Cirrus@Austlit

'The bookshop in the Berlin high street was, like any bookshop in any Berlin high street, four or five times better and more comprehensive than its Anglo - sphere counterparts. The ‘Australian and New Zealand’ section was small compared to the large Asian section it appended, but it was there. Among a random selection of novels by novelists from Bryce Courtney to Gail Jones, a trio of Christos, and no poets I’d heard of was the in evitable, ugh, The Lucky Country . It was the section’s sole volume of social commentary aside from the inevitable Mutant Message Down Under , a reprint that was now itself fifteen years old. This was 2012. Had das buch buyers been able to find nothing more current to represent us than this—with, if memory serves, its Sidney Nolan cover—response to the Australia of Robert Menzies? Apparently not. Here we were amid the postmodern Kosovo poets and deluxe BDSM photo essay collections, permanently waiting to realise our potential, a ‘lucky country, of second rate men, who s hare its luck’.' (Introduction)