y separately published work icon Southerly periodical issue   peer reviewed assertion
Alternative title: Mid-Century Women Writers
Issue Details: First known date: 2012... vol. 72 no. 1 2012 of Southerly est. 1939 Southerly
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Notes

  • Contents indexed selectively.

Contents

* Contents derived from the 2012 version. Please note that other versions/publications may contain different contents. See the Publication Details.
Southerly Salutes Rosemary Dobson, Felicity Plunkett , single work obituary
'In April this year Rosemary Dobson received a copy of her new book Rosemary Dobson: Collected. Reviewers responded to the opportunity to capture an overarching statement of Dobson's poetics and career. Literary editor of The Age Jason Steger assembled a collective portrait of Dobson and her work, compiling the words of writers and editors and weaving them with his own. Helen Garner's comments highlight Dobson's "refined or austere approach to things . . . a sense of discretion and reserve." Ivor Indyk describes "a great sense of clarity and decorum" while Chris Wallace-Crabbe admires "the steadiness of her poetry." Peter Rose who in his capacity as editor of Australian Book Review published some of Dobson's most recent poems, emphasises "a real finesse and sustained quality". (Author's introduction)
(p. 10-17)
George Jeffreys 13 : George Jeffreys Woke up in Beijingi"George Jeffreys woke up in Beijing. Loud dragons", Jennifer Maiden , single work poetry (p. 18-26)
Golden Screei"In going forward", Jill Jones , single work poetry (p. 27-28)
Music and Weatheri"Be hidden", Jill Jones , single work poetry (p. 29)
Sugarloaf, Helen Hewitt , single work short story (p. 30-35)
Leaving the Party : Dorothy Hewett, Literary Politics and the Long 1960s, Fiona Morrison , single work criticism

'What political, cultural and rhetorical changes occurred between the publication of Dorothy Hewett's nostalgic essay on Kylie Tenant in Westerly in late 1960 (Hewett, "How Beautiful Upon the Mountains") and her strikingly negative literary obituary of Katherine Susannah Prichard in Overland in late 1969 (Hewett, "Excess of Love: The Irrecon - cilable in Katharine Susannah Prichard")? The first of these essays offered a forthright series of criticisms about Tenant's interest in stylistic experimentation and the decline of her rather more interesting socialist realism. The second essay delivered an equally forthright assessment of Prichard, Hewett's much-loved fellow West Australian woman writer and Communist, strongly condemning her deforming and persistent allegiance to the Communist Party in Australia and the Soviet Union and the socialist realist aesthetics mandated by them. Separated by only nine years, these two pieces of non-fiction present the contradictory literary and political positions that book-end Hewett's turbulent and productive Cold War 1960s, and indicate the nature and importance of the repudiation of Prichard as a springboard for Hewett's writing in the 1970s. Approached chronologically, Hewett's essays of the 1960s demonstrate the imbrication of politics and literary aesthetics in her work. Initially reproducing the partisan contours of the relationship between politics and literature familiar from the Left cultural debates of the 1930s, Hewett finds increasingly different answers for this debate's foundational questions about the function of art, the role of the socially engaged artist, the importance of realism and what to do or think about modernism.' (Author's abstract)

(p. 36-50)
Cloves Remind me of Siblingsi"when i was fifteen my mother’s brother –", Julie Chevalier , single work poetry (p. 51)
Newtown Dawn, Hawkesbury Duski"We cringe under the war of noise", Susan Adams , single work poetry (p. 52)
“Yrs Patrick” : Thea Astley’s Brush with Timely Advice on “The Rackety Career of Novel Writing”, Karen Lamb , single work criticism
'Thea Astley had a difficult relationship with critical responses to her work throughout her entire writing life. Success - early or late career (for she had both) - did little to diminish the wounds she felt were inflicted when a reviewer or critic got to work on her "style". By the mid-1980s there were even some Australian literary scholars who were beginning to endorse Astley's own sense of critical foul play. Elizabeth Perkins wrote of Astley's fiction being the kind of writing which not only "disconcerts enthusiastic readers" but seems to render it "beyond the reach of the more usual modes of criticism" (Perkins 11; 17). Yet until now little has been said about how this state of affairs developed or how Astley, over time, came to deal with it - despite the many re - marks she made in interviews which indicate just how strange her relationship with her public persona as a writer actually was. Astley, for her part, became adept at deflection: her teenage poetry was "a form of acne" (Smith 43); she was "incapable of playing the game of the writertaking- himself-seriously seriously" (Astley, Kunapipi 21); she was just a "bit of a misfit" (Astley, Australian Voices 37) and later, more defensively, "I've worked all my life and I haven't had to time to be in the ghetto de Balmain" (Astley, Sunday Herald 3). One person who had an impact on Astley's self-regard at an early stage in her writing life was Patrick White. The record of the friendship has thus far rested on the evidence of its beginning and ending, detailed in David Marr's biography Patrick White: A life (1991) yet a letter White wrote to Astley in 1961, and which Astley kept from view and from publication in Marr's subsequent collection of White's letters, is a critical new source from which we can interpret the influence of White's mentoring of Astley.' (Author's abstract)
(p. 53-65)
Through a Cupboard Darkly, David Cohen , single work short story (p. 66-70)
“Dazzling” Dark – Lantana Lane (1959), Helen O'Reilly , single work criticism
'World War II, and the Cold War which followed it, were years of stresses and strain for Eleanor Dark. When Lantana Lane appeared in 1959, signalling, as it turned out, the end of her literary career and seemingly light years away from her previous work, it was the culmination of two intense decades. At the beginning of 1940 she was still engaged in the long, laborious research for The Timeless Land trilogy, making daily trips to the Mitchell Library, even in the dead of winter. She was sharing the civilian experience of food shortages, wartime restrictions and rationing. Despite the popular and critical success of The Timeless Land (1941), top of The London Times' Christmas fiction list and the Book of the Month in the U.S. in October, repeatedly in letters to her publishers Dark declared herself "bothered" by her immersion in the past.' (Author's abstract)
(p. 71-80)
In the Desert, R. D. Wood , single work poetry (p. 81)
In the Cloudsi"you are bookbinder cartographer a", Sebastian Gurciullo , single work poetry (p. 82-83)
The Roadside Bramblei"Walking late by a roadside bramble", Peter Minter , single work poetry (p. 84-86)
From : Anonymous of Troy, Didier Coste , sequence poetry (p. 98-100)
Out of the Bluei"That there should appear out of the blue", Didier Coste , single work poetry (p. 98-99)
Lark Ascendingi"Up and soaring, her rosy fingers a finch", Didier Coste , single work poetry (p. 99-100)
Rose Bay Airport, 1944i"All of it surreal in infra-red", Margaret Bradstock , single work poetry (p. 101-102)
Boys, A. S. Patrić , single work short story (p. 103-108)
Holiday Snapi"I look at myself", Andrew Taylor , single work poetry (p. 109)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

Works about this Work

Small but Sure Samplers of the Nation's Creative Voice Christopher Bantick , 2013 single work review
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 19-20 January 2013; (p. 25)

— Review of Southerly vol. 72 no. 1 2012 periodical issue ; Kill Your Darlings no. 11 October 2012 periodical issue ; Meanjin vol. 71 no. 3 Spring 2012 periodical issue ; Island no. 130 Spring 2012 periodical issue ; Overland no. 209 Summer 2012 periodical issue
Mid-Century Well-Meaning? Victoria Genevieve Reeve , 2013 single work review
— Appears in: TEXT : Journal of Writing and Writing Courses , October vol. 17 no. 2 2013;

— Review of Southerly vol. 72 no. 1 2012 periodical issue
Small but Sure Samplers of the Nation's Creative Voice Christopher Bantick , 2013 single work review
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 19-20 January 2013; (p. 25)

— Review of Southerly vol. 72 no. 1 2012 periodical issue ; Kill Your Darlings no. 11 October 2012 periodical issue ; Meanjin vol. 71 no. 3 Spring 2012 periodical issue ; Island no. 130 Spring 2012 periodical issue ; Overland no. 209 Summer 2012 periodical issue
Mid-Century Well-Meaning? Victoria Genevieve Reeve , 2013 single work review
— Appears in: TEXT : Journal of Writing and Writing Courses , October vol. 17 no. 2 2013;

— Review of Southerly vol. 72 no. 1 2012 periodical issue
Last amended 29 Oct 2012 13:43:41
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