The fibro house Bryan Brown called home until he was 25 still stands on its stumped legs.
Where once it bordered a boggy swamp and bushland, a natural playground and "the best fun in the world" for the young Brown, it is now one house in a sprawling second Sydney metropolis spreading from Liverpool to Parramatta to the Blue Mountains.
In working-class Panania, Brown's mates were migrant kids hailing from England, Ireland, Italy and Greece.
The new tribes didn't always get on and there were the occasional scuffles but they grew up and mostly settled into ordinary lives – except for Brown who didn't take the direct path from school to job. He found fame as an actor.
The kids and teens from western Sydney come from different places these days; from Lebanon, Vietnam, Egypt, Turkey, Greece, India and the Pacific Islands.
But they exhibit the same kind of swagger, cheek and irreverence that took Brown to Hollywood, and he loves that.
Casting his eye across a classroom of year 10 students from Arthur Phillip High School workshopping Othello recently, Brown was impressed by the enthusiasm they brought to Shakespeare's twisting story of jealousy, racism and deceit.
Among the jostling personalities he glimpsed his younger self. "A really good-looking guy that was sharp," Brown cracks. "I could see one of my mates in there. And I could see Sam Neill in one of them."
Growing up in the Bankstown area, the son of a single mother who cleaned houses to make ends meet, fundamentally shaped him as a person.
So it is from a position of gratitude, and a desire to redress inequities in the distribution of arts funding and resources, that Brown has accepted the new role of ambassador of WestWords, an incubator of emerging writing talent established in 2007 by author Libby Gleeson and a group of fellow writers.
Since obtaining independence from Blacktown City Council in 2014, WestWords has been busy reshaping itself to become the "connective tissue" between creatives and the region's under 25s, bringing literature to preschool, primary and secondary school aged children while supporting the region's capacity for new and exciting literary work.
Within this regional melting pot of 2 million people, a vibrant flash mob of 150 languages and 140 cultures, WestWords, backed by other local arts bodies, is pressing the State Government to establish a Western Sydney Centre for Writing. A feasibility study it is authoring is to be presented to Arts NSW in March.
Writing is absolutely essential to storytelling, to theatre, to dance, songwriting, opera, journalism, criticism, fiction and non-fiction, says Brown who loved school, hated English. Shakespeare felt too remote. Iambic pentameter? "I didn't know it at all." The irony, Brown says, "is that for the 40 years of my working life has only been about English."
A centre for writing is simply a "bloody good idea".
FOR the past year, author James Roy has been leading WestWord's project entitled Landscape, Place and Me, involving students from Granville Boys High and Lightning Ridge Central School.
Roy worked with students from each school individually. They exchanged writings and critiqued each other's work and in September the two sets of students were brought together for a week-long camp in Baradine, near the Warrumbungles.
Last week six of the seven year 10 students from Granville met with their teacher, Owen Egan, to edit their work ahead of the publication of an anthology that will join the bestsellers of Neil Gaiman and Roald Dahl on the school's library shelves.
A Different Simple takes its title from student Ali Hawchar's brooding piece in which he peers into a star-studded night and ponders the limitations of his own urban world.
"I think the main change has been in their confidence," says Roy of the project. "One of the boys put it as explicitly as that. He told me that he'd never realised that he could express himself and share his views and experiences with the kind of clarity he's discovered in his writing.
"There is the recognition of the possibilities ahead of them, and clarity of expression, all those other benefits that come from better writing skills. But to feel confident that their voice is not only able to be heard, but that people want to hear them – that's huge."
The lads are alert to casual prejudice and Melik Ibrahim's We Love this City is a satirical take down of Arab-Australian stereotypes. Questions around family, and identity preoccupy them.
"When we're young we're quite narcissistic by nature," says Roy. "We're also transitioning out of the family unit into the wider world.
"It's a scary business, because expectations pull you in all directions. In some respects those pressures are harder for these boys than many other young adults, especially when one considers the way their community is often viewed by wider society and some of the press, but at its core, the same things drive, worry and excite them."
Brown, too, notices how strong the influence of international forms of popular culture: Westerns in his day, Star Wars in this. It's a marker of culture in transition as a second generation trades one set of cultural expectations for another.
Greater social cohesion is one of the benefits of WestWords' aim of sustained literary engagement.
"The work is unifying," Brown says. "The thing they are focused on and concentrating on is creative and academic … and all the other stuff going on in their lives, be it relationships with others in the school and outside of the school, all that drops away, all other cultural things drop away and they become Australian school kids.
"Out of that, then, what have they got to offer? They've got shyness, they've got to offer confidence, they've got to offer humour; larrikanism in a creative context and directing it in one place - a story - and I find it thrilling.
"What I see is one nation at work in these classrooms, an Australian nation at work. Sure, they might be carrying other things like I was carrying an Irish background or a Catholic background.
"I remember at Panania coming off the ramp home from school one day and some kid was at the bottom of the ramp going, 'I hate Catholics, I hate Catholics'. I said: 'Why do you hate Catholics, mate?', and he said, 'Because my parents hate them'.
"This sort of stuff has been going on forever. That factional stuff, that fear of the new, has been going on forever. Then, you have to learn to struggle with it, and get over it."
With the dedication of their teacher and the support from WestWords, Melik and Ali, Nepalese-born Shreya Wagley, 15-year-old twins Hani and Fadi Alameddine, Hamzah Ghamrawi, and Abdul Wilson will be the first of their high school peers to study HSC English extension.
They mainly want to become doctors and lawyers though some of the boys, says Egan, are developing the deep critical thinking required to one day write a a novel. Good fiction takes time to trickle down from the well of human experience, especially narratives which move beyond the traditional mainstream.
And particularly so, says Roy, from the corners of society where literacy levels might be low, educational opportunities poor or the creative arts not so valued.
From the work of Bankstown Youth Development Services and The Writing and Society Research Centre at Western Sydney University, which houses Giramondo Publishing and the Western Sydney Literacy Movement, SWEATSHOP, have emerged the likes of Luke Carman (An Elegant Young Man), Felicity Castagna (The Incredible Here and Now) and Michael Mohammed Ahmad (The Tribe).
WestWords executive director Michael Campbell says one of the objectives of the Western Sydney Centre for Writing is to unearth more writers, playwrights and performers who can articulate what it means to be Australian in the 21st century.
During the 1960s and 1970s, Australian writers and playwrights shook off the shackles of British literary traditions which arrived with the First Fleet to tell stories of post-war Australia and Brown rode that wave.
Campbell is talking of a potential third phase.
The stories of western Sydney are "exciting and new, and different and unprecedented and untamed but that rawness is Australia", he says. "We are peering into the future."
