Australian literature | History, Summary, Characteristics, Authors, Books, & Facts | Britannica

Australian literature | History, Summary, Characteristics, Authors, Books, & Facts | Britannica


Australian literature

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Aboriginal narrative: the oral tradition
3. The century after settlement
4. Nationalism and expansion
5. Literature from 1940 to 1970
6. Literature from 1970 to 2000
7. Literature in the 21st century

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Australian literature, the body of literatures, both oral and written, produced in Australia.

Perhaps more so than in other countries, the literature of Australia characteristically expresses collective values. Even when the literature deals with the experiences of an individual, those experiences are very likely to be estimated in terms of the ordinary, the typical, the representative. It aspires on the whole to represent integration rather than disintegration. It does not favour the heroicism of individual action unless this shows dogged perseverance in the face of inevitable defeat. Although it may express a strong ironic disapproval of collective mindlessness, the object of criticism is the mindlessness rather than the conformity.

This general proposition holds true for both Indigenous Australians and those descended from later European arrivals, though the perception of what constitutes the community is quite radically different in these two cases. The white Australian community is united in part by its sense of having derived from foreign cultures, primarily that of England, and in part by its awareness of itself as a settler society with a continuing celebration of pioneer values and a deep attachment to the land. For Aboriginal peoples in their traditional cultures, story, song, and legend served to define allegiances and relationships both to others and to the land that nurtured them. For modern Aboriginal people, written literature has been a way of both claiming a voice and articulating a sense of cohesion as a people faced with real threats to the continuance of their culture.

Aboriginal narrative: the oral tradition

When first encountered by Europeans, Australian Aboriginal peoples did not have written languages (individual words were collected from first contact, but languages as systems were not written down until well into the 20th century). Their songs, chants, legends, and stories, however, constituted rich oral literature, and, since the Aboriginal peoples had no common language, these creations were enormously diverse. Long unavailable to or misunderstood by non-Aboriginal people, their oral traditions appear (from researches undertaken in the last half of the 20th century) to be of considerable subtlety and complexity.


The oral literature of Aboriginal peoples has an essentially ceremonial function. It supports the fundamental Aboriginal beliefs that what is given cannot be changed and that the past exists in an eternal present, and it serves to relate the individual and the landscape to the continuing spiritual influence of the Dreaming (or Dreamtime)—widely known as the Alcheringa (or Altjeringa), the term used by the Aboriginal peoples of central Australia—a mythological past in which the existing natural environment was shaped and humanized by ancestral beings. While the recitation of the song cycles and narratives is to some extent prescribed, it also can incorporate new experience and thus remain applicable—both part of the past (called up by the Ancestors) and part of the present.

Aboriginal oral tradition may be public (open to all members of a community and often a kind of entertainment) or sacred (closed to all but initiated members of one or the other sex). Narratives of the public sort range from stories told by women to young children (mostly elementary versions of creation stories—also appropriate for tourists and amateur anthropologists) to the recitation of song cycles in large gatherings (known as corroborees). Even the most uncomplicated narratives of the Dreaming introduce basic concepts about the land and about what it is that distinguishes right behaviour from wrong. When children are old enough to prepare for their initiation ceremonies, the stories become more elaborate and complex. Among the sacred songs and stories are those that are men’s business and those that are women’s business; each is forbidden to the eyes and ears of the other sex and to the uninitiated.
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The chief subject of Aboriginal narratives is the land. As Aboriginal people travel from place to place, they (either informally or ceremonially) name each place, telling of its creation and of its relation to the journeys of the Ancestors. This practice serves at least three significant purposes: it reinforces their knowledge of local geography—that is, the food routes, location of water holes, places of safety, places of danger, the region’s terrain, and so on—and it also serves a social function (sometimes bringing large clans together) and a religious or ritual function.


Many of the stories have to do with the journeys of the Ancestors and the “creation sites,” places at which they created different clans and animals. Other stories concern contests between Ancestor figures for power and knowledge. A sequence of stories or songs—a story track or song line—identifies the precise route taken by an Ancestor figure. Knowledge and recitation of the journey of each totemic figure are the responsibility of that figure’s totemic clan. (Members of an immediate biological family belong to different totems, or Dreamings. Totem membership can be determined in various ways, from association with a locale to an acknowledgment of spiritual kinship.) Because an Ancestor’s journey is often traced over vast stretches of land, only a segment of the entire song cycle or story is known to a particular group. These are exchanged at meeting points, and, though the songs may be sung in a different language, an Ancestor’s story contains musical elements that make it clearly identifiable to all members of that totem, from whatever part of the country. Song lines and story tracks can be traced over the entire country. In this way oral literature sustains the sense of continuity between the clans as well as between the present and the time of creation.

Important stories that deal with the activities of perhaps just one or two of the ancestral figures and belong to adjacent areas and adjacent clans may constitute a song cycle. Some of these stories do not allow for variation and constitute a formal literature with precise structures and particular language. For example, repetition is an important structural device. Verb forms and tenses indicate the unchanging yet ongoing relationship between the ancestral past and the present. The persistent theme of transformation, a theme characteristic of many oral literatures, is for the people a way of access to their mythic past, to the eternal present of the Dreaming.

The Djanggawul song cycle recounts in 188 songs the journey of three ancestral beings, a Brother and Two Sisters, in the Millingimbi region. Those Ancestors created all that territory. Water holes become sacred because there they created the people of a particular totem or there an important aspect of the law was established. Places acquire a name; they come into being. Much of the cycle is about fertility and increase and about the relations between men and women. For example, men steal from the Sisters the sacred objects and the power that goes with them, and, while that legend might appear to concede the dominance of men in tribal practice (according to custom), it also acknowledges women as the original source of power and knowledge.


Above all, the oral literature of Aboriginal peoples is involved with performance. It is not simply a verbal performance. Traditional song is very often associated with dance, and storytelling with gesture and mime. Or stories may be accompanied by diagrams drawn in the sand and then brushed away again. Each song, each narrative, is in effect acted out. Storytellers will customarily announce who they are, where they come from, and what their relation to the story is, as though they are its agent. They may provide a frame for their story. They use the common devices of oral literature such as repetition and enumeration and formulaic expression. But they always take care with their songs and stories; they are as careful with imagery and symbolism, with the figures of speech, as they are with other aspects of ceremony.

The intention of the song man or storyteller is not to assert a sense of individuality but to identify the continuing validity of the song or the story. There may be direct address to the listener (or, in more recent times, the reader), but this is a device of inclusion. It is also a stratagem to ensure understanding, providing the opportunity for explanation and elaboration whenever that is desirable.

Increasingly, traditional Aboriginal peoples have permitted their songs and stories to be collected and recorded for the time when the young people, who they feel show little interest in their traditional literature at present, return to the old ways of custom. The non-Aboriginal person’s knowledge of this traditional literature relies almost entirely on printed translation. What non-Aboriginal people are permitted to read is therefore at least twice removed from its proper context—once by its metamorphosis from oral to written and again by its translation. Even with the most sympathetic mind and the most comprehensive set of footnotes, the non-Aboriginal person has little means of assessing the relation of custom to individual performance. Further, there remains the residual perception of the nature of traditional Aboriginal literature formed on a number of early, well-intentioned collections of myths and legends, such as Catherine Langloh Parker’s Australian Legendary Tales (1896) or Alan Marshall’s People of the Dreamtime (1952), where the stories are reshaped to meet European notions of narrative design and structure.


Anthropologists Catherine H. and Ronald M. Berndt were the first to publish traditional narratives and songs in full in the original language (though linguists have still not agreed on how best to represent Aboriginal speech), then with a translation and a commentary. One good example of their work is Three Faces of Love: Traditional Aboriginal Song-Poetry (1976). This approach enables at least an initial appreciation of the subtlety and the artistry of the oral tradition.


Not all Aboriginal song and story is in Indigenous dialect. In the 1970s and ’80s, as Aboriginal people began to write in formal English, some began to express themselves in what might be called Aboriginal English, an English that is different from standard English. It is formed in short, simple sentences, and it makes considerable use of repetition with variation. It also conveys a certain dignity—and a rich sense of humour. Some versions of this can be found in the different narratives included in Sally Morgan’s My Place (1987) and, more sensitive still as a transcription, in Paddy Roe’s Gularabulu: Stories from the West Kimberley (1983). In the last decades of the 20th century, the poet and storyteller Maureen Watson helped to maintain the oral tradition by reading on radio and television and by performing at schools.



3] The century after settlement

Almost as soon as settlement of New South Wales began, in 1788, reports of the “new” country were sent back to England. The public was interested not in the routine of convict life but in the details of strange new flora and fauna. In the colony itself there was little time for any other than practical considerations. Early publications were dominated by reports of new lands and rivers, journeys of exploration, summaries of what had so far been discovered in the “new” continent.

Yet there were some who attempted to interpret their experience as best they could. There were early expressions of local pride by those born in the colony, such as the poets Charles Tompson and William Wentworth in Australasia (1823), but those who were serving a tour of duty in the Antipodes, like the unfortunately named Barron Field, were more inclined to see their experiences in terms of disbelief, sometimes comic disbelief. Field’s First Fruits of Australian Poetry (1819) was the first volume of poetry published in Australia. Those who were likely to spend a much longer term in New South Wales, as the colony was then known, expressed a profound nostalgia for “home.” The sense of exile was keenly felt by the anonymous composers of convict songs and bush ballads alike.

Flinders, Matthew

The prose writers exhibited the inquiring mind of the 18th century; a scientific interest in the novelties of the new world and their perception of man as a social being show that, while the Romantic movement was under way in Europe, early Australia was essentially fostered by the Enlightenment. Watkin Tench’s A Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay (1789) and its sequel, A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson (1793), were immediately popular in Europe. Matthew Flinders’s A Voyage to Terra Australis (1814) is another example of this engaging literature of discovery.


Yet touches of the Romantics arrived speedily enough. By mid-century Charles Harpur, the child of ex-convicts, was writing rugged, well-sustained poems that were responsive to the landscape in the manner of William Wordsworth. In other poems he imitated the idealism of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Harpur also had made a careful study of Emersonian ideas. But his poetry and prose were not easily available beyond their occasional appearance in the colonial press, and only in modern times has a proper estimation of his work been undertaken. A collection of his poems, Poems by Charles Harpur, was published in 1883.

Adam Lindsay Gordon was a much more popular poet. “The Sick Stockrider” from his Bush Ballads and Galloping Rhymes (1870) was a general favourite, much admired and much recited. It conveyed a sense of comradeship, mapped a world by a bushman’s kind of detail, and exhibited a stoic sentimentalism that was exactly to colonial taste. Henry Kendall, a poet of forests and mountain streams, specialized in more mournful effects. As his is a poetry of sound and description rather than of action (as clearly evinced in his volume Leaves from Australian Forests [1869]), it is not always clear that he was wrestling with some broadly transcendentalist notions.

The first Australian novel, Henry Savery’s Quintus Servinton, was published in 1831. It is strongly autobiographical, and its convict theme amounts to special pleading. But it does not emphasize the exotic possibilities of its Australian scenes. James Tucker’s Ralph Rashleigh; or, The Life of an Exile (written in 1844; published in an edited version in 1929 and in its original text in 1952), on the other hand, makes use of all the sensational opportunities at hand. It begins as a picaresque account of low-life London and proceeds through the whole gamut of convict life, escape, bushrangers, and life among Aboriginal peoples. One of its most telling moments is Ralph’s panic at being lost in the bush, a theme that compelled many colonial writers and painters.


Kingsley, Henry

The first widely known novel of Australia was Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn (1859) by Henry Kingsley, brother of Charles Kingsley. When the action at last moves from Devon to Australia, the story transposes into heroic romance, and it too manages to incorporate the sensational possibilities of the colonial experience: bushrangers and bushfires, floods and hostile Aboriginal peoples, the tragic outcome of being lost in the bush, cattle branding and horse galloping, and a fortune earned. Catherine Helen Spence’s Clara Morison (1854) details with a nice sense of irony the social preoccupations of Adelaide in the mid-19th century, but it was not a well-known novel.

Marcus Clarke’s His Natural Life (1874; the antecedent phrase For the Term of was inserted without authority after his death) is the first novel regarded as an Australian classic. It is a powerful account of the convict experience, drawing heavily on documentary sources. Within the rigours and perversions of the convict system, another social system forms itself and establishes its own code. But beyond the horrors and the brutality, there is a compensating moral theme, that of goodness recognized. Clarke uses his Australian material to approach universal values. Both Clarke and Rolf Boldrewood (pseudonym of Thomas Alexander Browne) initially published their fiction in serial installments in colonial magazines such as the Australian Journal and The Sydney Mail. Boldrewood’s Robbery Under Arms (1888) was immensely popular, and it too achieved classic status. Of particular interest is the Australian vernacular in which the narrator, Dick Marston, presents his confession of his part in gang activity. Boldrewood also articulates the sentimental, stoic resignation that colonial Australians seemed to favour. Other novelists who had established themselves by the late 1800s were Rosa Praed—her Policy and Passion (1881) is an interesting account of the personal life of a Queensland politician—and the prolific Ada Cambridge.


Not to be forgotten in any account of the first hundred years are the published journals of the explorers. Not only were their discoveries of widespread interest, but many of them—including Charles Sturt, Edward John Eyre, and Sir Thomas Livingstone Mitchell—were accomplished writers. Eyre’s account of his struggle around the Great Australian Bight (a wide embayment of the Indian Ocean) inspired the Australian novelist Patrick White in writing Voss (1957), although White modeled that novel in part on the experiences of Ludwig Leichhardt, explorer and naturalist who in the 1840s led a dangerous expedition through interior Australia that resulted in the discovery of many sites suitable for settlement.



4] Nationalism and expansion

The centenary year 1888 provided the occasion for review and reassessment, and almost inevitably that activity encouraged the growing nationalist sentiment already in evidence in such publications as the weekly Bulletin (founded 1880). The last 20 years of the 19th century saw a marked growth of nationalism and the movement toward federation of the separate states. The Bulletin, with its rallying cry of “Australia for the Australians,” was ardently nationalistic. It urged its contributors to “write Australian” and to celebrate above all the virtues of the Australian worker, especially the bush worker. It endorsed the egalitarian myth of mateship rather than the independence of the little man, the battler, who struggles on his own against the odds. It espoused a cheerful, somewhat larrikin (Australian word meaning, among other things, “rowdy,” or “irresponsible”) brashness, and in this it revealed its underlying urban orientation. Other papers and magazines of the period actively published Australian writing, but the Bulletin attracted the utopian idealists and the sentimental realists who dominated Australian writing at the end of the century. It advocated a spare, laconic style; it preferred a humorous attitude to life’s hardships; and it favoured themes of national pride, the values of rural life, and sympathy for the struggles of small-scale farmers. Among its many contributors, A.B. (“Banjo”) Paterson was acclaimed for composing “Waltzing Matilda” and for his bush ballads, and Henry Lawson published his greatest short stories there. (Among the collections of Lawson’s work are While the Billy Boils [1896] and Children of the Bush [1902]).

Steele Rudd

Curiously, at the very time the image of young Australia was being so vigorously advanced, Paterson and Lawson and Steele Rudd (pseudonym of Arthur Hoey Davis) showed a pronounced tendency to nostalgia, to the distant in time or place. Joseph Furphy, resisting the call for succinctness, wrote a large complex novel, Such Is Life (1903), describing the rural world of the 1880s. It overflows with details of station life, the conversations of bullock drivers, nationalistic sentiments, and philosophical meditations about chance and determinism.

The reading of the Australian experience in terms of bush realism was open to challenge. Barbara Baynton’s stories in Bush Studies (1902) subvert the persistent “matey” ethos, suggesting instead the darkly disturbing side of bush experience. Christopher Brennan, in such volumes as Poems 1913 (1913), virtually ignored local preoccupations in his Symbolist poetry; he tapped instead the deep sources of spiritual restlessness, particularly through the use of myth and archetype. Some popular writers, such as C.J. Dennis in his verses about the Sentimental Bloke, relocated many of the bush attitudes to the inner city.


By the early decades of the 20th century, the era of bushranging, convictism, and exploration was far enough in the past to be regarded as historical colour. It also was fully expected that the Aboriginal peoples would also pass away—Daisy Bates, who lived for many years among Aboriginal people, used as the title of her book about her experiences the standard phrase The Passing of the Aborigine (1938). Aboriginal people had become the subject of anthropological interest in the work of Sir Walter Baldwin Spencer and Francis James Gillen in Central Australia, and Aboriginal legends had been collected and rewritten by K. Langloh Parker, although there was still very little interest in Aboriginal people as people. Such interest as existed was—in the manner of the times—proprietary, as in Mrs. Aeneas Gunn’s The Little Black Princess (1905) for young readers and in her autobiographical We of the Never-Never (1908), about her experiences on a station in the Northern Territory, the last region of Australia to attract European expansion. It still regards itself as the quintessential Outback.

The first great phase of writing for children also occurred in the Federation era (Australia’s version of the Edwardian period, extending from 1901, when the Australian provinces formed a federation, to just beyond the end of World War I), a time of widespread wealth and security and, for the middle class, of social consolidation. The books for children reflect this atmosphere; they also reflect another reality, the easy acceptance of both Australian and British Empire loyalties. Classic works were written by Ethel Turner, Ethel Pedley, Amy and Louise Mack, May Gibbs, and Mary Grant Bruce (a little later), and Norman Lindsay’s wonderful The Magic Pudding (1918) became standard fare for generations of Australian children.


The character of the times is perhaps best represented in the work of such diverse writers as Mary Gilmore, Walter Murdoch, and Miles Franklin. The life span of each of them stretched from colonial times into the modern era; in both their lives and their writing, they represented continuity. Each expressed a kind of independence from time: Gilmore by the long reach of her memory, apparent in such volumes as Old Days, Old Ways: A Book of Recollections (1934); Murdoch by the gentle whimsy and conversational ease of his essays, as in Speaking Personally (1930); and Franklin by her absorption in the realm of Australian pastoral in such novels as Up the Country (1928), though she is mostly remembered by her early pseudoautobiographical My Brilliant Career (1901). John Shaw Neilson, in the sheer shimmering beauty of his lyric poetry, achieves another order of timelessness, that of the moment of true perception, at once unworldly and firmly located in the natural world.

E.J. Banfield stepped aside from the world for reasons of health and wrote from his island on the Great Barrier Reef a series of books beginning with Confessions of a Beachcomber (1908) that reflected, often wryly, on natural history and the advantages of the contemplative life. Jack McLaren in My Crowded Solitude (1926) was another who encountered timelessness for a time. And C.E.W. Bean found the same slow rhythms of experience out on the great Western plains (On the Wool Track [1910]) and down the Darling River (The Dreadnought of the Darling [1911]). Like Banfield and Murdoch, he identified a genial world and men whose essential character he admired, and, when he entered the world of torrid events as Australia’s official war historian, his thesis was that the courage and resourcefulness of the Australian soldier, the digger, was in fact derived from the bushman—that these were but two manifestations of the national type. The same perception is present in Keith Hancock’s Australia (1930), a reading of Australian history in terms of character.


Robertson, Ethel

The most impressive novelist of the period was Henry Handel Richardson (pseudonym of Ethel Florence Lindesay Robertson). Her Maurice Guest (1908), set in Leipzig, Germany, is an antiromantic novel about ordinariness caught up with genius, provincialism among the exotic, the tragedy of an insufficiently great passion. Her three-volume masterpiece, The Fortunes of Richard Mahony (1917–29), traces the fluctuating fortunes of the immigrants who established the new urban Australia in the late 19th century. The last volume, Ultima Thule, graphically describes conditions in the goldfields and brings its character studies of the temperamentally opposite spouses Richard and Mary to a profoundly moving climax. Katharine Susannah Prichard’s realism in Working Bullocks (1926) and in Coonardoo (1929), her sympathetic portrait of an Aboriginal woman, was of a more romantic nature. For others, such as Kylie Tennant and Eleanor Dark, realism served social and historical ends.


Modernism arrived with the poetry of Kenneth Slessor (as evidenced in such of his volumes as Earth-Visitors [1926] and Five Bells [1939]) and R.D. FitzGerald (Forty Years’ Poems [1965] and Product: Later Verses by Robert D. FitzGerald [1977]). Slessor was committed to the importance of the image; FitzGerald was of a more philosophical bent and developed complex arguments in his poems. During the 1930s both became preoccupied with history and the concept of time.

Herbert, Xavier

The Depression years directed attention back to the comparable experiences of the early 1890s and confirmed the defining status of that period in Australian cultural mythology, the apotheosis of the acclaimed national virtues—mateship, humorous stoicism, populist pragmatism, and irony. It was also a time of international awakening, and it was a time of discovery, as the many books about travel, especially in the Australian Outback, testify. Among the discoveries of that period was a romantic notion of the spirit of place and the importance, for writers, of what could still be discerned of Aboriginal culture: this discovery gave rise to the Jindyworobak movement, which had as its goal the freeing of Australian art from “alien” influences. By apt coincidence, Xavier Herbert’s Capricornia (1938) was published at this time. Herbert’s sprawling comic anarchy, his maverick vision, and the sense of remoteness from regulated society all derive from his Northern Territory milieu. But Capricornia also displays all the themes important to the Jindyworobak movement: concern for the Aboriginal, discovery of the Outback, social protest, and the true spirit of Australia. Before long, however, world events overwhelmed the movement completely.



5] Literature from 1940 to 1970

A new and very talented generation of writers and artists began to emerge at the outset of World War II. Literary magazines—including Southerly and Meanjin, both concerned with promoting Australian writing (and both still extant)—established themselves, and the interest of the international reading public in Australian writing grew. Although factual and descriptive writing remained prominent, Australian writers became increasingly speculative and searching. The “Ern Malley” hoax (1944), in which the poets James McAuley and Harold Stewart, writing as a deceased mechanic-salesman-poet, parodied what they saw as the meaninglessness of experimental verse, was an indication of the demand for new standards. Similarly Patrick White, a Nobel Prize winner (1973) and the most important and influential of the modern Australian novelists, was drawn to Australian themes and the Australian landscape, but he was profoundly dismissive of the dun-coloured journalism, as he thought it, of Australian fiction.

Patrick White

White’s imaginative reach, ambitious themes, and elaborate imagery showed him surpassing nationalistic limitations. His major novels, The Tree of Man (1955), Voss (1957), and Riders in the Chariot (1961), had an epic scope. His short stories and plays and his later novels explored more completely the ambiguity of character and the troubling question of belief. White not only demonstrated the richness of the Australian experience for imaginative writing (“your country is of great subtlety”) but drew the attention of the world to it.

Martin Boyd had won the first Gold Medal from the Australian Literature Society as early as 1928, but his career belonged mainly to the postwar period. His particular interest was in tracing the influence of the past upon the present, most often through novels of family histories. These novels—particularly Lucinda Brayford (1946) and the Langton quartet, beginning with The Cardboard Crown (1952)—were chronicles too of the decline of the genteel and aristocratic tradition. Christina Stead, who also had begun writing before the war, did not win recognition until the 1960s, with the reissue of The Man Who Loved Children (1940). Her novels explored the relation between personality and environment and particularly the theme of exploitation. A younger writer, Randolph Stow, had an early success with To the Islands (1958), a novel that was poetic in texture and structure and that intertwined aspects of European and Aboriginal culture and belief.


The practice of descriptive verse continued in the postwar period, but the new generation of poets also sought a new symbolic reading of Australia. They turned increasingly to the meditative lyric. In such poems as “The Death of the Bird” and “Moschus Moschiferus,”A.D. Hope developed a reputation for witty, satiric, and allusive verse delivered in the clear middle style of John Dryden. Rather richer and more emotionally charged were the lyrics of Judith Wright (Collected Poems 1942–1970 [1971]); sometimes she attempted abstruse concepts, lodged in images of the natural world. Douglas Stewart (Collected Poems 1936–1967 [1967]) was another who drew his inspiration directly from the natural world, perceiving in it fragments of the moral design of the universe. James McAuley, always a meditative poet, achieved both grace and humanity in the moving clarity of his later verse (for example, in Music Late at Night [1976]). And David Campbell (Collected Poems [1989]) combined an intelligent love for poetry with a passion for the land, the language of the traditional lyric with the speech rhythms of the Australian vernacular. His poetry too was mainly a kind of meditative lyric. Rosemary Dobson (Collected Poems [1991]) was another of this generation of fine poets. Although Vivian Smith (New Selected Poems [1995]) does not quite fit with this group, he continued the practice of meditative lyric and so may be mentioned here. Gwen Harwood developed a thoughtful kind of poetry, varied at times by clever, satiric verses, as in her Collected Poems (1991).

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Australia: The culture of Australia

Plays had been written in Australia well back into the colonial period, but the drama was not distinguished and was of only local interest. Among the first notable plays were two radio plays by Douglas Stewart, Ned Kelly (published 1943) and The Fire on the Snow (performed 1941), both of which showed the symbolic possibilities in historic figures. In 1955 Ray Lawler won local and international acclaim for Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, a play naturalistic in character and idiom and universal in theme yet peculiarly Australian in its attitudes. Its success began something of a revival in Australian drama; it was followed by Alan Seymour’s The One Day of the Year (1961) and Patrick White’s Four Plays (published 1965).

In nonfictional prose there were numerous histories and biographies in this period. In the early 1960s occurred one of those curious convergences that mark literary history. A number of writers began publishing works of an autobiographical kind in which the emphasis lay elsewhere than on the self. Judith Wright’s The Generations of Men (1959) is a family history, just as Mary Durack’s Kings in Grass Castles (1959) is the story of her ancestors as well as a social history. Martin Boyd’s Day of My Delight (1965) defines his family in its historical and moral context, while Hal Porter’s The Watcher on the Cast-Iron Balcony (1963) is a résumé of post-Edwardian Australia as seen in a country town (an audacious but convincing variant on the bush orientation of traditional writing) and is patterned as a biography of his mother.


At about the same time began another productive phase of writing for children, and by the end of the 1960s both Patricia Wrightson and Ivan Southall had won major awards for their work. Wrightson’s novels of the 1960s and ’70s were particularly interesting in their use of Aboriginal figures and motifs, as in Behind the Wind (1981). In 1986 she was awarded the international Hans Christian Andersen Award for lifetime achievement in children’s literature.



6] Literature from 1970 to 2000

Hal Porter had already begun to establish himself as one of the more interesting short-story writers. His manner was arch, his perception ironic, his taste somewhat melodramatic. But his eye for detail was exact and his powers of recollection extraordinary. All these characteristics can be observed in the volumes The Cats of Venice (1965) and Fredo Fuss Love Life (1974). His insistence that he wrote only of what was fact, apart from impressing the reader that the world is a very strange place, put him completely at odds with the following generation of short-story writers as, for example, Frank Moorhouse, Michael Wilding, and Peter Carey. These writers, provocative and scandalous in the manner of the 1970s, broke free from all restraints and explored the many possibilities of fantasy—sexual, science fiction, gothic. Allowing for the liberalism of their values, their stories in fact display an almost moral preoccupation with social and political attitudes. They are each highly alert to the ironic possibilities of personal encounters. In the 1980s Carey extended his range and began writing novels, still exploiting fantasy and, as much postmodernist fiction does, the interpolation of stories within stories. He won the Booker Prize in 1988 with Oscar and Lucinda (1988).

Thomas Keneally commenced his prolific output in the late 1960s and attracted widespread notice with The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1972). Nearly all his novels explore the intersection of history and the individual life and contemplate just what kind of effect the insignificant individual can have on events of some moment. When Schindler’s Ark (1982), which is centrally about just this situation, won the Booker Prize in 1982, it caused something of a sensation for being as much a work of fact as of fiction. Keneally was a gifted storyteller, and his fiction appealed to both the serious and the popular audience. Several of his novels were made into films or plays.

Thea Astley was another highly successful novelist, droll and amusing, yet she wrote about serious issues. She developed a love-hate relation to many of her characters and subjects, but underlying her narrative is a warm humanity and a delight in accurate imagery and surprising turns of phrase. In Beachmasters (1985), one of her most accomplished novels, she re-creates the cultural tensions in a South Pacific island with aspirations to independence from joint English and French control. Randolph Stow had similarly written a sensitive and sympathetic novel of intercultural relations in the Trobriand Islands in Visitants (1979). Astley’s later novels—Drylands: A Book for the World’s Last Reader (1999), for example—were increasingly concerned with the dominant, two-pronged problem in late 20th-century Australia: not only how to effect reconciliation between Aboriginal peoples and European Australians but also how to reconcile white Australians to the dark side of their own past.


With An Imaginary Life (1978), David Malouf, already a promising poet, emerged as a major novelist. Nominally a story about Ovid in exile, the novel is really about the transforming power of the imagination. Malouf’s writing is spare, delicate, meticulous. Like many writers of the time, he thought carefully about language and the signs by which meaning is conveyed. He also reflected on the way in which place might influence perception; this interest lies behind his use of Queensland as a setting—as, for example, in Remembering Babylon (1993). C.J. Koch developed a similar interest in regional writing, using the exotic possibilities of Asia to provide a mythic reading of political events in The Year of Living Dangerously (1978) and Highways to a War (1995) and the shadowy otherness of Tasmania in The Doubleman (1985) and Out of Ireland (1999). Likewise, Shirley Hazzard wrote with great seriousness of purpose in her modern tragedy The Transit of Venus (1980), an ironic love story devised to contemplate how strangely things come about. Like so much of Australian fiction, it looks for patterns of meaning that might indicate some kind of proportion in destiny.

The 1980s also witnessed the emergence of a number of accomplished women writers—Janette Turner Hospital, Kate Grenville, Helen Garner, Glenda Adams, Barbara Hanrahan, and Elizabeth Jolley—and the first three of these continued to be prominent voices in the 1990s. In all her work Grenville treads a precarious line between darkness and superb comedy, from the extraordinary Lilian’s Story (1985) and its sequel, Dark Places (1994), to her clearly understated novel The Idea of Perfection (1999). Garner’s work includes The Children’s Bach (1984) and True Stories: Selected Non-Fiction (1996), which draws upon fact as well as fiction. Hospital’s Collected Stories 1970–1995 appeared in 1995. Jolley’s enigmatic fiction includes Miss Peabody’s Inheritance (1983) and The Well (1986). Among male writers, Brian Castro, Robert Drewe, David Foster, and Tim Winton similarly emerged as significant writers. Of these Winton and Foster are particularly notable for their volumes Cloudstreet (1991) and The Glade Within the Grove (1996), respectively.

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The two leading poets of the 1980s were Les Murray, allusive and humane, concerned to find what evidence he could in the secular world of spiritual realities and to demonstrate the importance of poetry in ordinary life (a representative volume of his work is Dog Fox Field [1990]), and Bruce Dawe, who evinced the Australian voice in his contemporary, journalistic poetry appearing in, for example, Sometimes Gladness (1978). Robert Gray continued the tradition of spare, almost Imagistic lyric verse in such volumes of his as Piano (1988) and Certain Things (1993). Robert Adamson and John Tranter wrote more experimental verse, as is evinced, respectively, in The Clean Dark (1989) and The Floor of Heaven (1992).

David Williamson developed a kind of journalistic drama. He had a good ear for Australian idiom and a good eye for Australian social and cultural attitudes, including prejudice. His plays were topical, particularly in terms of current political interests, yet they also tapped much that was enduring and deep-seated in the collective identity. Two of his critically acclaimed plays are Travelling North (1980) and Dead White Males (1995). Other playwrights who came into prominence were Jack Hibberd, Alex Buzo, Peter Kenna, Louis Nowra, Steve J. Spears, and Michael Gow. Nowra’s Così (1992) was successfully adapted for film.


In nonfictional prose, the autobiographical mode continued. Patrick White’s Flaws in the Glass (1981) was of particular interest. Malouf and Koch both wrote a volume of essays, and these too were interesting for the light they shed upon the writers as well as being fine examples of the essay form. Travel writing continued to be published; one of the most interesting examples was Robyn Davidson’s Tracks (1982), an account of her trek across Australia with her camels. It is a shaped narrative, tracing her increasing awareness of the meaning and experience of the desert and leading toward self-discovery. Like the imaginative writers, she looked for a pattern of significance in her experience. A.B. Facey, recounting his life experience in A Fortunate Life (1981), accepted what life had offered, not with bitterness but with gratitude. Robert Dessaix in Night Letters: A Journey Through Switzerland and Italy (1996) wrote a series of highly cultivated reflections on the poignancy of life, art, and, ultimately, death. Drusilla Modjeska similarly interwove history and personal story, as in Stravinsky’s Lunch (1999).

In each of these modes of writing, Aboriginal people also began to make their presence known. Oodgeroo Noonuccal (Kath Walker) published her first volume of poetry, We Are Going, in 1964. Mudrooroo Narogin (Colin Johnson, whose Aboriginal identity, however, was questioned) published his first novel, Wild Cat Falling, in 1965. Jack Davis wrote several acclaimed plays. Sally Morgan’s autobiography, My Place (1987), is a moving account of her discovery of her identity and family history. It is also social and cultural history. And Kim Scott, with his novel Benang (1999), became the first Aboriginal writer to win the prestigious Miles Franklin Award (which he shared with Astley). By the example of these and other Aboriginal writers, Aboriginal people have asserted their claim to the imaginative territory of Australia—a claim especially significant in the last decade of the 20th century as Australians attempted to effect a process of mutual understanding and reconciliation.


Writing in Australia evolved through a number of phases. It began with mapping the difference and distinctiveness of a new society establishing itself in the antipodes and at a large imaginative distance from the rest of the world. Then it concentrated on finding and articulating its own cultural voice. This writing was characterized by unusual colloquialisms and figures of speech, ironic understatement, and laconic rhythms; it concentrated on representing—even asserting—a nationalist sentiment. Beyond that phase, Australian writing became more sophisticated, discovering the universal in its own local symbolism. Until the mid-20th century, Australians had written as though their work was that of a more or less homogeneous society. In the closing decades of the 20th century, however, the country’s literature began the discovery of differences within itself: regional, cultural, and ethnic.Adrian C.W. Mitchell



7] Literature in the 21st century

Colleen McCullough

Many of the Australian writers who distinguished themselves in the last decades of the 20th century continued to make their mark in the new century. Named a “living treasure” by the National Trust of Australia in 1997, Colleen McCullough, author of The Thorn Birds (1977) and the Masters of Rome series of historical novels (1990–2007), remained one of the country’s most prolific and best-selling novelists.

Similarly productive and protean was Peter Carey, whose My Life As a Fake (2003) drew its inspiration from McAuley and Stewart’s 1944 poetry hoax, whereas his Theft: A Love Story (2006) lampooned the international art market with a story of art fraud. Carey’s other 21st-century efforts included Parrot and Olivier in America (2009), focusing on a character modeled on 19th-century French social observer Alexis de Tocqueville, and Amnesia (2015), which employs cybercrime as the lens through which to view the Battle of Brisbane (1942), a clash between U.S. soldiers and Australian military personnel and civilians during World War II.

Among Thomas Keneally’s publications in the new millennium were American Scoundrel (2002), a biography of the infamous American politician and Civil War general Daniel Sickles; The Daughters of Mars (2012), a novel about volunteer nurses during World War I; and Shame and the Captives (2013), a fictionalized account of prison breakouts by Japanese prisoners of war in New South Wales during World War II. Tim Winton added the highly regarded novels Dirt Music (2001) and Breath (2009) to his oeuvre.

Richard Flanagan

Novelist, historian, and film director Richard Flanagan won the 2002 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for best book for his novel Gould’s Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish (2001), the story of a convict living in 19th-century Tasmania. Flanagan’s engaging mystery The Unknown Terrorist (2006) offers a cynical view of the world in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks, and his The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2013) was much praised for its brutally stark depiction of the life of a prisoner of war during World War II. Fear of terrorism in the post-September 11 world is central in Janette Turner Hospital’s political thrillers Due Preparations for the Plague (2003) and Orpheus Lost (2007). The Secret River (2005), another tale of the life of a British convict in Australia, earned Kate Grenville the 2006 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for best book. Other Australians who published novels of note in the first decades of the 21st century were Geraldine Brooks (winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for March), Sonya Hartnett, Roger McDonald, Alexis Wright, Steven Carroll, Steve Toltz, Christos Tsiolkas, Anna Funder, Patricia Mackintosh, and Sofie Laguna.


The art of the short story was also alive and well in Australian literature in the 21st century and received notable contributions with the publication of acclaimed collections from Turner Hospital (North of Nowhere, South of Loss [2003]), Winton (The Turning [2004)], featuring 17 overlapping stories), and David Malouf (Every Move You Make [(2006]). In the 2000s and 2010s the contributions of Australia’s most-revered contemporary poet, Les Murray, included Learning Human, Selected Poems (2001), The Biplane Houses (2005), Taller When Prone (2010), and Waiting for the Past (2015).The Editors of Encycl