Cirrus@Austlit

Rothwell identifies a small group of books that he believes hold the key to a distinctively Australian literature. The list includes Randolph Stow's Tourmaline, Scot Cane's Pila Nguru: The Spinifex People and T. G. H. Strehlow's Journey to Horseshoe Bend. Rothwell contends that this writing 'tends towards the reduplicative and the understated, the mazy and open-ended. It is the tradition that was first sensed and explored by Leichhardt, whose disappearance seems somehow very like its defiant foundation act. Its works are hybrid, unreliable and conform to no obvious canon, and yet they are instantly recognisable: they have a common stamp.'

He concludes that such writings need to be re-examined. 'I regard them not as eccentric outliers, rebel weeds that failed to take, but as emblems of the beckoning future, traces of an ore as yet unformed, the first glimmering stars in the dark sky of an authentic Australian literature.'

James Bradley recalls his youthful readings of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. He argues that, at its best, fantasy fiction 'has a capacity to connect us to things we too often seem to have lost, to make these deep questions [about belief and the human condition] somehow comprehensible, making us feel as if we are somehow connected to the past, to a way of being that might, like the outlines of the map of Middle-earth that once hung on my bedroom wall, reside somewhere in the shadow of our own past'.

In pondering A. E. Housman's relegation to relative literary obscurity, Peter Ryan demonstrates Housman's influence on various Australian poets (including James McAuley and A. D. Hope) and on some of Australia's historians, judges and politicians.