This March marks the 25-year anniversary of the publication of Elliot Perlman's "Three Dollars". A novel inspired by the rise of economic rationalism against the backdrop of Jeff Kennett's Victoria, Perlman and his legion of fans might reasonably have hoped that the precarity of living that it charted, the hard cost of neoliberalism on individuals and families, might be somewhat resolved or at least addressed after a quarter of a century.
They are not, and in an article in "The Monthly" the author explains how he came to write this book - click here. Read the book at archive.org.
