Cirrus@Austlit

'When Hamilton Mackinnon collected Clarke's stories in The Austral  Edition of the Selected Works of Marcus Clarke (1890),1 he placed as the first item of the 'Australian Tales and Sketches' section two pages entitled 'Australian Scenery'. This justly famous passage, originally part of the text accompanying reproductions of two paintings, Louis Buvelot's 'Waterpool Near Coleraine' and Nicholas Chevalier's 'The Buffalo Ranges' in Photographs of the Pictures in the National Gallery, Melbourne (1874), had been incorporated into Clarke's preface to Adam Lindsay Gordon's poems in 1876 and frequently reprinted.2 It was certainly not a tale, even if arguably a sketch. But its inclusion set a tone for Clarke's stories that followed, even if it was not the tone that Clarke set. The expected feature of Australian stories by the 1890s was clearly up-country description. Yet when we turn to Clarke's stories, such landscape descriptions are generally marginal. Mackinnon's incorporation of the passage into 'Australian Tales and Sketches' suggests an attempt to supplement the comparative lack of scenic settings in the stories themselves.' (Introduction)

Wilding challenges the critical consensus that dismisses Lawson's political writing. Wilding demonstrates that when these stories are analysed in historical and intellectual contexts a "rich specificity of social observation and political thought" is revealed.

Wilding demonstrates that William Lane's The Workingman's Paradiseexplores the traditional appeals, analyses and understandings of socialist propaganda. But Wilding finds that Lane also emphasizes that the propagandists must ensure they live within the propagandized value system before any social change can be effective.

'Joseph Furphy's Such is Life (1903) opens simply and clearly enough with that memorable, sardonic initial declaration: 'Unemployed at last!’170 The complex reaction of the relief from work, while at the same time the prospect of poverty and hunger; the sense of liberation, while at the same time the hitter reflection that it is only through unemployment that working men and women can ever attain the state of leisure and relaxation available to the upper classes: all this is succinctly implied. There is a lot said but not said, a lot of social observation and
commentary on the economic situation.' (Introduction) 

'In Fanfrolico and After Jack Lindsay discusses the historical novels he began to write in the mid 1930s. 'I still, however, could not handle the contemporary scene.'191 When contemporary society proves too resistant, then a recourse to history can be a way of approaching it from another direction, an approach to catch it off guard, unprotected. So it was in the mid-seventeenth century, both before the English Revolution and in the Restoration aftermath of repression, that poets turned to Old Testament themes: to search for a model that would illuminate the current complexities; and to evade the complex of repressions that effectively discouraged an accurate expression of the present moment. To turn to the historical is not to flee in escapism from the present, but to confront it by a negation that will allow a true perception of the negated present to emerge dialectically. The inexpressible crisis of the nineteen-thirties thus finds itself revealed in Lindsay's 1649: A Novel of A Year (1938);192 the emergent centralized, military-based, repressive Junto of Cromwell images the emergent dictatorships and national governments and the destruction of the radical impulses of cooperation and freedom at this moment in twentieth-century history.' (Introduction)

'When Christina Stead's Seven Poor Men of Sydney appeared in 1934 the dominant themes of Australian writing were rural, the characteristic settings were the country, the bush and the outback. There had, of course, been poems and fiction written about the cities; it isn't the case that there were no urban materials. Henry Lawson had written powerfully about urban poverty in the series of stories set in 'Jones' Alley' in the 1890s and had begun his career with the powerful urban ballads 'Faces in the Street' and 'The Army of the Rear'. William Lane's The Workingman s Paradise (1892) had described urban conditions in Sydney in the 1890s. But the received impression is of a literature devoted to perpetuating the outback myth of Australia, even though the population was predominantly urban.216 Seven Poor Men of Sydney can be seen as a work confronting and challenging this outback myth.' (Introduction)

'The fiction of Christina Stead (1902-83) is at last receiving something of its proper recognition after years of critical neglect, ascribed variously to her gender,232 to her expatriate status (born in Australia and spending her creative life in Europe and America),233 and to her left-wing politics.234 Her work is now being brought back into view within the general reappraisal of women writers and the extending of the canon of Australian literature. This essay explores her political vision with an examination of her volume of four novellas, The Puzzleheaded Girl (1968). The collection of novellas, even more than the volume of stories, is most publishers' least favourite form. It has proved similarly unattractive to critical commentary. Yet so many fiction writers have felt most at their ease in the novella, enjoying the space for amplification denied in the short story and free from the necessity of the ramifications of complex plotting and narrative expected in the novel. The novellas in The Puzzleheaded Girl work not by conventional plot but by the great monologues her characters deliver and the obliquely realized compulsive, seemingly unwilled and unmotivated entanglements in which they live. Stead catches most remarkably the way people talk, and the way, talking, they reveal themselves, their sexual and political involvements and obsessions - though the characters themselves could never recognize them as obsessions. The world of intellectual, radical, fringe bohemian groups during the late 1940s and the McCarthyite period and its aftermath is effortlessly documented. None of the actions has that neat Jamesian form, but instead a succession of seemingly inconsequential events. It seems sometimes as if Christina Stead is writing a variation on or descant to material a more mundane writer would have treated naturalistically; though we could never reconstruct those Ur-novellas. It is a manner that leads to a remarkable concision, an elliptical compression, resulting in a solidity and fullness free from any ponderousness: and from the elisions and ellipses retaining a powerful energy that imprints these stories on the memory.'  (Introduction)

'There is no doubt about the achievement of Patrick White (1912-90). The substantial corpus of books is there - twelve novels, three collections of stories, the plays, the autobiography. He is an Australian writer who is known internationally. But though he is well known, when we come to ask what he is known for, it is not so easy to get a succinct answer. What are his novels about? Are they about anything other than themselves? To define what White is we have to begin by defining what he is not; and this leads immediately into the nature of modernism. For White is the great Australian modernist. And modernism as an artistic movement is very much a system of exclusions. Much of the impulse of modernism was a denial of preceding traditions and a refusal of certain possibilities of continuity. The way in which modernism most immediately proclaimed itself was in its refusal of what had been the dominant nineteenth century mode of realism. If modernism was to be new, then it had to deny the existing, make it seem old and outdated. So that concern with the knowable, with recognizable psychological motivation, with the inventory of named objects, with causality and morality, is abandoned.'  (Introduction)