Australian literature

Monday musings on Australian literature: Hazel Rowley Fellowship

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Book cover er

Back in 2013, I wrote about the Hazel Rowley Literary Fund which was set up in 2011 by Rowley’s sister and friends, in association with Writers Victoria. Hazel Rowley was, as many of you will know, one of Australia’s most respected biographers. Her subjects were diverse, and not exclusively Australian. Indeed, most were not Australian, as besides the Australian writer Christine Stead who spent much of her writing life overseas, she wrote on the African American writer Richard Wright, the French writers Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, and the American power couple, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt (my review). Unfortunately, Rowley, born in 1951, died too young – of a cerebral haemorrhage in New York in 2011.

The aim of the fund was “to commemorate Hazel’s life and her writing legacy through activities that support biography and writing in general”. Its main vehicle was the Hazel Rowley Literary Fellowship which provided money to support a writer researching a biography, or some aspect of cultural or social history compatible with Rowley’s interests. It was offered annually, with the initial award of $10,000 gradually increased to the $20,000 this year’s winner received.

Now, those of you with eagle eyes may have noticed that I wrote “was”. As Wikipedia reports, which I confirmed on the official website, the Fellowship ends with this year’s award. The website summarises its achievements in this paragraph:

The Fellowship has been running for the past 14 years since Hazel died in March 2011. It was created to honour Hazel as a skilled biographer and to encourage others to write with the same care and enthusiasm in this time-consuming and exacting genre. Based on Hazel’s own experience we recognised the need to support a work in progress by providing money for research and travel. Over the past 14 years the Fellowship has supported more than 20 writers to progress and finish their projects.

They do not say why it is ending, but presumably the money has run out. Bequests, even well managed ones, do not last forever. I am guessing, but perhaps it was a case of either offering decent prize money – as in a useful amount – until it runs out, or award small amounts that risk not being enough to make a real difference to the winning project.

So now, the final award … $20,000 is going to Jennifer Martin for her proposed biography of Austrian-born Eva Sommer. She was the inaugural Walkley award winner in 1956 when she was a cadet on the Sydney Sun. She died in 2019 at the age of 84. The fellowship also gave $10,000 to each of three commended writers: Monique Rooney, Theodore Ell and Ashleigh Wilson, who are writing on Ruth Park, Les Murray and Barry Humphries respectively. All good subjects, but I’d love to see Ruth Park done.

You can see the complete list of awards made, including which ones have – to date – resulted in publication, as well as the shortlisted authors and their projects, at the above-listed Wikipedia page.

Maxine Beneba Clarke, The hate race

Of the 15 winners to date (including this year’s which, by definition, is presumably still in project stage), 9 have been published, and I have reviewed one of them, Maxine Beneba Clarke’s The hate race. I’d like to read several others, but if I had to choose one, it would be Mandy Sayer’s on Australia’s movie-making sisters, The McDonagh Sisters.

However, there are some on the shortlist that I would also love to see come to fruition, including those on Louisa Lawson (Michelle Scott Tucker), David Malouf (Patrick Allington), Gerald Murnane (Shannon Burns) and Amy Witting (Sylvia Martin). Hmm … given Sylvia Martin was later shortlisted for a different subject, which has now been published – Double act: Eirene Mort and Nora Kate Weston – I fear for my Amy Witting wish.

This brings me to the fact that, of course, several on the shortlist have been published, including those on Shirley Hazzard (Brigitta Olubas, on my TBR), Elizabeth Harrower (Helen Trinca, my review), Elizabeth Harrower (Susan Wyndham, on my TBR).

What these lists show is that biography is alive in Australia. How well it is, is another question. Writing a biography is no simple task. It can take years (and years) of research during which authors receive no money – unless they win or obtain fellowships like this one. It’s a shame it has ended, for whatever reason, but we should be grateful for the 15 years of support it did give.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on biographies. Do you like them? Do you have favourites? What do – or don’t you – like in them?

Johanna Bell, Department of the Vanishing (#BookReview)

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Words can be problematical when it comes to expressing our response to literature, indeed to any of the arts. We are uncomfortable, for example, using the word “enjoy” to express our response to anything that is dark. This is understandable, and yet I think “enjoy” is a perfectly okay word for something that has engaged and moved us. If we say, for example, that we “enjoy” reading good books, then logically, if a good book is dark, as is not uncommon, it should be valid to say we’ve enjoyed it. Shouldn’t it? So, in a similar vein, when I say Johanna Bell’s Department of the Vanishing was fun to read, I don’t mean it was a fun or funny book. It is in fact a deadly serious book about species extinction, but it is so delightfully clever that I enjoyed the reading experience immensely. Let me explain …

Now, I hadn’t heard of Johanna Bell until I saw her listed as a winner in the 2025 Tasmanian Literary Awards – for the unpublished manuscript of this book. So, I searched, and found her website. She describes herself as “a writer and arts worker based in Nipaluna/Hobart”, whose “practice spans fiction, poetry, picture books, audio making and community arts”. She says she is “most interested in projects that encourage experimentation, elevate new voices and challenge the established rules of storytelling”. Well, I can tell you now that she practises what she preaches.

Her website also briefly describes this book:

Set in a time of mass extinction, Department of the Vanishing blends documentary poetry, archival image and narrative verse to explore the vital questions: Can we live in a world without birdsong, and is it possible to create a new opus with the fragments left over? 

“cataloguing the dead”

This description gives you an idea of the subject matter, and a vague idea of its form, but what it actually looks like on the page is something else. I would love to have been a fly on the wall when the publisher and book designer grappled with this one. But, I’m digressing. I still haven’t explained how the book actually works. It’s told in the voice of the rather cutely named archivist, Ava Wilde (as in Wild Bird), from January 2007 when she joins DoV (the Department of the Vanishing) to around 2030. Her job is “cataloguing the dead”, that is, documenting and recreating as best as possible extinct bird species from whatever “archival and cultural materials” exist. After some introductory matter to which I’ll return in a minute, the novel starts with Part 1 of a partially redacted police interview recorded with Anna on 10/11/2029. The irony starts here, with her being told that at the end of the interview the “tapes will be sealed up” and “stored in a secure place”. A few pages later we flash back to her commencing work. The interview records are presented in 10 parts that are regularly interspersed through the text, along with various other documents and narratives, to which I’ll also return in a minute. After all, if Bell can mix it up, so can I.

So, the introductory matter. It tells us much, including that this book requires careful reading, not skimming through the bits that don’t look like story. The first epigraph is presented as a little sticky-taped note and it’s from DH Lawrence, “In the beginning, it was not a word but a chirrup”. The facing page comprises an image of museum drawers containing tagged bird carcasses. The next two pages are covered with bird sounds presented in somewhat jumbled text in different sizes and fonts, giving the impression of a cacophony of birdsong. This is followed on the next page by another sticky-taped epigraph from Stephen Garnett, Ornithologist, “After a few days of fourty [sic] degrees plus the country’s just silent”. Then comes the aforementioned police interview.

In other words, before the story starts, we have an idea of how it is going to be presented (through text in various forms, images and graphics) and what it is about (the impact of climate change on birdsong, and an archivist who has done something illegal). From here the story moves, roughly chronologically, through Ava’s working life at the DoV. The main narrative is presented via poetry in her voice, as she recounts her days – which include weekly visits to her dying mother in a hospice – and through lists and bird obits, departmental emails, images, and headlines. Some factoid, some fact. As she chronicles her increasing despair over the extinctions and her inability to keep up, she tries to unravel the story of her naturalist father who disappeared while searching for lyrebirds when she was a child. She describes the one-night stands that dull the despair for a moment or two, until along comes Luke with his bird tattoo. We also have a compassionate chorus from the sex workers in her apartment who take an interest in her wellbeing.

If you are someone who needs to know what is fact and what is not, Bell helps you out. Under her concluding “Notes and references”, she explains that her “intention was to blur the line between fact and fiction” but for those who “enjoy tracing things back to their origins” she helpfully provides six pages of notes about her source materials. When I am reading fiction, I like the blur, but my archivist-librarian self also appreciates author’s notes like this.

“weird, experimental verse novels”

In her acknowledgements, Bell thanks her family. If she could write a bestseller, she would she says, “but for now you’re stuck with weird, experimental verse novels”. Yes, Department of the Vanishing is weird and experimental, though more in form than language. That is, the language is easy to understand, but to glean the full story, you need to pay attention to the details. It is a strong story about an archivist who is unravelling under the pressure of her concern for bird loss and her increasing workload as the extinctions mount and staff numbers are cut. It is leavened by touches of irony and wit, including well-placed library stamps like “CANCELLED” or “NOT FOR LOAN” scattered across the documents.

I was left with some questions, particularly regarding Luke and his intentions, perhaps the product of seeing a story through one pair of eyes? Whatever the reason, they did not spoil the emotional power or reading experience.

Bell draws on some new-to-me writers for the quotes she scatters through her novel, but there are also the expected suspects – Orwell and Solnit for example – and contemporary writers like Jordie Albiston, Victoria Chang, Angela O’Keeffe, and Ocean Vuong. While they may not all write specifically in the eco-lit sphere, they put truth to the idea that much of today’s writing is backgrounded by ecological concerns, which brings me to some lines about a quarter of the way through, when Ava writes of looking at bird carcasses:

I make myself look
at the horrors we’ve made

if no one else does
I will pay

with an open gaze

This is why we must read eco-literature.

Johanna Bell
Department of the Vanishing
Transit Lounge, 2026
311pp.
ISBN: 9781923023550

(Review copy courtesy Transit Lounge via Scott Eathorne, Quikmark Media)

Stella Prize 2026 Longlist announced

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As I say every year, I don’t do well at having read the Stella Prize longlist at the time of its announcement. In recent years the most I’ve read at the time of the announcement has been two (in 2019). Last year I’d read one. I have read 9 of the 13 winners to date, which is a fair run for me.

As I also say every year, Stella works hard to keep their judging panels fresh, so again none of this year’s judges were on last year’s panel, though some have judged before. This year’s panel comprises bookseller, editor, and author, Jaclyn Crupi; academic and author, Sophie Gee; author, screenwriter, and broadcaster, Benjamin Law; journalist, writer, and facilitator, Gillian O’Shaughnessy; author and editor, Ellen van Neerven. Sophie Gee is this year’s Chair.

The longlist

Here is the list, in alphabetical order by author, which is also how they were presented:

  • Eunice Andrada, Kontra (poetry)
  • Evelyn Araluen, The rot (poetry) (on my TBR) (CWF Session 5 and 6) (Jonathan’s review)
  • Geraldine Brooks, Memorial days (memoir) (Kate’s review)
  • Debra Dank, Ankami: Stolen children, shattered families, silenced histories (nonfiction/memoir) (on my TBR)
  • Miranda Darling, Firewater (novel)
  • Natalie Harkin, Apron-sorrow/Sovereign tea (nonfiction)
  • Lee Lai, Cannon (graphic novel)
  • Charlotte McConaghy, Wild dark shore (novel) (Brona’s review)
  • Lucy Nelson, Wait here (short story collection)
  • Micaela Sahhar, Find me at Jaffa Gate: An encyclopedia of a Palestinian family (nonfiction/memoir)
  • Marika Sosnowski, 58 facets: On violence and the law (nonfiction)
  • Tasma Walton, I am Nannertgarroook (novel)

So, 5 fiction (including one graphic novel and a short story collection), 5 nonfiction (including 3 memoirs), and 2 poetry collections, this year. And four, I think, by First Nations writers – Araluen, Dank, Harkin and Walton. You can read about the longlist, including comments by the judges, at the Stella website.

As I did last year, prior to the announcement, I pre-loaded this post with 25 potential longlistees, partly in the hope that it would speed up writing this post if I had a goodly number of the listed titles already in the post, but I only guessed 4 of the selected books.

As always, I won’t question the selection, though I did have a couple of favourites I’d love to have seen here. But, the Stella is a diverse prize that aims to encompass a wide range of forms and styles, including some I don’t necessarily chase, and I can’t pretend to have read widely from 2025’s output. But I do have some on my TBR or in my sights. Certainly, contemporary political issues are evident in the listing, which is what we’d expect from a prize that wants to encompass good writing that reflects the diversity of Australian writing (by women and non-binary authors). Many of these writers are the brave ones confronting us with their presence and their ideas.

You can read the judges’ report at the link I’ve given above, so I’ll just share two paragraph from it:

As we narrowed the field to a long-longlist, we commented often on how virtually every book reimagined and transformed a different life story, through fine-grained attention, creative intelligence and technical skill. The twelve longlist titles reflect the excellence of all the entries, virtually all of which accomplished something moving and true through narrative, structure, voice or description.

In the other, they define what they mean by originality:

Originality consists in a book that recognisably inhabits its genre or form, and at the same time purposefully breaks it. Original writing changes the scope of what can be thought, felt and envisioned. A sign of great originality is often that, as readers, we think new thoughts, or feel changed by sentences, images and ideas. Originality reaches beyond the book itself to shift the lives of readers.

Each of the longlisted authors receives $2000 in prize money, donated by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund, while shortlists will receive $5000. The winer will receive $60,000. There were over 200 submissions this year.

The shortlist will be announced on 8 April, and the winner on 13 May.

Any comments?

Monday musings on Australian literature: Turning 50 in 2026

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No, not me, much as I wish it were! I’m talking books. Today being the day after International Women’s Day, I thought to feature women in this week’s Monday Musings. But how? Then I remembered that somewhere last year I’d seen a list of books turning 50, so decided to take inspiration from that and share books by Aussie women which are turning 50 this year, meaning they were published in 1976.

Researching this wasn’t easy. Wikipedia’s 1976 in Australian literature was inadequate, but I have beefed it up somewhat now. It had only one novel by an Australian woman under “Books” and one entry under “Short Stories”. So, I searched Wikipedia for authors I knew of the time and found more titles. I also used Hooton and Heseltine’s Annals of Australian literature (though that was tedious because many of the authors are listed under last name only. Is Bennett female or male, for example? Female I discovered. In she went into Wikipedia’s 1976 page too, but she doesn’t have her own page despite her body of work.)

By the time I finished I had added four novels by Australian women, two short story entries, three poets, another dramatist, and three children’s works. I could have added a few more but time and, to some degree, the work’s significance (or “notability” in Wikipedia’s world), resulted in my stopping where I did. My point in sharing this is not to beat my own drum but to say that it is really important, when we can, to improve Wikipedia’s listings in less populated areas, such as entries for women and other minorities. For all its faults, Wikipedia is a triumph, but it is up to all of us who have the time and skills to keep it that way. End of lesson …

Books turning 50 in 2026

During my research into writers who, I knew, were writing around this time, I checked, for example. Thea Astley. She published 15 novels between 1958 and 1999, but only 2 in the 1970s, neither in 1976. Jessica Anderson published three novels in the 1970s but not in 1976. The same went for Barbara Hanrahan. Now, the lists …

Links on names are to my posts on those authors. I have made some random notes against some of the listings,

Novels

  • Nancy Cato and Vivienne Rae Ellis, Queen Trucanini: historical fiction, which was of course Cato’s metier. I haven’t read it, but we have moved on in knowledge and thinking so it has very likely been superseded. I haven’t included nonfiction works here, but will mention Cato’s Mister Maloga: Daniel Matthews and his mission, Murray River, 1864–1902, also published in 1976. The mission failed, for various reasons, and I don’t know Cato’s take, but reviewer Leonard Ward praises its detail, and says that “As an historical document Mister Maloga earns a place on the bookshelves of those who have at heart the welfare of the Aboriginal people”. Potentially paternalistic, but Cato did support FN rights in her day.
  • Helen Hodgman, Blue skies: apparently this novel was translated into German in 2012. I’ve read and enjoyed Tasmanian-born Hodgman, but not this one. (Lisa’s review)
  • Gwen Kelly, Middle-aged maidens: a new author for me but worth checking out. This, her third novel, was, said the Sydney Morning Herald, “a perceptive portrait of three headmistresses and the staff of an independent girls’ school” and “was considered somewhat controversial in Armidale” where Kelly was living. Her Wikipedia page shares some of the reactions to it, including that it offered a “fierce appraisal of small-town shortcomings … [an] acerbic depiction of a private school for girls in Armidale.” Another was that “the headmistresses’ characters are sketched with sharp and brilliant lines … Gwen Kelly draws from us that complexity of response which is normal in life, rare in literature”, while a third wrote “spiteful, malicious, cunning, intensely readable … Delicious, Ms Kelly … you know your Australia and you’ve a lovely way with words”. Intriguing, eh?
  • Betty Roland, Beyond Capricorn: I have Betty Roland’s memoir, Caviar for breakfast on my TBR, but still haven’t got to it. For those who don’t know her, she had a relationship with Marxist scholar and activist Guido Baracchi, a founder of the Australian Communist Party. They went to the USSR, and while there, according to Wikipedia, she worked on the Moscow Daily News, shared a room with Katharine Susannah Prichard, and smuggled literature into Nazi Germany. Caviar For Breakfast (1979), the first volume of her autobiography, covers this period.
  • Christina Stead, Miss Herbert (The suburban wife): Stead needs no introduction (Bill’s review).

Short stories

  • Carmel Bird, Dimitra: Bird’s first published book, by Orbit (from her website), but it seems to have almost completely disappeared from view (at least in terms of internet searches)
  • Glenda Adams, Lies and stories: a story by Adams was in the first book my reading group did – an anthology. It wasn’t this story, but so much did we enjoy the one we read, that we went on to read a novel.
  • Shirley Hazzard, “A long story short”: published in The New Yorker 26 July 1976 (excerpt from The transit of Venus)
  • Elizabeth Jolley, Five acre virgin and other stories: for many years this collection was my go-to recommendation for people wanting to try Jolley. It captures so much of her preoccupations, style, and thoughts about writing (including reusing your own material).

Poetry

  • Stefanie Bennett, The medium and Tongues and pinnacles: prolific and still around but does not have her own page in Wikipedia.
  • Joanne Burns, Adrenaline flicknife: Burns won the ACT Poetry Prize Judith Wright award, and was shortlisted for and/or won awards in the NSW’s Kenneth Slessor Prize, but not for this collection.
  • Anne Elder, Crazy woman and other poems: Anne Elder’s name is commemorated in the Anne Elder Award for Poetry.
  • Judith Wright, Fourth Quarter: Like Stead, Judith Wright needs no introduction – to Australian readers at least.

Drama

This is not my area of interest and not only are plays best seen, but I think they have an even shorter shelf life. However, a few playwrights were published in 1976, including Dorothy Hewett, who also wrote poetry and novels.

Children’s literature

I won’t list the books here, but most of the authors are well-known to older Australian readers: Hesba Brinsmead, Elyne Mitchell (of The Silver Brumby fame), Ruth Park, Anne Parry (the least known of this group), Joan Phipson, and Eleanor Spence.

Do you have any 50-year-old books in your list of favourites? Several of these authors are important to (and not forgotten by) me, but the book from this year that is the important one is Jolley’s.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Forgotten writers 17, Beatrice Grimshaw

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Of all the writers I’ve researched for the AWW project, Beatrice Grimshaw is among the most documented, with articles in the Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB) and Wikipedia, among others. And yet, she is little known today. This post, like most of my recent Forgotten Writers posts, draws on the one I posted on AWW. However, I have abbreviated that post somewhat here to add more commentary.

If you are interested, check out the story I shared on AWW, a romance titled “Shadow of the palm”. It provides a good sense of what she wrote – and why it might have value today, despite its problematic language. It tells of local traditions and lustful dissolute men, of missionaries and young people in love. It is a predictable story typical of its time, but is enlivened by knowledge of a place that was exotic to its readers. It also conveys some of the cultural conflict and exploitation that came with colonialism.

Beatrice Grimshaw

Beatrice Grimshaw, 1907 (Public Domain)

Beatrice Ethel Grimshaw (1870-1953) is described by Wikipedia as “an Irish writer and traveller”, while the ADB does not give a nationality. However, both state that she was born on 3 February 1870 at Cloona, Antrim, in Ireland, and died on 30 June 1953 at Kelso near Bathurst in New South Wales. She is buried in Bathurst cemetery.

Grimshaw, the fourth of six children, was never going to be the little wife and mother. Wikipedia says that she “defied her parents’ expectations to marry or become a teacher, instead working for various shipping companies” while ADB says that, although she went to university, “she did not take a degree and never married but saw herself as a liberated ‘New Woman'”. There is much detail about her life at these two sources so I’ll just share the salient points here. She loved the outdoors, and began her writing career when she became a sports journalist for Irish Cyclist magazine in 1891. Besides working as an editor, she wrote “a range of content including poems, dialogues, short stories, and two serialised novels under a pen name”. Her first novel, Broken away, was published in 1897.

“a fearless character” (HJB)

The early details aren’t fully clear, but from some time after 1891, she worked for various shipping companies in the Canary Islands, the USA and England. Things become clear by 1903 when we know she left for the Pacific to report on the region for the Daily Graphic. She also accepted government and other commissions to write tourist publicity for various Pacific islands and NZ.

In 1907, she returned to Papua, intending to stay for two or three months, having been being commissioned by the London Times and the Sydney Morning Herald as a travel writer, but ended up living there for most of the next twenty-seven years. She wrote, joined expeditions up rivers and into the jungles, managed a plantation (1917-22), and established a short-lived tobacco plantation with her brother (1934). She played a key role in the development of tourism in the South Pacific.

Due to recurring malaria fever, she moved to Kelso in 1936 to live with her brothers. She didn’t retire, however. She continued to write books, and undertake other work, including, according to Broken Hill’s Barrier Daily Truth (12 Feb 1943) “liaison work for the Americans in Australia … She said that Australia offers unlimited opportunities for expansion, opportunities which the American people will be quick to utilise”.

Grimshaw was a prolific and best-selling writer, with over 35 novels to her name. She drew from her experiences in the South Seas, and wrote in the popular genres of the time – romantic adventure, crime fiction and some supernatural or ghost stories. The Armidale Express and New England General Advertiser (3 July 1940) reported that many of her novels and short stories had been “translated into German, French, Danish and Swedish” and that her books were “known throughout England, America and Australia”. She also wrote numerous articles and short stories for papers and journals. Her 1922 novel, Conn of the Coral Seas, was made into a film, The Adorable Outcast, in 1928.

She was quite the celebrity, for her adventurous life as well as for her writing. After all, as The Australian Women’s Weekly (Feb 1935) pointed out, she had lived amongst “headhunters”, no less! Her writing was frequently praised for its realism, with a reviewer in Adelaide’s The Register writing (9 Sept 1922) identifying “two outstanding features of her writing” as:

her understanding of human nature, and her power of description. There is no need to illustrate her books. Her own words conjure up pictures as accurate as they are enchanting …

Some though were more measured, like the writer in The Queenslander (4 Mar 1922) who admired her storytelling but was “forced to wonder if the beautiful islands hold nothing but hatred and dark intrigue”. That though, was surely her genre more than the truth speaking!

Nonetheless, for modern readers her writing is problematic. We can’t, as Byrne writes, overlook “her paternalistic and occasionally racist attitudes” in her fiction and her journalistic writing. Take her reference to Japanese divers as “little yellow men” (The Australian Women’s Weekly 1940) or this much earlier one on Papuans:

The native is willing to work—unlike the Pacific Islander—and a good fellow when well treated. His interests are being thoughtfully cared for, and he is governed with honesty and justice. (Sydney Morning Herald, 14 December 1907)

And yet, if you read this SMH article, you will gain an impression of the liveliness of her observations, which brings me to why she is worth reading. Her writing is a valuable historical source. She wrote a lot, in depth, and with excellent powers of observation about the Pacific, and in doing so conveys information about the life of European settlers, along with the values, beliefs, and attitudes they had. It has to be gold for anyone researching that time and place.

AustLit notes that she was, in her day, “sometimes favourably compared with Joseph Conrad, Bret Harte and Robert Louis Stevenson”, but that she is out of print today. More interestingly, the Oxford Companion shares that researcher Susan Gardner concluded that she “was made up of contradictions” including that “between her explicit anti-feminism and her feminist career”. A most fascinating, forgotten woman.

Sources

HJB, “At home with Beatrice Grimshaw, Novelist”, Sydney Mail (9 December 1931)  [Accessed: 10 February 2026]
Angela Bryne, “Beatrice Grimshaw: The Belfast explorer treated as a male chief on Samoa“, The Irish Times (5 March 2019) [Accessed: 2 March 2026]
Beatrice Grimshaw, AustLit (Accessed: 8 February 2026]
Beatrice Grimshaw, Wikipedia [Accessed: 7 February 2026]
Hugh Laracy, ‘Grimshaw, Beatrice Ethel (1870–1953)‘, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Australian National University, 1983 [Accessed: 7 February 2026]
William H. Wilde, Joy Hooton and Barry Andrews, The Oxford companion to Australian literature. Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 2nd, edition, 1994

All other sources are linked in the article.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Walter Scott Prize

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Some of you will have come across the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction already. Brona (This Reading Life) recently posted on it, and I have mentioned it in passing a few times on this blog. Wikipedia provides good overview, as does the Prize’s own website, so I am sharing information from both these sites.

Waverley book cover

It is a British literary award that was founded in 2010 by the Duke and Duchess of Buccleuch whose ancestry includes Sir Walter Scott. He is generally accepted to be, as Wikipedia puts it, “the originator of historical fiction” with his 1814 novel Waverley (see my post on Volume 1). Its prize money of £30,000 makes it one of the UK’s largest literary awards. Eligible books must be first published in the UK, Ireland or Commonwealth and must, of course, be historical fiction, which, says Wikipedia, they define as fiction in which “the main events take place more than 60 years ago, i.e. outside of any mature personal experience of the author”. As the Prize website explains, the 60 years comes from Waverley’s subtitle, Or, sixty years since.

You will now, I’m sure, have gleaned its relevance for Monday Musings, which is that because Australia is of the Commonwealth, books by Australian authors are eligible. Over the years of the prize, Australian novels have been long- and shortlisted. So, I thought to share them here – to give them another airing, and to identify their main subject matter. Have any topics been more popular than others, I wondered? Let’s see …

Walter Scott Prize Australian shortlistees (2010-2025)

While the prize was first awarded in 2010, an Australian book was not shortlisted until 2013. Perhaps some were longlisted before that (and since), but I can’t see longlists on the Prize’s website, and it would take some gleaning to track them down.

  • 2013: Thomas Keneally, The daughters of Mars: World War 1, and Australian nurses (Kimbofo’s review, with links to other bloggers)
  • 2016: Lucy Treloar, Salt Creek: mid-19th century South Australia, farming struggles and First Nations tensions (Brona’s review)
  • 2017: Hannah Kent, The good people: early 19th century Ireland, and “changelings”
  • 2019: Peter Carey, A long way from home: 1950s Australia seen through the lens of the Redex Car Trials (Kimbofo’s review, on my TBR)
  • 2021: Kate Grenville, A room made of leaves: early 19th century Australia (the Sydney settlement) imagined through the eyes of Elizabeth Macarthur (Brona’s review)
  • 2021: Pip Williams, The dictionary of lost words: early 20th century England, imagining a woman’s contribution to the OED (Brona’s review)
  • 2021: Steven Conte, The Tolstoy Estate: World War 2 (1941), and a German medical unit at the Tolstoy Estate: (my review)
  • 2023: Fiona McFarlane, The sun walks down: late 19th century South Australia, lost child story involving many people, including famers, cameleers and First Nations trackers (Brona’s review)

So far, an Australian hasn’t won, but my, what a showing we had in 2021! As for setting, there’s little concentration – in this tiny sample – on any one time or place. South Australia appears twice, and four of the eight are set in the 19th century. Given none of the authors are First Nations, a couple of the stories include First Nations people, but their history is not the focus. Three of the stories – by Kent, Williams and Conte – are not set in Australia. If there is any one idea coming through, it is that of restoring the role of women in historical events or, simply, in life. This is not surprising given that one of the values of historical fiction, according to American historian Steven Mintz*, is that it

can offer a more inclusive portrait of the past, recover and develop stories that have been lost or forgotten and foreground figures and dissenting and radical perspectives that were relegated to history’s sidelines.

And we all know that women, just one among many groups of disempowered people, were/still are ignored by “history”. This recovery of lost stories – this deeper and wider exploration of history, and all its byways, that the proverbial victors ignored – is why I have come to enjoy historical fiction, a genre I wasn’t much interested in for a long time.

The 2026 longlist has been announced, and it features another Australian work, Melissa Lucashenko’s Edenglassie (my review). It is a good and significant read, and it would be excellent to see it become the first First Nations Australian shortlistee.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on historical fiction and/or this particular prize, or for you to just name a favourite historical novel. Over to you …

* An aside: I didn’t know who Steven Mintz was, but he has a Wikipedia page. I also found this intriguing commentary on his departure from Inside Higher Ed (which is where I found the statement above). He sounds like a thoughtful, decent guy, but he is in his 70s, so I don’t blame him for wanting to move into a quieter life.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Trove treasures (16), Garrulity and Gracelessness in AusLit

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(Courtesy OCAL, via clker.com)

Another post in my Monday Musings subseries called Trove Treasures, in which I share stories or comments, serious or funny, that I come across during my Trove travels. 

Today’s story popped up during my research for a post on Beatrice Grimshaw for the Australian Women Writers blog. It stunned me, and I had to share it. It is, ostensibly, a review in the Sydney Morning Herald (25 July 1953) of a new-to-me Ruth Park novel, A power of roses. The review is titled, pointedly, “A power of women”, and the author, S.J.B., does not mean this as a compliment.

It opens with:

THE visitor from abroad venturing into these barbarian lands for the first time might be pardoned for concluding that women have an almost unbreakable grip on fiction in Australia.

“These barbarian lands”? And visitors need to be “pardoned” for thinking women have the upper hand in Australian fiction? Oh, the horror.

S.J.B. then says that “this domination” had “become increasingly evident” in recent months, with novels, “varying in quality from the excellent to the ordinary”, appearing in rapid succession from “Eleanor Dark, Kylie Tennant, Ruth Park, Dymphna Cusack, Elyne Mitchell, Dorothy Lucie Sanders, Helen Heney, Marjorie Robertson and Maysie Greig”.

He continues:

This flourishing femininity is not exactly new. For the past half century or so, our literature has been notable (if that is the right term) for its women contributors.

If “notable” is the right word to describe women’s strong role in Australian literature? He lists these “women contributors” as “Mrs. Campbell Praed, Mrs. Aeneas Gunn, G. B. Lancaster, Henry Handel Richardson, Miles Franklin, Beatrice Grimshaw, Ernestine Hill, Mary Grant Bruce, Henrietta Drake-Brockman, Marjorie Barnard, Flora Eldershaw, Katharine S. Prichard, Mary Mitchell, Eve Langley”. He is right, women had played a major role in Australian literature in the first half of the century, as this impressive list – representing a significant legacy – shows. Many of these writers are still read, and respected, today.

But, this long introduction to his review gets worse, because he then suggests that these writers “may go some way towards explaining why our fiction is somewhat distinguished for its garrulity, its repetitiveness, its attention to inessentials, its false humour, and its gracelessness” [my emph]. What? Who was saying all this!

However, he admits that this long list of women writers

does not explain why our male writers make such a poor showing. Can it be that Australian men are so occupied with keeping wolves from the door that only their little women [my emph] have time to write?

Perhaps breadwinning plays some role, he says, but he thinks something more is going on:

We note, for example, that in so far as Australian men are active in writing, they tend to concern themselves with social documentation – they record and interpret rather than invent.

The reason? Perhaps the fact is that Australian men lack an ability to sustain imaginative flights and the resolute patience necessary for putting a novel together. Whatever the solution, our male novelists are grievously outnumbered.

And whatever the reason, it’s interesting that it was around this time that things started to change, for the men. Patrick White’s much admired fourth novel, The tree of man, was published in 1955, and during the 1950s other “serious” male writers appeared like Martin Boyd, Randolph Stow and others.

But, back to S.J.B. … Having made these points, he finally gets to his review of A power of roses, to which he gives three small paragraphs. The novel is, he says, “in the tradition of squalor, sentiment and grotesquerie that Miss Park has made distinctively her own”, and then quotes Odysseus’ complaint about hearing the same story twice. He concludes:

Book reviewers are expected to be more tolerant. But even the most generous reviewer cannot help feeling that Miss Park’s grime, bug-infested rooms’ and poverty-stricken ratbags have lost much of their novelty as subjects for fiction. We have had it all before-and better – in The Harp in the South and Poor Man’s Orange.

At least he does think those two books written by a woman are good.

I have quoted heavily from the article because, while paraphrasing would have conveyed the meaning, the actual words have a “power” I had to share. As for who S.J.B. is I have not been able to ascertain. AustLit lists S.J.B. as an author of some newspaper articles, but all it can tell me is “gender unknown”. “S.J.B.” does not appear in its list of pseudonyms, which rather confirms that they don’t know who this person is, despite the fact that S.J.B. wrote several articles around this time.

Comments?

Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper, and Sarah Krasnostein, The mushroom tapes (#BookReview)

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Chances are I’m not telling you anything when I say that The mushroom tapes is about an Australian murder trial that took place over two months in the middle of 2025. However, if you don’t know, this trial concerned a woman named Erin Patterson who was accused of murdering three relatives and attempting to murder a fourth, by serving them toxic-mushroom-laced beef Wellingtons for lunch, in July 2023. The victims were her estranged husband’s parents and aunt, with the survivor being his uncle, Ian Wilkinson. The estranged husband, Simon, had also been invited but pulled out the day before. You can read more at the Wikipedia article, Leongatha Mushroom Murders.

This was one of those cases that captured local and international attention, so when it went to trial coverage was intense. Not only were there the usual news reports on television and radio, and in print and online newspapers, but there were also podcasts, social media threads, and of course conversations everywhere you went. Within weeks of the trial’s conclusion, the books started coming out. People were, as Helen, Chloe and Sarah* write, either obsessed and consuming all they could or repulsed and doing everything possible to avoid it. I was in the middle-ground. I certainly wasn’t obsessed. I didn’t seek out reports but couldn’t miss hearing snippets of news. If it came up in conversation, I took part with whatever information I had recently heard. It’s not that I didn’t care. It’s a terrible and devastating story – for the families involved and particularly for Erin and Simon’s two young children, who were 14 and 9 when the murders occurred. However, having lived through the Lindy Chamberlain days, I’d rather let the court do its job as unhampered as possible. I am increasingly uncomfortable with pronouncing on controversial situations, because the sources are often questionable or incomplete.

Then I heard that Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein – all writers of thoughtful narrative nonfiction that I have loved – had decided to write jointly about the case. This, I knew, would interest me, because I could trust them to engage in honest and open-minded thinking that would consider the greys. I hoped, too, that they would reach beyond this particular case to offer something more. I didn’t have a preconceived notion of what this might be, but just wanted them to tease out something bigger than this case for us to take away and ponder. Did they? Read on …

“a rent in the social fabric” (Hannah Arendt)

In the book’s opening pages, the three discuss what they are doing, whether, in fact, they should be doing it. After their first day in court, a few days into the trial, they talk about what they have seen in the witness, Simon – the grief, horror, incomprehension. Invoking Hannah Arendt, they suggest they are “bearing witness to a rent in the social fabric and how the law is going to deal with it” (p. 15). Nonetheless, they are concerned at this early stage, and revisit it often throughout the process, that they might be “just perving”. Helen admits there is an element of “perving” of course,

but you hope that by the time you’ve got a certain degree of skill as a writer, you can become useful. I think it’s useful work. These trials are excruciatingly painful. Your [Sarah’s] description of that journalist, going to drink at the pub – that’s defence, isn’t it, defence against the pain. The pain that you volunteer to witness. (p. 16)

Chloe adds that another issue is the transformation of the town by the media pack. These are just two of the many ideas these three explore amongst themselves as the trial progresses – because this book is completely framed by the trial.

“our eyes will go to different places” (Chloe)

This brings me to the book’s structure and form. It is divided into 6 parts which follow the trial, chronologically, through to the verdict. The parts are themed around the focus of the trial at that point in time, such as mushrooms or the victims. They tease the theme out, while also interrogating wider thoughts that their process was generating.

And their process was an interesting one. When they decided to jointly write this book, rather than individually, they recognised that by working together their eyes would “go to different places”. During the conversation I attended with Helen and Sarah, they talked about these different “places”. Helen’s tended to be “Shakespearean”, and personal, concerned with questions like where is the line that an ordinary person crosses to commit such a crime, while Chloe’s tended to the sociological (as in, what in society created this). No surprises for guessing what legally trained Sarah’s was! These are loose divisions, because they are not one-dimensional women, but it does mean that the discussions are wide-ranging.

The overall tone is one of reportage: “we” drove to Morwell, or “in her opening address for the Crown, Nanette Rogers had told the jury …”, or “Helen and Chloe are still on the phone with Sarah”. These reports, which provide facts, describe the scene, or establish bona fides, are interspersed with conversations selected from hours of recordings and other communications like email. They are introduced by the speaker’s name, as in “Chloe: The public gallery wants a plot twist… ” (p. 109). This might sound disjointed, but in fact the book flows well, which is impressive given the time-frame in which it was produced.

“it has everything in it that’s human, including absurdity” (Chloe)

I have never sat on a jury nor attended a trial, but these writers conveyed a real feeling of what being in that courtroom was like – of the tedium of long days of evidence about mushrooms and dehydrators, of the little communities of people attending court, of the cafe where attendees would go for coffee or lunch, of attendee Kelly the dairy farmer who gets a mushroom tattoo, and so on. It’s both life-changingly serious and oh so ordinary.

But, of course, the centre is Erin. Their discussions about her, as their thoughts waver and shift through mounting evidence, convey just what a strange case this was. As Chloe comments near the end, “it’s a miasma of why?” (p. 222). Who is she? Why did she kill her parents-in-law who had treated her with much kindness? What happened in the marriage? Why does she lie? Is she a “monster” or “a broken person”? They can’t decide. Sarah says, as they wait for the verdict:

“We should be nervous – we’re finding out how much we’ll never know” (p. 226-7)

So, back to my question: Did I come away from this book with some meaningful takeaways? I do think it suffers a little from its rapid production. It is fresh and immediate, but not quite as complete as I was hoping for. Many ideas were touched upon, rather than fully explored – including the impact on a community of being at the centre of such a tragedy and then of intense media attention, the bigger issues about what makes someone (particularly women) kill, the moral questions about what they were doing, not to mention questions about the legal system.

However, meaningful questions were raised, and I enjoyed spending time with these three. On their own, they are some women, but together, they are a force. It was like eavesdropping on the sort of intelligent, compassionate and open conversation that we all aspire to. And they ended on the hopeful note that, despite the horror and the “appalled sorrow”, there was survivor “Ian Wilkinson’s offer of kindness – an enlargement of the field”. “An enlargement of the field”. What a beautiful thought.

Brona, Jonathan, Kate and Rose have all posted on this book.

* I use first names because that’s how they present themselves in the book.

Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper, and Sarah Krasnostein,
The mushroom tapes: Conversations on a triple murder trial
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2025
240pp.
ISBN: 9781923058750

Monday musings on Australian literature: Precarity and Late Capitalism

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Over the years I have written posts about and reviews of books with strong socioeconomic underpinnings. In the nineteenth century these novels tended to be described as Social Novels (and I am have just an English one for reading group, review coming) or were seen under the banner of the Realist movement. In the early to mid twentieth century, books dealing with these concerns were seen as part of the Social Realism movement. I’m playing a bit loose here, because I don’t intend to get into the weeds about definitions. I simply want to note that these novels, to quote Wikipedia’s article on Social Realism, aim to explore the “socio-political conditions of the working class as a means to critique the power structures behind these conditions”. I have written at least two Monday Musings about writing in this area, one on Factory Novels and one on Realism and Modernism, but the issues have popped up frequently in individual reviews too.

In recent years, new terms have entered the popular sociopolitical lexicon, and these include “precarity” and “late capitalism”. Precarity, with its focus on the lack of job security and all the social and psychological ills that flow from this, may be a relatively new term in sociopolitical discussion, but its broader meaning encompassing the idea of living precarious lives, has underpinned most nineteenth and early twentieth century “Social” and “Realist” novels.

Similarly, Late Capitalism is a complex “term” with a history going back many decades, but is popping up increasingly frequently across all types of writing. Wikipedia covers it in detail, but I’m using one definition from PhD student David Espinoza at the University of Sydney (2022). If you are interested, you can read more at both sites. Basically, Espinoza says that the term wasn’t taken up widely until Belgian Marxist economist Ernest Mandel’s treatise on the topic was published in English in 1975. Espinoza says that

Mandel used the idea to describe the economic expansion after the second world war … a time characterised by the emergence of multinational companies, a growth in the global circulation of capital and an increase in corporate profits and the wealth of certain individuals, chiefly in the West.

For Mandel, “late capitalism” is not so much a change in what capitalism is as “expansion and acceleration in production and exchange”. He says that “one of the main features of late capitalism is the increasing amounts of capital investments into non-traditional productive areas, such as the expansion of credit”. Espinoza says late capitalism is behind the increasing number of financial or economic crises we have had since the 1970s.

There is more, but this is the essence. It’s a bit loosey-goosey I know, but I’m not an expert in economics. However, I hope this is accurate enough and makes enough sense for our needs.

Now, last week’s Monday Musings was inspired by critic/artistic director/literary judge Beejay Silcox’s article in The Guardian on new Australian releases. As I wrote in that post, Silcox grouped the releases under headings. One was “Eco-lit flourishes”, which I discussed last week because it’s an area that interests me. Another area of interest also caught my eye, the one she called “The cost of living”. It inspired this post. Don’t worry, I am not going to go through her whole article in this way. That would be too cheeky for words!

Precarity and Late Capitalism in Australian fiction

I don’t want to repeat the books I included in those previous Monday Musings, but I will name a handful of other Australian novels (and short satires) that I’ve read that encompass these issues (though probably the most searing fictional critique I’ve read recently is Scottish writer Andrew O’Hagan’s Caledonian Road):

  • Donna M. Cameron, The rewilding (my review): capitalism and its impact on climate
  • Julie Koh, Portable curiosities (my review): satirical short stories which skewer multiple aspects of capitalist culture, including housing and banking
  • Paddy O’Reilly, Other houses (my review): social mobility and the desire to provide better opportunities for children
  • Heather Rose, Bruny (my review): satire, on globalised capital, and the conspiracies and political corruption that ensue

These books show there are many ways in which contemporary authors approach this topic, from a more traditional working-class novel (like Paddy O’Reilly’s) through to thrillers and eco-literature, and that satire is still alive as a means to expose the extremes. I would also argue that many of the recent novels by First Nations Australian writers, like Melissa Lucashenko, encompass responses to the depredations of late capitalism.

Now to Beejay Silcox’s list of what is coming in 2026. She introduced this section with the statement that “From the housing crisis to the care sandwich: an emerging and caustic theme in Ozlit (and beyond) is late capitalism and financial precarity”. As with my Eco-literature post, I will dot point the books she lists, in alphabetical order by author, for simplicity’s sake, but will include any description she provided:

  • Alan Fyfe, The cross thieves: “set in a riverside squat”, Transit Lounge, March, on my TBR
  • George Kemp, Soft serve: “traps his cast in a regional McDonald’s as a bushfire closes in”, UQP, February, on my TBR
  • Jordan Prosser, Blue giant: “sends a hungover millennial to Mars”, UQP, August
  • Ellena Savage, The ruiners: “follows an anarchist waiter from inner-city Melbourne to a decrepit Greek Island”, Summit, April
  • Fiona Wright, Kill your Boomers: “captures the mood”! Harumph, says this Boomer, watching her back (though, having children, I do understand), Ultimo, March

For the record, Silcox also names a couple of nonfiction titles on the theme: Lucinda Holdforth’s Going on and on: Why longevity threatens the future (Summit, April), and Matt Lloyd-Cape’s Our place: How to fix the housing crisis and build a better Australia (Black Inc, September).

Can you recommend any standout books you’ve read about contemporary precarity and late capitalism? Doesn’t have to be Australian. I’d love to hear.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Invasion Day/Australia Day (2026)

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It’s Monday, and I did have a post planned, until I remembered that this Monday has a very particular date, 26th January. So, I decided to postpone that post in order to make a brief statement about this date which, for many decades, has been designated Australia Day. And we have a public holiday in its honour. The problem is that this day – 26th January – commemorates the 1788 landing at Sydney Cove of Arthur Phillip and his First Fleet and the raising of the flag of Great Britain to establish a penal colony in Britain’s name. In so doing, Britain effectively invaded Australia. (On what legal basis this happened, there is discussion, but the legalities are a distraction from the fact that the British occupied land, that was already occupied, as their own.)

Although Australia Day has been a much loved day, not all Australians have been oblivious to its origins and implications. Wikipedia’s article on the Day provides a brief history of some of this recognition. For example, in 1888, before the first centennial anniversary of the First Fleet’s arrival, Henry Parkes, New South Wales’s premier at the time, was asked about including Aboriginal people in the celebrations. He apparently replied: “And remind them that we have robbed them?” (from Calla Wahlquist and Paul Karp in The Guardian, 2018)

Wikipedia also summarises the history of First Nations people’s response to the Day, including their identifying the 150th anniversary celebrations in 1938 as an Aboriginal Day of Mourning. By the nation’s Bicentennial in 1988, they were framing the day as Invasion Day. Since then, this idea has increasingly taken hold among not only First Nations but many other Australians. With the rise of social media, hashtags like “invasionday and “changethedate have appeared and have also gained traction. Momentum is building.

From drone show, Brisbane Festival 2024

So, where do I stand? I love Australia, and am very glad to be Australian. I would, therefore, like to celebrate our nation in some way on some day BUT I do not think January the 26th is the day to do it. Consequently, I am with the #changethedate proponents. And, I believe it will come. The voices are rising, and increasingly more Australians are feeling uncomfortable about celebrating a day that feels dishonest and that disrespects and brings pain to the country’s first peoples. We can find another date – that is not hard. We just have to do it.

POSTSCRIPT (28/1/2026): I fear I spoke too soon re change coming. According to a report in The Conversation, there has been little change in numbers supporting a date change. In 2021, around 38% of Australians agreed Australia Day should not be celebrated on January 26, while just over 60% disagreed. By late 2025, those figures were around the same, with 37% opposing the date and 62% supporting its retention. But, the worrying thing is that, also according to the report, there has been an increase in the strength of opposition to changing the date. That is a worry for those of us who believe change is a necessary part of the reconciliation journey.