Cirrus@Austlit

Vance Palmer was born in Bundaberg, Queensland. He was educated at several schools at which his father was schoolmaster and at Ipswich Grammar School. An interest in literature, instilled by his father, was temporarily replaced by a passion for sport at Ipswich. But a recurring desire to become a writer saw him leave for England in 1905. After little literary success, Palmer returned to Australia in 1907 via Finland, Russia, Siberia and Japan and worked for a time as tutor on a remote Queensland property. Palmer returned to England in 1910 and travelled through North America, Mexico and the Pacific. Palmer was now a well-known member of literary circles, and with the encouragement of A. R. Orage, editor of the New Age, he developed his writing and his social philosophy with many articles for various periodicals. This experience consolidated Palmer's view that Australia's national consciousness originated in the bush, an idea which he would further develop in his criticism and creative writing. In 1914 he married Janet (Nettie) HigginsYi) with whom he forged one of the most productive partnerships in Australian literary history.

After serving in World War I, Palmer returned to Australia and wrote a combination of popular and serious literature during the 1920s. In the late 1920s Nettie Palmer's growing income from journalism enabled Vance to concentrate on his serious writing and he twice won the Bulletin Novel Competition. In the following decades he continued to write and became a widely-known literary critic through his regular talks and reviews for the ABC. With this profile Palmer promoted the works of Australian writers such as Henry Lawson and Joseph Furphy and encouraged many young writers. His ideas about the formation of a national literature found their most influential form in The Legend of the Nineties (1955). His novels include The Passage (1930), Daybreak (1932), The Swayne Family (1934) and Legend for Sanderson (1937). His short stories first appeared in The World of Men (1915) and later Separate Lives (1931) and Sea and Spinifex (1934).

When Palmer died in 1959, a special edition of Meanjin was being prepared to honour his and Nettie's contribution to Australian literature, the conferral of an honorary doctorate at the University of Melbourne was being planned and his novel The Big Fellow was in the press. That novel would later win the Miles Franklin Award.

According to Palmer's entry (in his own hand) in A. G. Stephens's 'Australian Autobiographies' vol.2, he published two works in the UK in 1913. These were National Proverbs: China and National Proverbs: Japan in the series published by Frank Palmer in 1913.