Cirrus@Austlit

'‘Spider Town’, Frank Moorhouse’s first published short story, appeared in Overland #29, autumn 1964.

'We’ve rescued it from the archives, because Frank is keen for it to find new audiences, and also because there is one change he wishes he could make. We’ve given him the opportunity here, by republishing the story below, along with his marked-up correction.

'We’re also giving readers the opportunity to edit the story – to tweak, comment on, alter, transform, to even create new endings and back stories.' (Introduction)

'800 stories were submitted for consideration this year, many exploring the politics of this decade. After six weeks we decided on a shortlist of ten impressive examples of the contemporary short story, which included this years three finalists.' (Introduction)

'Drysdale is the essential Australian painter. Many gifted painters have come out of Australia, and one of them Sydney Nolan is a universal figure. But noone except Drysdale gives the same authentic feeling of the resolute humanity that has manged to exist in that terrible continent ...' (Introduction)

'Lawson scholar Paul Eggart recalls that, when he was a third-year high school student in 1966, as a prize for mathematics he opted for a hardback copy of Cecil Mann's Henry Lawson;s Best Stories ...' (Introduction)

'If he were alive today, Lawson may not be as destructively conflicted about and disturbed by his effeminacy, and may be bolder in his assertion of himself. Even so, he would recognise the strong remnants of the primitive male culture he dealt with, and the psychological damage and suicide it causes.' (Introduction)

'The sexual tension in 'The Drover's Wife' is stark. 

'The girl-wife

'The drover's wife has found herself in the outback, living in relative isolation in a two-room shack, one room with an earthen floor and one with a slab floor. She has four young children and a husband who is away droving for long stretches of of time - he's been gone for six months without any communication, and at one time had been gone for eighteen months. she is virtually a single mother, or a part-time wife, or maybe a semi-abandoned wife. She is used to the loneliness in her life.

'As a girl-wife she hated it, but now she would feel strange away from it.'

'Maybe life was be better without the drover being home?' (Introduction)

'In the bushfire incident, the drover's wife experiences, for a few moments, dramatic transformations in her personality that are wonderfully revealing. For a brief time, she becomes a man. she crosses the sex boundary: 'She put on an old pair of her husband's trousers and beat out the flames with a green bough ... The sight of his mother in trousers greatly amused Tommy', her oldest child. This is perhaps the nervous laughter of children when confronted with a disordering of their certainties. Tommy may have been even more nervously amused if his drover father - had he been around - had put on one of his wife's dresses.' (Introduction)

'This year, 2017, marks the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the birth of the Australian writer Henry Lawson. Lawson scholar Paul Eggart, in Biography of a Book :Henry Lawson's While the Billy Boils (2013), recounts Lawson's death, at the age of fifty-five, and funeral...' (Introduction)

'Since Henry Lawson wrote his story The Drover’s Wife in 1892, Australian writers, painters, performers, and photographers have created a wonderful tradition of Drover’s Wife works, stories, and images.

'The Russell Drysdale painting from 1945 has become an Australian icon.

'Other versions of the Lawson story have been written by Murray Bail, Frank Moorhouse, Barbara Jefferis, Mandy Sayer, David Ireland and others, up to the present including Ryan O’Neill’s graphic novel.

'Moorhouse has examined our ongoing fascination with this story, collected some of the best pieces of writing on the subject, adding commentary on each piece, and created a remarkable, gorgeous book.' (Publication Summary)

''Becoming' writing-learning the oath of literary life (and its exceptions).

'When I was about 15 in school at Wollongong Tech I began to think that I would like to 'be a writer'. In particular, to be a short-story writer. When younger I had already been inspired by the magic of the imagination in Alice in Wonderland and during my first years of high school I was a constant reader and read ex-curriculum: O. Henry, Guy de Maupassant, Saki. I suppose Henry Lawson was in the curriculum. I had found my way to Edgar Allan Poe and Jack London. The English teacher encouraged me and I edited the school newspaper and wrote my first fiction for it.' (Introduction)

'To: Malcolm, Bill,

'Cc: Queen Elizabeth, Head of State (you may remember me, you have given me a couple of medals and I met your late sister, Margaret), Richard Di Natale, leader Australian Greens (we haven’t met), Barnaby Joyce and all Independents

'Re: KPIs—‘Things is crook in Tallarook and there’s no dough in Dubbo …’ (Jack O’Hagan)' (Introduction)

'ASIO has kept a file on Frank Moorhouse since he was seventeen. Now Frank has decided it is time to report on ASIO.

'This year ASIO has extended its surveillance powers, made the issuing of warrants easier and limited the freedom of journalists. At a time when the government has raised the terrorist alert level to ‘high' we are facing the question of what degree of terrorist threat we are prepared to endure so as to retain freedoms of expression and what might loosely be called the ‘traditional privacies'.

'The paradox is an old one: is a secret agency needed for our safety as a democracy? If so, how does a democracy manage a secret agency without losing control of it? What constitutes an offence against national security? And what are we to make of WikiLeaks and socially conscious hackers and whistleblowers?

'Do we need a renewal of the bargain between the citizen and the secret agencies, as unreliable as it may be, as we all go into the glare and the maze of controlled and uncontrollable data collection and its consequences?We are entering a new era, where nothing can be assumed to be private, especially at the governmental level.

'More than ever before, our future is unforeseeable, but if in the unforeseeable we see a glimmer of dangerous things, perhaps we should remember that positive things can also be unforeseeable.' (Publication summary)

'The article offers the author's insight on his friend whom he called the conversationalist. He states that the conversationalist is interested the way they converse and spend most of his free time in coffee shops, trains, and bars listening to the conversations of other people. He mentions that the conversationalist makes gentle corrections and improvements to a certain person's conversation. He adds that phrases in their conversations were called dead prayers by the conversationalist.' (Publisher's abstract)