Cirrus@Austlit

Hergenhan's contribution to the Festschrift for Michael Wilding starts as a memoir, reminiscing about the mid-1960s when he and Wilding were colleagues at the University of Sydney. Both Wilding and Hergenhan were interested in a Marcus Clarke 'revival', and both did some critical writing on Clarke which, in Wilding's case, led to the significant monograph Marcus Clarke (1977). Hergenhan discovers an affinity between the two writers who both were expatriates from England having to make sense of the new environment in Australia, and who both were Australian as well as international writers. He argues that 'perhaps Wilding saw much of himself in Clarke' (226), and concludes:

'Clarke provided a literary model [for Wilding], a morale booster, and above all an analogue of a thoroughly professional writer, with a flexible, restless outlook, pursuing the new with the aid of the old, a young expatriate writer, beginning his acclimatisation but always nurturing his internationalism. ... Theirs is one of the most fascinating connections - of "imagined counterparts" - in Australian literary history' (232).