Cirrus@Austlit

'On my bookshelf is a copy of Morris Miller's two-volume bibliography Australian Literature, in which Bruce Sutherland pasted his bookplate, a reproduction of a Neville Cayley painting of a kookaburra. He acquired the copy shortly after the bibliography was published in 1940 and must have been one of the few academics in US or other overseas centers of learning ever to possess one. At the time, he was a young lecturer in English on the staff of the Pennsylvania State College.' (Introduction)

'The central argument of this essay is that Peter Cowan's modernist experiments in fiction have not received due acknowledgment. A complex and conflicted personality, Cowan emerged in the 1940s as a writer under the sponsorship of the Angry Penguins in Melbourne but has become identified with Western Australia, where he was born and lived almost all his life. This essay, which discusses his love-hate relationship with the place, attempts to counter the limiting view that he is a regional writer. Drawing attention to the extraordinary contrast been his modernist fiction and his old-fashioned historical chronicles of his colonial forbears, it reveals him as a man psychically wounded by his family's past, whose overriding concern in his fiction was to match in words the emotional immediacy that the Angry Penguins achieved in paint.'  (Publication abstract)

'Most biographers like to think that what they have written would have been acceptable to the person they are writing about. Suzanne Falkiner has no such illusions about this work. In a postscript to her 890-page biography of Randolph Stow she remarks: ‘No doubt Stow would not have approved of this book, and more especially because it contains a large amount of “chatter about Harriet”’ (721). The phrase, ‘chatter about Harriet’ (originally from a review of a Shelley biography that gave considerable attention to Harriet, the first wife), had been used by Stow in a 1976 interview, when he had been asked whether he thought that ‘knowing something of the life and personality of an artist’ could help readers to understand his work. In reply he agreed on the need ‘to know a great deal – well, a certain amount, anyway – about an author’s life, and not only what he chooses to have known’. By way of illustration, he pointed to Conrad’s attempted suicide, which had only recently become known, as ‘obviously something that one needs to know’. At the same time, he hoped ‘this sort of thing could be kept to a minimum’, as ‘too much chatter about Harriet . . . distracts attention from the work’.' (Introduction)

'Every man and his dog has heard of La Trobe. But just who was Charles Joseph La Trobe? He is at once a household name and a mystery man. A man vilified by his opponents, and misunderstood by his modern admirers.

'This lavishly illustrated biography uncovers the man behind the public name, as not only an important colonial figure but an author and artist. Traces his globetrotting early years and struggles as Governor in Victoria during the goldrush to his eventual blindness in old age. Filled with interesting colonial illustrations and his personal correspondence. ' (Publication Summary)

' When Henry Lawson died in 1922, he was publicly honoured as a "national writer," but for the last twenty years of his life he had been a "derelict artist," caught in a cycle of poverty, alcoholism and depression, humiliated, frustrated, often ashamed of the work that he was producing and haunted by the sense of the writer that he might have been. Almost a century later, there is no biography that adequately portrays the man and the circumstances that contributed to his collapse. Underlying this article, which considers aspects of his struggle to realize his literary ambitions, is the assumption that because Lawson's work has such a strong autobiographical element, the way in which his life is read inevitably colours how his writing is read. Until there is a biography in which the tragic dimension of his life is fully recognized, our understanding of Lawson's literary achievement remains incomplete.' (Publication abstract)

'Laurie Clancy was already a lecturer at La Trobe University when I arrived there in 1970. In those heady days when universities were expanding rapidly, and there was a widely shared belief among both staff and students that the humanities mattered, teaching in an English department could be an exciting experience. The La Trobe English staff was young and enthusiastic, ready to try out new ideas about teaching and assessment, and staff meetings could be lively—and even acrimonious—as everyone had their say. What I quickly learned was that Laurie was a colleague who was easy to work with: he was a voice of reason at staff meetings; eschewed the factionalism that seemed to bedevil English departments in Australia during those years; and could always be relied upon to take a practical approach to things. Unfailingly sociable and never less than co-operative, with a strong sense of esprit de corps, he was a stalwart in the department, generous with his time in his dealings with both staff and students. As a teacher he was readily accessible to students, willing to spend time with them, mindful of their welfare, and full of encouragement for those who showed promise. My memory is that he was never less than busy, but never asked for relief or special favours to get more time for himself. He did not shirk the various administrative chores that came his way, handling them with a minimum of fuss, and sat on committees when it was required of him. Conscientious though he was about his university responsibilities, he did not spend more time on campus than he needed to, because he lived a double life, somehow managing to reconcile being a full-time academic with being a creative writer and journalist. Within a few years of his going to La Trobe he was probably the best-known member of the English department, with a solid reputation as a fiction writer and as a reviewer as well as an academic. ' (Author's introduction)

'The article traces the phrase 'Secret of England's Greatness' through its currency in nineteenth-century British culture, including the title of the painting of Queen Victoria by Thomas Jones Barker (1863), and other references, to argue that it was a commonplace in Joseph Furphy's time. The paper traces Furphy's critique of British imperialism in the novel.' (Author's abstract)