Cirrus@Austlit

'In 1888, Melbourne hosted a grand Centennial International Exhibition to mark a century of British occupation of the continent. There, a six-year-old girl called Ethel Punshon was excited to see that she had won a prize of two guineas for her needle-work – an embroidered red felt newspaper holder. Almost one hundred years later, as Brisbane prepared to mark the bicentennial with a modern ‘Expo 88’, Ethel – now known as Monte Punshon – was invited to become Expo’s roving ambassador, as perhaps the only person alive who remembered its predecessor.' (Introduction)

'Charmian Clift was a novelist, travel writer, and essayist who, with her writer husband George Johnston, lived with their young family on the Greek island of Hydra from 1955 to 1964. One member of the artist community who gathered around them there, the young Leonard Cohen, described them as having ‘a larger-than-life, a mythical quality’. That mythical quality was matched by real-life fame when, on their return to Australia, George’s novel My Brother Jack (1964) met with huge success, and Charmian became widely known and admired for her regular newspaper columns. Yet within five years of their return, both had died prematurely, Charmian by her own hand in 1969 and George of tuberculosis the following year.' (Introduction)

'Contrary to the connotations of its title, Temperance is a novel of extremes. The narrative is built around two disappearances, which traumatically affect the lives of a woman and her children.'

'Anyone who is old enough, and had their primary schooling in Australia, would know by heart the lines

I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains

from the poem ‘My Country’, by Dorothea Mackellar. At a time of climate crisis, when the inhabitants of that country are more apprehensive than ever about sunburn, droughts, and flooding rains, we are also involved in a scarifying national debate about who has the right to call this place ‘my country’ and to love it, a debate highlighted by the referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament. So it may not be the ideal time to appreciate the fame that this poem brought to the young Sydney woman who wrote it. Published first in 1908, it reappeared in numerous anthologies over the following period of the Great War, and spoke to the patriotic sentiments that flourished at the time, reaching the status of something like a national anthem. Nevertheless, it is that poem, and that fame, which constitute Dorothea Mackellar’s claim to our attention today.' (Introduction)          

'Dolly Maunder, born in 1881, is the sixth of seven children of a sheep-farming family outside Tamworth in northern New South Wales. Their lives are a relentless round of hard work, indoors and out, relieved only a by few brief years at the local one-teacher school.' (Introduction)

'She and Her Pretty Friend is a collation of stories about lesbians in Australian history, ranging from the convict women of the ‘flash mob’ in Hobart’s Cascades prison to the lesbian separatists of the 1983 Pine Gap Peace Camp. Along the way, the reader meets a couple who farmed together in the 1840s, another couple who taught swimming and started the first women-only gym in Melbourne in 1879, as well as one of the first women doctors and her lifelong companion, who both served at the Scottish Women’s Hospital in Serbia in 1916. There are other figures, like poet Lesbia Harford and her muse, Katie Lush, or suffragist Cecilia John, who rode on horseback, dressed in suffrage colours, at the head of a march of more than 4,000 women and children (Danielle Scrimshsaw credits her with ‘queering the suffrage movement’). A chapter on Eve Langley and other ‘passing women’ prompts questions about whether they would have seen themselves as transgender, in today’s parlance.' (Introduction)

'It’s spring 1932 and Sydney is in the grip of the Great Depression. In the narrow terrace-lined streets and back lanes of inner Sydney, there are illegal two-up games and off-course betting. Sly grog shops are open after the official pub closing time of 6pm, offering beer, spirits and drugs. Police raids are usually pre-arranged, on these venues and others, such as Black Ada’s Academy School of Dancing, where homosexual men can meet under the guise of taking ballroom dancing lessons with the women who work there.' (Introduction)   

'Gwen Harwood is one of Australia’s most important poets, renowned for her lyrical brilliance and wit. Her Collected Poems, published in 2003, earned her praise as one of the finest poets of the twentieth century. She also appears in Roelf Bolt’s Encyclopedia of Liars and Deceivers as ‘Gwen Harwood, Housewife and Poetess’.' (Introduction)

'Dominique Wilson’s new novel is another foray into the field of historical fiction. Her two previous novels deal with the pain of living through periods of civil strife and migration, and cover long periods of time and several cultures: The Yellow Papers (2014) is set in China and Australia from the 1870s to the 1970s, while That Devil’s Madness (2016) moves from Paris to Algiers to Australia and back from the 1890s to 1970s.' (Introduction)

'Another book about a mother by a daughter, I thought when I saw this one, summoning to mind Biff Ward’s In My Mother’s Hands (2014), Kate Grenville’s One Life (2015), and Nadia Wheatley’s Her Mother’s Daughter (2018). But while each of those books presents an impressive woman cramped – sometimes tragically so – by her postwar circumstances, in this case we have a subject who was nothing short of a national treasure.'  (Introduction)

'In 1942, The Pea Pickers was published by Angus & Robertson in Sydney, garnering high praise for its freshness and poetic invention. A picaresque tale of two sisters who, dressed as boys, earn their living picking seasonal crops in Gippsland in the late 1920s, it impressed Douglas Stewart, literary editor of the Bulletin, with its ‘love of Australian earth and Australian people and skill in painting them’. The author, Eve Langley, was at that time incarcerated in the Auckland Mental Hospital, where she would remain for the next seven years, isolated from her estranged husband and three young children, and from her mother and sister, who were also in New Zealand.'  (Introduction)

'‘Ern Malley’ – a great literary creation and the occasion of a famous literary hoax – has continued to attract fascinated attention ever since he burst upon the Australian poetry scene more than seventy years ago. But his sister Ethel has attracted little notice, she who set off the whole saga by writing to Max Harris, the young editor of Angry Penguins, asking whether the poems left by her late brother were any good, and signing herself ‘sincerely, Ethel Malley’.' (Introduction)

'Craig Munro’s latest book shines a spotlight on the work of some very different Australian book editors. It begins in the 1890s, when A.G. Stephens came into prominence as literary editor of The Bulletin’s famous Red Page. It continues through the trials and tribulations of P.R. (‘Inky’) Stephensen in publishing and radical politics in the interwar period and his internment during the war for his association with the Australia First Movement. Literary Lion Tamers then moves on to Beatrice Davis’s long career as a professional book editor with Angus & Robertson after World War II. It concludes with Rosanne Fitzgibbon, with whom Munro developed fiction and poetry lists at the University of Queensland Press.' (Introduction)

'After My Brilliant Career appeared in 1901, Miles Franklin spent a few years living in Sydney, where she enjoyed being fêted as a new literary sensation. Her attempt to earn a living by writing fiction and journalism about women’s issues was less than successful; even the timely and witty suffrage novel, Some Everyday Folk and Dawn (1909), was knocked back at first. In 1906, at the age of twenty-six, she left Australia for the United States. She spent the next nine years living in Chicago and working for the Women’s Trade Union League, secretary to its wealthy patron, Margaret Dreier Robins, and editing its journal, Life and Labour, with her compatriot Alice Henry. The two Australians enjoyed recognition as enfranchised women, a status that American women were still fighting for.' (Introduction) 

'Kenneth Cook (1929-87) was a prolific author best known for his first novel, Wake in Fright (1961), which was based on his experience as a young journalist in Broken Hill in the 1950s. In January 1972, as I sat in a London cinema watching the film made from this novel by director Ted Kotcheff, its nightmare vision of outback life seared itself into my brain. I was about to return home to Australia after two and a half years away, and I wondered why on earth I had made the fateful decision to go back to a place as violent and cruel as this. (Introduction)

'In 2016 A.S. Patrić’s first novel, Black Rock, White City won the Miles Franklin Literary Award. Two years earlier (he told an interviewer) he couldn’t even get a rejection slip for it: not one of the big Australian publishers responded when he sent the manuscript. The independent company Transit Lounge took it on, and the rest is history. Or, rather, the rest of Patrić’s work comes into the light: Transit Lounge has since published his second novel, Atlantic Black (2017), and now this, his fourth collection of short fiction.'  (Introduction)

'The appearance in 2014 of In Certain Circles, a new novel from Elizabeth Harrower, was an important literary event. The author, who still lives in Sydney, had published nothing since 1966 and had repeatedly maintained that she had nothing more to say. In Certain Circles had been ready for publication in 1971, but Harrower withdrew it. In interviews over the intervening period, she gave a number of reasons for this decision but remained adamant that no one could read the manuscript. Fortunately, Michael Heyward at Text Publishing, who had recently reprinted her four earlier novels, persuaded her otherwise. Text published handsome hardback editions of In Certain Circles and A Few Days in the Country and other stories (2015), a collection of her short stories, more than half of which had appeared for the first time in that same year. With these two new books, and the republication of her small but powerful oeuvre, it is time to ask how we now understand Harrower’s achievement and, as a consequence, how we might reconfigure the picture of mid-century Australian fiction.' (Introduction)