Cirrus@Austlit

'In her expansive biography of the New York–based Shirley Hazzard, published two years ago, Brigitta Olubas revealed that the writer corresponded for many years with the Sydney novelist Elizabeth Harrower. Harrower had never met Hazzard when they began writing to each other, but she had become friendly with Kit Hazzard, her difficult mother, in the 1960s and gradually found herself taking responsibility for her care in Sydney while Shirley stayed on in New York and Europe. The slightly shocking revelation that the relatively successful international writer had imposed her daughterly duties on the struggling local novelist reinforces a sense that Hazzard was rather haughty and self-centred.'  (Introduction)

'It’s only a few months since I recommended Catharine Lumby’s lively biography of Frank Moorhouse to readers of Inside Story. Her Frank Moorhouse: A Life is a warm tribute to its subject as a social force, with photographs and an index for those eager to check out mutual contacts, though it gives little attention to Moorhouse’s fiction.' (Introduction)

Frank Moorhouse’s first biographer captures a life in motion

'How Shirley Hazzard resisted provincialism'

'Kath Kenny’s intergenerational account of a key moment in Australian theatre'

'Despite his critics, David Williamson created a remarkable body of popular work'

'What meaning can be drawn from an individual life? Most of us will disappear without much trace, forgotten by all but friends and family. Writers may hope for more, leaving their art behind for posterity. Performance artists, though, live their art in the moment.' (Introduction)

'Coralie Clarke Rees and Leslie Rees are not remembered among the glamour couples of twentieth-century Australian literary life. Unlike George Johnston and Charmian Clift, Vance and Nettie Palmer, or their friends Darcy Niland and Ruth Park, neither of them wrote novels and they both spread their work across a range of genres. Critics, journalists, travel writers, children’s writers, playwrights, they devoted themselves to supporting the broad artistic culture of Australia rather than claiming its attention. Their lives were spent in juggling their literary interests with the need to make a living at a time when Australian society was even less supportive of writers than it is now. They made compromises to suburban life and the need to care for their two daughters, without ever abandoning their determination to live by the pen.' (Introduction) 

(Introduction)

'Did Australian drama really go missing during the 1960s, as the standard accounts of theatre history assume?'

'What can novels tell us about how political ideas circulate?'

The first Australian television drama was broadcast in 1956, within a year of the first production of Ray Lawler’s play, The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (1955), which stimulated a revival of Australian stage drama. Literary critics have marked the production of the Doll as a significant turning point in the history of the national drama and accepted it and a handful of subsequent stage plays into an Australian literary canon, returning to them for analysis and reinterpretation. But television drama has struggled to gain literary status in Australia and it still presents challenges to any ongoing literary critical discussion. It confronts literary critics with a popular, ephemeral form with doubtful claims to artistic merit. Indeed, in Belonging: Australian Playwriting in the Twentieth Century John McCallum consigns the realist drama that flourished in the wake of the Doll to film and television: ‘After the early 1960s bush realism, country-town comedy-drama, slum realism and most of their related genres moved off, mostly into film and television’ (89). By the mid-1960s, television adaptations of plays by Lawler, Alan Seymour, Richard Beynon, Barbara Vernon and other prominent playwrights of the stage revival had been broadcast on the ABC or on the commercial network most committed to producing drama, ATN7 Sydney/GTV9 Melbourne, engaging a much wider audience for serious drama. In television’s early years, stage drama and television drama appeared to be part of the same literary project. '

Source: Abstract

'Television drama has been the dominant form of popular storytelling for more than sixty years, shaping the imaginations of millions of people. This book surveys the careers of the central creators of those stories for Australian television—the writers who learnt how to work in a new medium, adapting to its constraints and exploring its creative possibilities. Informed by interviews with many writers, it describes the establishment of Australian television drama production, observing the way writers grasped the creative and business opportunities that television presented. It examines the development of Australian versions of the major television genres—the sitcom, the police drama, the historical series, docudrama, and social drama— presenting a ‘canon’ of significant Australian television drama productions that deserve to be remembered. It offers an account of the emergence of work by Indigenous writers for television and it argues for the consideration of television drama alongside histories of Australian film and stage drama.'

(Source: publisher's blurb)