'Over the hundreds of years it has taken for the colonies of the old European empires to become nations, there have been cases – most notably, of course, the United States – where a creole literature has made an important addition to the literature of the homeland; but there has been no case quite comparable to that of Australian poetry in this century. Trainee midwives on tenterhooks, Australian nationalists eager for every sign of a successful parturition from the homeland have a lot to go on. Though it remains necessary to call them unwise, it…' (Introduction)
