Cirrus@Austlit

'The short story in Australia and New Zealand has flourished from the last decade of the nineteenth century onwards, and has been strictly bound to orality - yarns, yarn-spinning (Bennet 5) - from its early days, as the speech cadence of a usually sympathetic storyteller, either involved in the narrative, or simply an eye-witness or a bystander, interacting with listeners / readers, influences its time-scale, rhythm, tempo and structure.

A few significant stories by representative short-fiction writers from the late nineteenty century well into the mid-twentieth century - Australian Henry Lawson, Barbara Baynton, Vance Palmer, and New Zealand Frank Sargeson - though reflecting specific colonial realities and issues in a period of nation building, will be discussed here for their contribution to a relatively new genre, with specific regard to their treatment of time, changing from a traditional to a gradually experimental mode where they are sometimes forerunners or aware of modernist techniques.' (105)