Tabis, nangs and woo-woo: Why Ella Baxter is the next Australian Lit Girl

“Second books are notoriously rough as guts.”

Artist and writer Ella Baxter’s new novel started as a 20,000-word letter to her stalker, which she intended to stick to the front of her house like a performance art piece. Then it became a book. 

“I was just so angry that I was being stalked. I was so sick of men’s violence against women, so sick of being frightened of men and having this continual threat of sexual violence. I had really had it: I was in my mid-thirties, and I just had this rage built up over 20 years,” she says. 

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“Woo Woo became a place where I could just push all that rage into and it was so cathartic. And then I had this really nutty manuscript, and I didn’t have the guts to publish it. And then a year or two later, once I’d had a baby and gone through birth, I had the guts to publish it, because birth was its own horror. After that ordeal, I suddenly had no fear.”

The novel tells the story of Sabine, a Melbourne-based performance artist, whose mind and body are stretched to the extreme in the week leading up to her new exhibition opening.

She goes to art parties with gorp-core-clad graduates, clashes with her gallery director, goes live on TikTok and trolls a middle-aged ceramicist who doesn’t like her work. In a way, Sabine is all of us, with the same insecurities and doom-scrolling impulses. In other ways, she is not, like being haunted by the ghost of her favourite artist.

There’s a lot going on, but this fever dream of a book is pitch-perfect about everything it tackles: the intersection of art and money, inner-northern Melbourne fashion trends, the breakdown between language and expression, social media in the post-ironic landscape, the ‘chronically online’ rollercoaster between hysteria and anticlimax, what it feels like to be engulfed by your own creativity.

Given the break-neck pace of the plot, it’s an incredibly balanced read. It’s also extremely contemporary without feeling dated. Weaving social media into a novel is notoriously difficult; few can do it well. In Woo Woo, Ella does it with grace. 

“I think because I am so online, it felt quite natural. But I also feel like it’s impossible to write a current story now without including [social media], and you have to find ways to include it authentically,” she says. “It’s the job of a writer to always be finding ways to portray reality or close to reality or left of reality. And if I had no social media in there, that would just be such an oversight. There’s so much richness in it. There’s so many layers.”

Fashion, equally, is deployed ingeniously throughout the story, mostly as a shorthand for a particular social scene: one anyone who has been to the inner north of Melbourne will recognise. At one point early in the book, Sabine’s best friend convinces her to attend an art gallery opening. Sabine agrees but proclaims, “If I get there and they’re all wearing Tabis and doing nangs, I’m leaving early.”

I tell Ella that I laughed out loud at this line; she says she did too, but she is also laughing at herself. “The finger’s pointed at me here, too. Sabine says, ‘Oh, these fools’ but she’s also turning up in equally foolish garb,” Ella says. I admit that I, too, wore tabis to my wedding. 

“I really struggle to write straight scenes, I tend to go a little bit more in the comedic angle, but it’s done with love. I love this subculture. I love the art world. I also have some bitterness towards it, but it is a very precious thing,” she says.

At the end of the day, it was a matter of writing what she knew. “The Melbourne social scene and the Melbourne art world is a very particular cauldron. I’ve been going to shows here since I came at 18. It’s very familiar. I felt like I could really nail the personalities and the vibe of that subculture.”

Compared to Ella’s first book, New Animal, which she wrote when she was just 26, Woo Woo is a step up, technically. She’s been working hard to make it such.

“I think people would be surprised by how much I do try and be better. I’m always reading and rereading books I’ve loved and circling sentences, and then working out how the writer has done something. I’m really trying to understand the technique used for that sentence to be so effective.”

It’s an admirable discipline, especially in this economy. It would have been easier for Ella to rest on her laurels (aka, raw skill and talent, which is already abundant). But would Sabine do that? No way. 

“Second books are notoriously rough as guts, I didn’t want to fall into that trap of just kicking something through. Because I could, but there’s no artistic integrity in that.

Woo Woo is available now.