Description

Adventures with the Kelly Gang:
An Anthology of Experimental Writing from Adelaide, SA
by Teri-Louise Kelly, Mel Kelly, Ivan Rehorek, Tim Gaze and others
FORTHCOMING: 2027/01/26 (INVASION / AUSTRALIA DAY)

This anthology brings together the work of four distinctive voices from Adelaide’s late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century experimental literary underground: Teri-Louise Kelly, Mel Kelly, Ivan Rehorek, and Tim Gaze.

Spanning poetry, prose, and visual text, the collection captures a moment of intense creative ferment in South Australian literature — one marked by formal innovation, sexual and gender transgression, and a sustained challenge to mainstream literary norms.

Teri-Louise Kelly’s contributions reflect her position as a transgender punk writer whose work engaged directly with themes of identity, desire, and marginality. Ivan Rehorek (also known as Avalanche), long associated with the Friendly Street Poets collective, brings a raw, beat-inflected energy rooted in performance and spoken word traditions. Tim Gaze, a pioneering figure in the international asemic writing movement, contributes works that extend the possibilities of textual meaning through abstract, calligraphic, and non-semantic mark-making.

Together, these writers represent a significant, if often overlooked, strand of Adelaide’s literary culture — one that operated at the intersection of Disability Arts, queer and transgender expression, and radical formal experimentation.

Their work emerged alongside, and in dialogue with, the very scene examined in the companion volume The Invisible Worm, offering readers direct access to the creative practices that were being contested, marginalised, or suppressed within Adelaide’s literary establishment at the time.

Adventures with the Kelly Gang stands as both a primary document of experimental writing in South Australia and a testament to the persistence of outsider aesthetics in Australian literature.