Cirrus@Austlit

Geordie Williamson traces his own encounters with Australian literature - while living in England - and comes to an understanding of what Australia's national literature is 'good for': 'helping us define ourselves in relation to an Anglo past and American present, for example, or airing the wounds suffered by indigenous Australia, or inhabiting those new frictions that result from our expanding cultural pluralism. Above all, it could teach us to dwell more easily in a landscape that did not accord with the metaphors and myth-kitty that was our northern inheritance.'

From this launching point, Williamson sets himself the task of exploring the current state of Australian literary criticism and the devising of a national literary canon.

Gabrielle Carey excavates, as far as possible with the resources at her disposal, the connection between her mother, Joan Ferguson, the writer Randolph Stow and their respective families. Correspondence between Carey and Stow (included in the essay) sheds some light on the relationship and solves some family mysteries for Carey.