Cory has been left jobless after finishing his latest short-term contract, while Jasmine is on unpaid maternity leave from a university job \u2013 hardly a leap in the age of casualised labour<\/a>. The end of a lease sends them packing to the sprawling empty nest of Cory\u2019s less-than-thrilled baby boomer parents, Richard and Lyn. The result is less Packed to the Rafters, more Wake in Fright.<\/p>\n Director Zoe Pepper says the idea for Birthright came during the pandemic, as friends and family joined the many young Australians<\/a> swallowing their pride to move back in with their parents.<\/p>\n \u201cThey always intended only to stay for a little while \u2026 and then it would extend,\u201d Pepper says. \u201cI became really curious about the power dynamic playing out underneath that roof.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Pepper says its premise has only grown more relevant in the years since \u201cavocado toast\u201d discourse<\/a> peaked. \u201cIn that last five years housing prices have nearly doubled<\/a> \u2026 I do think Australia has created this uniquely, absolutely ridiculous situation where housing is almost like a Ponzi scheme.\u201d<\/p>\n She isn\u2019t alone. An ambient hum of real estate anxiety can be found on the screen, page and stage across Australia, from Melbourne\u2019s Malthouse Theatre recently staging a refreshed Pride & Prejudice that was billed as a \u201clove story in a housing crisis\u201d<\/a>, to Adelaide, where playwright James Watson\u2019s The Housewarming<\/a> \u2013 a showdown between gen Z haves and have-nots \u2013 just wrapped its first season.<\/p>\n Kill Your Boomers by Fiona Wright.<\/p>\n Award-winning poet and writer Fiona Wright started working on her debut novel Kill Your Boomers even earlier<\/a>, around 2018.<\/p>\n \u201cMy life at the time was very much like Keira\u2019s,\u201d Wright says of her novel\u2019s protagonist, a freelance writer who has turned to au pairing for yuppies. \u201cWe weren\u2019t talking about a \u2018housing crisis\u2019 \u2026 it was really interesting to watch that conversation, that terminology, move further and further into the centre.\u201d<\/p>\n Like Pepper, Wright says the last few years have made that crisis even starker. \u201cThese aren\u2019t just \u2018young people problems\u2019 any more,\u201d Wright says. \u201cIt\u2019s been really interesting to see friends I\u2019ve known for a long time move into positions in their careers where, you know, we\u2019re in charge. And we\u2019re still going home to these shitty sharehouses that we live in with two strangers.\u201d<\/p>\n In the novel, Keira\u2019s parents own a house in Dulwich Hill, and lecture her about \u201cliving within her means\u201d \u2013 while they buy a new Tesla and stump up to send Keira\u2019s niece to private school.<\/p>\n Cory and his pregnant wife Jasmine are forced to move into a home on the outskirts of the city owned by Cory\u2019s parents Richard and Lyn in Birthright. Photograph: Madman Entertainment<\/p>\n In Birthright, the disconnect between generations is similarly pointed. Cory\u2019s dad is convinced his arts graduate son has squibbed the same opportunities that he built a life \u2013 and property portfolio \u2013 from. \u201cYou work harder than anyone and the world will look after you,\u201d he tells Cory after refusing to loan his expectant son $40,000.<\/p>\n \u201cHe\u2019s following the same recipe his dad laid out for him, but it just doesn\u2019t work any more,\u201d Pepper says of Cory\u2019s predicament.<\/p>\n Like many Australians<\/a>, Wright and Pepper\u2019s characters come to believe the only path to get ahead, or even stay afloat, runs through their parents. The gamechanging power of inheritance isn\u2019t uncommon in Australian millennial fiction: in Madeleine Gray\u2019s 2025 novel Chosen Family<\/a>, the lives of its characters hinge irrevocably on when a parent dies unexpectedly \u2013 and leaves behind a property worth half a million dollars.<\/p>\n More recently, Ellena Savage\u2019s The Ruiners<\/a> opens with a young woman stuck in a grind of credit card debt and hospo shifts, until her estranged father bequeaths her $50,000. It\u2019s not enough to buy a house in Australia \u2013 it\u2019s literary fiction after all, not fantasy \u2013 so she buys the next most achievable thing: a crumbling, mould-ridden house on a distant Greek island, sight unseen.<\/p>\n Several Australian publishers told Guardian Australia they have not yet spotted an emerging broader trend of housing crisis fiction, but Lex Hirst at Pantera Press cited two upcoming nonfiction novels dealing with the housing crisis and inheritance inequality \u2013 adding that she thought, in fiction, \u201cthe push towards escapism will continue, as it tends to in uncertain times\u201d.<\/p>\n The Ruiners by Ellena Savage.<\/p>\n Much like the unemployed factory worker (Lee Byung-hun) in South Korean director Park Chan-wook\u2019s No Other Choice<\/a>, who turns to murder to keep a roof over his family\u2019s head, Wright and Pepper\u2019s characters aren\u2019t content to wait for nature or the economy to take its course.<\/p>\n With a title like Kill Your Boomers, it\u2019s hardly a spoiler to say things get weird, as an anthropomorphised hole in Keira\u2019s sharehouse kitchen \u2013 left unfixed by her landlord \u2013 eggs on her darker ambitions. \u201cThey had so much to lean on, Kiera, that\u2019s why they could stand on their own feet,\u201d the hole says. \u201cAnd then they took all that scaffolding away.\u201d<\/p>\n Birthright takes a more slow-burning, chaotic route inspired by Who\u2019s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Get Out, while driving home the depth and scale of Cory\u2019s desperation.<\/p>\n Wright says the reactions from readers since her book came out have ranged from \u201cOh my god, hard relate\u201d, to \u201cShe\u2019s insufferable, can she just get a job?\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd I think they\u2019re both correct,\u201d Wright says.<\/p>\n After all, in the scheme of the housing crisis, both Keira and Cory are part of a relatively privileged cohort of potential heirs-in-waiting<\/a>. Pepper certainly recognises the entitlement at the centre of Cory\u2019s increasingly twisted family dynamic \u2013 and the reality that in many cases, wealthy parents are only too happy to open the bank of mum and dad<\/a> to help their children.<\/p>\n \u201cIt is terrifying how this distillation of class is going to become even more pronounced once millennials become the new boomers,\u201d Pepper reflects. \u201cIt\u2019s going to get turbo-charged.\u201d<\/p>\n That disparity is exemplified by the character of Jasmine, whose less affluent background draws a line between her and her husband. When she remarks upon the quiet luxury all around his family home, Cory replies defensively that his parents are \u201cnot loaded \u2013 comfortable\u201d. Such class unconsciousness makes Jasmine\u2019s breakdown in the car hit harder than anything Cory and his parents throw at each other.<\/p>\n For Pepper, at least, the darkly cathartic response during the film\u2019s first run at festivals in New York, Sydney and Adelaide bodes well for its national release \u2013 if not the state of the crisis it satirises, both in Australia and abroad.<\/p>\n \u201cThe worse the housing crisis, the harder the audience laugh,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cI wanna go home,\u201d sobs a heavily pregnant woman, sitting in a car stacked with her and her…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":698292,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[64,63,44],"class_list":["post-698291","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-australia","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/698291","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=698291"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/698291\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/698292"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=698291"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=698291"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=698291"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Chosen](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/262.jpg\")
Chosen Family by Madeleine Grey.<\/p>\n