nolan’s Ned Kelly series, he didn’t just analyse the paintings; he described the light in which they were made, the particular quality of the Wimmera sky, the way Nolan’s experience of the landscape was shaped by the fact that he painted it from memory while living in London. The distance was part of the work’s structure. When Clinton Walker wrote about the Australian punk scene in Inner City Sound, he plotted the book not as a chronological history but as a series of documents—posters, lyrics, photographs—that reproduced the fragmentary, do-it-yourself logic of the scene itself. The form was the argument.
This kind of plotting is not taught in writing schools. It’s learned by being in the room, on the road, in the gallery after hours when the lights are half off and the paintings look different. It’s learned by talking to the framer, the roadie, the volunteer who has been hanging shows at the Mildura Arts Centre since 1978. It’s learned by driving the Hume Highway enough times to know that the stretch between Wangaratta and Albury is where the light changes, and that if you’re writing about a band that formed in Wodonga, you need to account for that light. Not as metaphor, but as fact.
The risk of digital plotting tools is not that they exist but that they can make a writer forget that structure is always a negotiation with the specific. A plot generator can produce a perfectly serviceable outline for a novel or an essay. But it cannot tell you that the reason the third paragraph feels thin is that you’ve never stood in the car park of the Tote on a Tuesday night, or that the reason the argument about landscape painting lacks conviction is that you haven’t spent enough time looking at the actual dirt. The tool can expose the skeleton, but the flesh must come from somewhere else.
There’s a quiet radicalism in plotting work according to local conditions. It’s a refusal of the idea that structure is universal, that a story or a song or an exhibition should unfold in the same way regardless of where it is made. When Paul Kelly sequences an album as a journey through weather, when a curator hangs a Fred Williams show as a topographical map, when a band in a regional pub adjusts its setlist to the room’s acoustics and the crowd’s fatigue, they’re asserting that place matters. They’re saying that the Hume Highway is a plot, and that any criticism that ignores it is missing the point.
The same applies to the craft of writing about art. A critic who plots an argument without accounting for the material conditions of the work’s making is writing in a vacuum. The vacuum may be elegant, but it’s not true. The truth is in the freight costs, the last train, the floor plan, the weather. It’s in the specific boredom of an artist-run space in a town under 50,000, and in the particular acoustic of a shed that’s been turned into a recording studio. To write about Australian music and visual art is to write about these things—not as background, but as structure. The plot is not something you impose. It’s something you discover, if you’re paying attention.