Cirrus@Austlit

'Locating Australian Literary Memory begins with a typically pithy quotation from Miles Franklin about its subject matter: ‘Such monuments, alas, too often are a saving of face by the living in regard to the neglected dead’. Many of the eleven Australian writers focused on by Brigid Magner were indeed neglected during their lifetimes, and most, even if achieving popularity at one time, are little read today. They include a number whose work would still be regarded as canonical, such as Joseph Furphy, Henry Handel Richardson, Henry Lawson, ‘Banjo’ Paterson, Katharine Susannah Prichard and Eleanor Dark, along with two best-known for their books for children, Nan Chauncy and P. L. Travers. Novelist Kylie Tennant, Indigenous author David Unaipon and poet Adam Lindsay Gordon make up the rest of the group, all of whom were writing mainly in the nineteenth through to the mid-twentieth centuries.' (Publication abstract)