Monday musings

Monday musings on Australian literature: 1961 in fiction (2)

/ Whispering Gums / 9 Comments

I said in last week’s Monday Musing, which was dedicated Karen’s (Kaggsy’s Bookish Rambling) and Simon’s (Stuck in a Book) 1961 “Year Club”, that I might write a second post this week. I know the week finished yesterday, 19 April, but I couldn’t resist posting on a topic that popped up frequently during my research, the Commonwealth Literary Fund (CLF).

Brief history

The Commonwealth Literary Fund (see Wikipedia) was created in 1908 to assist needy writers and their families (primarily by providing small incomes to writers needing support, and to widows and dependent families of writers who died destitute). After 1939, it was broadened to grant fellowships, provide guarantees against loss to Australian publishers, and assist Australian literary magazines (Meanjin, Overland, Quadrant and Southerly). In 1973, its functions were taken over by the Literature Board of the Australia Council for the Arts (renamed the Australia Council in 1975, and Creative Australia in 2023). Of course, these renamings involve structural and policy changes but these are not my interest here.

However, I will explain that in 1939, the Committee which made the decisions was replaced by a Parliamentary Committee, which comprised the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition and one other. In practice, their Advisory board, which comprised leading writers, publishers and academics made the decisions – except when they were over-ridden.

Controversy

You won’t be surprised to hear that as an arts funding body, the CLF was involved, directly and indirectly, in controversy – in 1961 (and probably many other years if I went looking). I will share a couple from this year.

The politics of arts funding (1)

One related to the above-mentioned support for those four literary magazines. The Communist Party’s newspaper Tribune (21 June) reported that conservative PM Menzies had rejected the Advisory Board’s recommendation that Overland, a leftist magazine, should receive a grant, while he had “no objection” to a grant going to Quadrant, a conservative magazine which Tribune says has ‘infinitesimal claims to being a “literary” journal, but is renowned for the savagely reactionary nature of its political views’. They quote Katharine Susannah Prichard, Nancy Cato and Kylie Tenant as criticising this decision, with Tennant saying

We now know that the Commonwealth Literary Fund is only there to support the most anaemic and harmless publications.

Mary Gilmore, 1927 (Public Domain, State Library of QLD, via Wikipedia)

Tribune says it has criticised Overland at times for not supporting “with sufficient firmness and vehemence … the labor movement, whose energy and initiative originally launched it”. In fact, Overland had often sought ‘to take a “neutral” stand in the sharp issues of our day’. Unfortunately, ‘its attempts at “neutrality” have not saved it from the reactionary hand of Menzies’!

A few days later, poet and utopian socialist Mary Gilmore, criticised the decision in Tribune (5 July), and concluded with:

Might I suggest that, having been established by a Labor Prime Minister for the benefit of Australian writers, the unions remember this? For without such publications Australia would be a dumb continent except for book publication here and abroad.

The politics of arts funding (2)

Then, of course, there are criticisms of those who do receive funding! L.M.R, reviewing Alan Davies’ A Sunday kind of love and other stories in The Canberra Times (26 August), was not impressed, saying that the book, was “hardly designed to pass away an odd hour pleasurably. A baffling hour would be a better description”. Indeed, L.M.R. says, “they are not stories”. Rather, “each is a description of a mood, usually not accounted for”. S/he continues in this critical vein, concluding:

It was published with the help of the Commonwealth Literary Fund. I wonder why?

On the other hand, Professor T. Inglis Moore, who was on the Fund’s Advisory Board wrote a letter to the editor of The Canberra Times (5 October) correcting some points that had been made in an editorial. Apparently, the editorial had implied that grants made to writers were a new venture involving “experimentation or even gambling”. On the contrary, said Moore, the annual grants had been happening for 21 years, and formed “a well tried, sound, and constructive method of aiding our literary development”.

The editorial also seems to have implied that not all grants resulted in great works. Moore responded that there is “of course … an element of risk” but that the risk is minimised because the applications “are given careful consideration by the Fund’s Advisory Board and Parliamentary Committee”, and the “grants are made only to writers who have proved themselves … and for projects considered suitable to their particular talents”. So, in this year, he says, “it is hardly rash gambling to back Judith Wright to write good poetry and critical essays and Bill Harney to produce an expert work dealing with aborigines”.

Inevitably, though, there are occasional “failures or disappointments, but the great majority of the writers justified their awards satisfactorily, and some productions have been outstanding”. He draws a comparison with government support of the CSIRO, and concludes

there would be no success without experimentation, the risks undertaken are reasonable, and the rewards of the venture are very well worthwhile, whether in science or literature.

CLF Lectures

In addition to awarding fellowships, the CLF also supported lectures on literature around the country. Some of these were reported in the newspapers. Announcing the 1961 Fellowship winners on 2 October, The Canberra Times noted that increased interest had been shown in lectures in Australian literature, and that so far that year “the lecture programmes had reached a public audience of 8,000 and a school audience of 19,000”. A week earlier, on 27 September, the paper had reported on a CLF lecture to be given by academic Evan Jones on “The Anatomy of Frustration: Short Stories of Alan Davies and Peter Cowan.” (Given the criticism I’ve shared above of Davies’ stories, I’d love to know what he said!)

The Port Lincoln Times (3 August) wrote about a two-week lecture tour around South Australia to be given by Colin Thiele, who, they said, was well-known as a poet and broadcaster. (In fact, in 1961 he published a children’s book The sun on the stubble, and two years later Storm boy, perhaps his most famous children’s book. Today, he is best known for his children’s writing.) Two weeks later, on 17 August, the same paper reported on the tour. Thiele’s theme was “Spirit of People — Spirit of Place”. He talked about the Australian spirit (and humour), and how “a good writer should be able to observe and capture this spirit”. The report concluded by sharing the list of Australian literary works, that he recommended for “basic reading”:

  • Rolf Boldrewood, Robbery under arms
  • Martin Boyd, Lucinda Brayford
  • F. D. Davison, Man-shy (read before blogging)
  • M. Barnard Eldershaw, A house is built (on my TBR)
  • Miles Franklin, All that swagger
  • Joseph Furphy, Such is life
  • Mrs. Aeneas Gunn, We of the Never Never (read before blogging)
  • Xavier Herbert, Capricornia
  • T. A. G. Hungerford, The ridge and the river
  • Henry Kingsley, The recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn (on my TBR)
  • The prose works of Henry Lawson (read some before blogging)
  • Vance Palmer, The passage (read before blogging)
  • Ruth Park, The harp of the south (read before blogging)
  • Katherine [sic] S. Pritchard [sic], Coonardoo (read before blogging)
  • Henry Handel Richardson, The fortunes of Richard Mahoney
  • Randolph Stow, To the islands (on my TBR)
  • Kylie Tennant, The battlers (on my TBR)
  • Patrick White, Voss and The tree of man (read both before blogging)
  • Douglas Stewart, Four plays (read one before blogging)
  • Ray Lawler, The summer of the seventeenth doll
  • Stewart and Keesing (ed.), Australian bush ballads
  • Howarth, Thompson and Slessor, The Penguin book of Australian verse
  • W. Murdoch and Drake Brockman, Australian short stories.

Anything caught your attention?

Monday musings on Australian literature: 1961 in fiction

/ Whispering Gums / 22 Comments

Once again it’s Karen’s (Kaggsy’s Bookish Rambling) and Simon’s (Stuck in a Book) “Year Club” week. This time, it is 1961, and it runs from 13th to 19th April. Once again, I am devoting my Monday Musings to the week.

I have already written about 1960s for the 1962 Club. It was an exciting decade, one in which we thought we were really going to change the world for the better. Older and wiser now, I can see how naive that was. But, idealism is not a bad thing, and some good changes did happen. Just not enough. This decade was also the height of the Cold War. Literature reflected all of this – the enthusiasm for change looking towards a fairer more equitable world, the fear of communism, and the tension between the two. In Australia, the conservative government of Robert Menzies had a strong grip.

A brief 1961 literary recap

Books were, naturally, published across all forms, but my focus is Australian fiction, so here is a selection of novels published in 1961:

Mena Calthorpe, The dyehouse
  • James Aldridge, The last exile
  • Mena Calthorpe, The dyehouse (my review)
  • A. Bertram Chandler, The rim of space
  • Kenneth Cook, Wake in fright
  • Dymphna Cusack, Heatwave in Berlin
  • Nene Gare, The fringe dwellers (Bill’s review)
  • Xavier Herbert, Soldiers’ women
  • Elizabeth Kata, Be ready with bells and drums
  • H.A. (Harold) Lindsay, Janie McLachlan
  • John O’Grady, No kava for Johnny
  • Ruth Park, The good looking women (aka Serpent’s Delight) 
  • Hal Porter, The tilted cross
  • F. J. Thwaites, Beyond the rainbow
  • George Turner, A stranger and afraid
  • Arthur Upfield, The white savage
  • Judah Waten, Time of conflict
  • Morris West, Daughter of silence
  • Patrick White, Riders in the chariot (Lisa’s review)

Several short stories, and short story collections were published, including by some favourite writers of mine like Thea Astley and Shirley Hazzard, by other writers I’ve posted on here before like D’Arcy Niland and Hal Porter, and by one Ray Mathew, an Australian expat whom I discovered around a decade ago when I attended my first Ray Mathew annual lecture at the NLA.

The thing about the 1960s is that we start to see more authors appear that we still hear of today, even if not all are still keenly read.

The main literary award made this year was the Miles Franklin, which went to Patrick White’s Riders in the chariot. The ALS Gold Medal was not awarded in 1961.

Novelists born this year include Jordie Albiston (who died in 2022) and Richard Flanagan (who should need no introduction).

The state of the art

As for previous club years, I checked Trove for what newspapers were saying about Australian fiction. However, because 1961 is less than 70 years ago, I frequently confronted roadblocks, with Trove regularly telling me that “This newspaper article is still within its copyright period and can’t be displayed on Trove right now. The National Library of Australia will make it available as soon as copyright permits, or with the copyright holder’s permission”. Fortunately, some newspapers have – generously – released their material “ahead” of time! Thank you The Canberra Times, and more specialist papers like The Australian Jewish Times and Tribune.

Communists and other reformists

Communism was still a hot topic in the 1960s, and several writers in my 1961 list were Communists or, if not, Marxist or leftist writers, writers like Mena Calthorpe, Dymphna Cusack, Judah Waten – and Frank Hardy, whose nonfiction book about his most famous novel Power without glory, The Hard Way: The Story Behind Power without Glory, was published in this year.

I’ll start with Frank Hardy, who wrote a piece for Tribune (June 7) about The Communist Party of Australia’s Draft Resolution for its 19th Congress. ALS reviewer Teri Merlyn wrote in 2005 that “Hardy’s commitment to literature as a vehicle for working-class education and the Australian radical literary tradition was unwavering”. This is on display in his response to the Draft Resolution, for which he proposes the following additional lines:

An important part in interpreting Australian reality is played by realist literature and art. Art which lays bare the contradictions of capitalism, exposes the ramifications of monopoly, affirms class struggle, and reveals the worth and dignity of the working people and their ability to transform society.

While the “Party’s work has been decisive in the development of the working class literature and art movement”, this work has, he says, been “marred” by “errors”. He briefly discusses these, before concluding that literature and art are part of “the working class arsenal”, and the Party must make it a “whole party” issue.

Given the period, many of our serious writers were keenly interested in reform. What is interesting is how contemporary reviewers saw their works. For example, Mena Calthorpe’s The dye house is a factory novel, which, says The Canberra Times‘ reviewer, R.R. (16 September) ‘is “formula” novel, set in a Sydney textile factory’, and, “despite its immaturity of style … an impressive piece of work”. It’s a mixed review, panning much but also suggesting she has potential. R.R. suggests that editing out ‘schoolgirl words as “clatter,” “click clack,” and “tic tac,” which jangle irritatingly through it, would improve it immensely’. I, however, loved this language, as I wrote in my review.

Similarly, M.P., writing in The Canberra Times (13 May) about Dymphna Cusack’s Heatwave in Berlin, is less than complimentary. S/he describes its political content, adds s/he is not qualified to confirm the facts, and then critiques the book as

something which cannot be taken very seriously. The characters have the larger-than-life quality of figures in a melodrama, and they speak with something of the same staginess.

Not having read the book, I can’t comment, but there are some reviews from, for example, Hungarian and Estonian readers on GoodReads whose reflections offer some fascinating perspectives.

The aforementioned R.R. also reviewed Nene Gare’s novel, The fringe-dwellers, in The Canberra Times (21 October). S/he is far more complimentary about this one, calling it “a most compelling book and one of the best written on this theme”. Today, it would be critiqued for not being an “own story”, for being a story about First Nations people by a white writer. However, this was 1961, and Gare, I think, brought an important story into the main culture. It draws from her experiences in Geraldton, Western Australia, between 1952 and 1954, when her husband was District Officer with the Native Welfare Department. R.R. writes that Gare

captured completely the atmosphere of the part-aboriginal community—its pride, its squalor, and its terrible inertia — people caught between two ways of life and belonging to neither.

S/he says that it has a few – but not serious – false notes, and pronounces it “an outstandingly good, pertinent, and touching story”.

On reviewing

In my last Year Club post (for 1925), I shared some examples of reviewing style. I found some more interesting examples for this year, but will share just one here, by “Tinker”, who reviewed four books in The Canberra Times (12 August), including two by Australian writers, One rose less, by Pat Flower, and And death came too, by Helen Mace. Tinker – who must surely be a “he” – writes of the four books that, three

are by women authors, another saddening fact drawing evidence to the sex’s determination to invade almost every field of male activity.

What? Further, while “he” thinks that Flower’s book is the better of the two Aussies, he says she “just cannot resist the feminine love for tidying up”! Mace’s novel which “has some reasonably good word pictures of the Victorian countryside, but not so good as Pat Flowers’ Sydney scenes” also “unfortunately … suffers from the female tidying up complex”. Feminism still has battles to fight, but reviewers would be unlikely to get away with this today! Incidentally, several of Pat Rose’s novels have been republished in the 2020s.

I found much more, and might write a Part 2 next week. We’ll see … meanwhile I hope this post has piqued your interest about 1961.

Sources

(Besides those linked in the post)

Previous “Year Club” Monday Musings: 1925, 1929, 1936, 1937, 1940, 1952, 1954, 1962 and 1970.

Do you plan to take part in the 1961 Club – and if so how?

Monday musings on Australian literature: Tech noir

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The genres – or, perhaps I mean sub-genres – keep coming. Recently, I’ve started hearing about something called tech noir. I’ve heard for some time of rural (or outback or drought) noir, and have read some in that genre because I love books with a strong sense of place. I am also interested in technology and where it is taking us, but as you probably know I don’t gravitate to futuristic stories, so I am not at all familiar with trends in such writing.

Definition

I’ll start with definitions, and with my go-to source, Wikipedia. What I found there surprised me, though it shouldn’t have, because this sub-genre, like many is not limited to fiction. Wikipedia says that it is a

hybrid genre of fiction, particularly film, combining film noir and science fiction, epitomized by Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) and James Cameron’s The Terminator (1984). The tech-noir presents “technology as a destructive and dystopian force that threatens every aspect of our reality”. It can be characterized by dark, urban settings, while depicting technology ranging from retrofuturism to classic futurism. Tech noir combines the high-tech worlds of sci-fi with the dark, gritty, and bleak atmosphere of film noir.

It then says that it is “also known as cyber noir, future noir, neo-noir science fiction and science fiction noir”, and that James Cameron coined the term, via the name of a nightclub in The Terminator. It provides some pre-history, but of course origins are always murky because these movements never appear out of nowhere. Do check out Wikipedia’s article if you are interested. I’m leaving it here because, although Wikipedia describes tech noir as a “genre of fiction, particularly film” it does not talk about any other type of fiction besides film, and of course, I am interested in prose fiction (aka novels).

So, regarding novels, I’ve seen the genre described in various ways. There’s tech noir, of course. Indeed, it was references to Australian author Ashley Kalagian Blunt being “Australia’s queen of tech noir” that inspired this post. But, I’ve also seen terms like electronic crime and high-tech crime. The point is that this genre blends traditional 1940s noir elements, like cynical investigators, moral ambiguity, and atmospheric settings, with futuristic or high-tech elements like AI, cybercrime, and the dark web. The stories tend to be urban, and focus on modern concerns about privacy, identity, and security, not to mention issues like corporate greed. The misuse of technology is common and stories will often confront existential questions about what it means to be human. Like 1940s noir, tech noir is grounded in anxieties about the future, which is usually seen as bleak.

Just how far this bleakness extends can vary. Noir stories are by definition bleak or dark. The world, if not always doomed, is seen through a dark lens. But there can be humour, most likely satirical, and the endings aren’t necessarily depressing. Or, so I believe!

Tech noir’s precursors can be found in cyberpunk, with books like Philip K Dick’s 1968 Do androids dream of electric sheep and William Gibson’s 1984 Neuromancer. (Classics now, I know, but I haven’t read them.) According to Wikipedia, Neuromancer is “set in a near-future dystopia [and] follows Case, a computer hacker enlisted into a crew by a powerful artificial intelligence and a traumatised former soldier to complete a high-stakes heist”. I must say, this feels a bit like a case of today’s tech noir is yesterday’s cyberpunk? Wikipedia describes cyberpunk as “using elements from crime fiction—particularly hardboiled detective fiction and film noir—and postmodernist prose to describe an often nihilistic underground side of an electronic society”. What do you think?

Tech noir in Australia

My research into Australian writers in this field brought up Dorothy Johnston (see my posts on her). Wikipedia says that her 2000-published novel, The Trojan dog “was one of the first Australian novels to give electronic crime a central place”.

However, despite those references I found to Ashley Kalagian Blunt as Australia’s tech noir queen, I have to say that my internet searches did not produce a large number of writers in this field, and most of those I list below do not seem to write exclusively or even mainly in this field. But, I am out of my comfort zone, so I might have missed something big.

Selected Australian tech noir novels:

  • Ashley Kalagian Blunt: Dark mode (2023, Sydney-based thriller about a series of murders linked to the dark web); Like, follow, die (2025, psychological thriller examining the impact of online radicalism, cybercrime, and online forums on real-world violence)
  • Andrew Croome: Midnight empire (my review) (2012, thriller about drone warfare fought in the Middle East from the Nevada desert)
  • Dorothy Johnston: The Trojan dog (2000, Canberra-set crime about computer fraud and bureaucracy)
  • Zane Lovitt: Black teeth (2016, Melbourne-based noir with a tech focus, featuring a computer geek whose day-job is to search the internet to confirm that people’s CVs are real)
  • Jonathan Macpherson: Brazen violations (2016, high-tech thriller about a cop who has a bugging device implanted in his chest allowing him to be controlled by a criminal family)

As you see a small list. I did find a couple of others, but not many. Except for Blunt’s novels, these are ten or more years old. I know some readers of my blog – I’m looking at you Bill, in particular – might know more. I’d love anyone who has read in this area to leap in and correct any misconceptions I have and/or expand on what I have said.

So, over to you. Do you read “tech noir”? And if so, I’d love to hear your thoughts and your favourites?

Monday musings on Australian literature: Blake Poetry Prize

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Coincidentally, I reviewed a book of poetry by Paris Rosemont just as the longlist for the current Blake Poetry Prize was announced, and it includes a poem by her. The timing seemed right to give this prize some air. I have mentioned it before – but only in passing in my 2024 Poetry Month post in which I wrote about the Kings College Choir Cambridge Performing an Australian poem set to music. The poem was On finding Charlotte in the anthropological record by poet and visual artist, Judith Nangala Crispin, and it won the Blake Poetry Prize in 2020 (see the poet read it online here).

The Blake Prize is named for William Blake, who, England’s Blake Society writes, was “unusually … equally a writer and a visual artist”. Indeed the Society apparently laid a stone on his grave that reads ‘Poet Artist Prophet’. Now you may have noticed that I wrote “the Blake Prize”, because in Australia it was, initially, an art prize. Australia’s Blake Society and the prize were established in 1951, with the prize awarded annually until 2015. From 2016, it has been awarded biennially. Originally titled the Blake Prize for Religious Art, it is now, simply, the Blake Prize, with the criterion broadening out to, says Wikipedia, “art that explores spirituality”. You can read some of the complicated history of the prize – including controversies concerning the definition of “religious” – in the Wikipedia article.

Meanwhile, I’ll get to the Blake Poetry Prize. It is related to the above prize, and is now managed by the same organisation, the Liverpool Powerhouse, but in conjunction with WestWords. It is for “a new work of 100 lines or less, focused on non-sectarian spiritual and religious topics”, and is worth A$5,000. WestWords currently describes it as

an open poetry prize that challenges poets, both national and international, in conversations concerning faith, spirituality, religion and/or belief.

Further down the page, it reiterates that the prize is “strictly non-sectarian” and says that “all poems entered must have a recognisable religious or spiritual integrity and demonstrate high degrees of artistic and conceptual proficiency”.

AustLit summarises the prize’s short but chequered history:

The Blake Poetry Prize was established in 2008 by The Blake Society, in partnership with the NSW Writers’ Centre and sponsored by Leichhardt Council in NSW. From 2016 (after a loss in funding), Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre (CPAC)* and Liverpool City Council took over funding and managing both the art prize and the poetry prize, with events moving to Casula. From 2017, management was intended to shift to Liverpool City Library, in conjunction with CPAC, but bookshop Westwords ultimately took the library’s role in the partnership.

WestWords, in its current iteration, is far, far more than a bookshop (as you can read here), but it must have started as a bookshop.

Like the art prize, the poetry prize is now presented biennially. And I am confused, because Wikipedia and AustLit say the Poetry Prize was established in 2008, and it has been biennial for a few years, yet this year’s longlist is labelled the 69th. It seems that the Poetry Prize numbering is aligned with the numbering of the Art Prize.

Blake Poetry Prize Winners (2008-2024)

The winners to date are:

  • 2008: Mark Tredinnick, “Have You Seen”
  • 2009: John Watson, “Four Ways to Approach the Numinous”
  • 2010: Tasha Sudan, “Rahula”
  • 2011: Robert Adamson, “Via Negativa, The Divine Dark”
  • 2012: Graham Kershaw, “Altar Rock”
  • 2013: Anthony Lawrence, “Appellations”
  • 2014: Dave Drayton, “Threnodials”
  • 2017: Julie Watts, “The Story of Julian who never knew that we loved him”
  • 2020: Judith Nangala Crispin, “On Finding Charlotte in the Anthropological Record”
  • 2022: Simone King, “Surfing Again”
  • 2024: Coco X. Huang, “Three Lessons”

69th Blake Poetry Prize Longlist (2026)

This year’s prize was judged by three poets – Natalie Damjanovich-Napoleon, Kevin Brophy and last year’s winner, Coco X. Huang.

The longlist for this year’s prize was presented on the WestWords site in a seemingly random order – poetic licence, perhaps? But, it’s a long longlist so, because I am librarian-trained and like to make finding information easy, I have reorganised it into alphabetical order by poet’s last name (to the best of my knowledge). Apologies if I have upset any listing or naming conventions. I have not, however, changed the capitalisation of the titles (to suit my editorial convention) as poets can be particular about things like punctuation. Links on poets are to any posts I have tagged with the poet’s name, though the posts are not necessarily on their poetry!

  • Sela Ahosivi-Atiola, Mending Skies
  • Allison Browning, There’s No Such Thing as Astrology (Or: The last Trump/Odious Joy)
  • Gayelene Carbis, Divinations
  • Phillippa Cordwell, Father 
  • Gregory Day, The Church Was Strangely Empty But The Day Outside Was Full: his collection Southsightedness is on my TBR
  • Adrienne Eberhard, Ten Blessings of Upper Blessington 
  • Jo Gardiner, Giornata
  • Ross Gillett, Cave Faith
  • Ross Gillett, The Room and the River
  • Stephanie Green, Equilateral
  • Catherine Johnstone, THE DRAWING: a sestina
  • Cliff Kemmett, Ahead Of Us, Our Past Burns Still 
  • Cate Kennedy, Suddenly Getting Religion
  • Moira Kirkwood, Tiny home
  • Jeanine Leane, Gundyarri-galang bila-gu
  • Wes Lee, Prayer at the Cove 
  • Wes Lee, The broken smashed rubble of everything I owned
  • Gershon Maller, The Transcendentalist
  • Shey Marque, The Body as Tidal Scripture
  • Freshta Nawabi, Jigar in a Jar
  • Kerrie Nelson, Why would you drive on a day like this, unless for good reason
  • Jenny Pollak, A faint echo from the South
  • Omar Sakr, Ode to Prednisone
  • Kathryn Reese, Post Vespers 
  • Paris Rosemont, Verdigrisleeves
  • Josephine Shevchenko, Invisible but Potent
  • Laura Jan Shore, Sometimes A River Wave
  • Ella Skilbeck-Porter, Intonation
  • Terri Slanovits, Aftermath
  • David Terelinck, Watching the Storm from My Hospital Bed
  • Mark Tredinnick, Nothing Will Be Lost: won the inaugural Montreal International Poetry Prize in 2011, and a previous winner of this prize (among others)
  • Anders Villani, Under the Banner of Heaven
  • Chen Wang, The Woman Who Refused the Kingdom of Forgetting
  • Julie Watts, Ad honorem Patti Smith
  • Kimberly Williams, St. Mary and the Hula Dancer
  • Beth Yahp, Visitation/Turtle-Shaped

Some of these may be available online, but I decided I’d rather spend my time reading than check every one in the hope of finding a couple! Sorry!

The shortlist will be announced on 2 April, and the winners on 1 May.

Have you read any of these poets, or do you follow and poetry prizes? I’d love to hear your thoughts …

* Now the Liverpool Powerhouse.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Melbourne, a City of Literature?

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A year ago I finally wrote a post on the UNESCO Cities of Literature, focusing on Melbourne’s designation as UNESCO’s second such city in 2008, and Hobart’s addition as Australia’s second city in 2023. The full list is available online at the Cities of Literature website.

As I wrote in that post, the criteria against which cities are assessed aren’t specifically listed, but the Cities of Literature website says that these Cities “share similar characteristics”, which presumably draw from the criteria. The characteristics are:

  • Quality, quantity and diversity of publishing in the city
  • Quality and quantity of educational programmes focusing on domestic or foreign literature at primary, secondary and tertiary levels
  • Literature, drama and/or poetry playing an important role in the city
  • Hosting literary events and festivals which promote domestic and foreign literature
  • Existence of libraries, bookstores and public or private cultural centres which preserve, promote and disseminate domestic and foreign literature
  • Involvement by the publishing sector in translating literary works from diverse national languages and foreign literature
  • Active involvement of traditional and new media in promoting literature and strengthening the market for literary products.

Again, in last year’s post, I shared that UNESCO has pages for some of the cities. Melbourne’s (Naarm) commences with:

Celebrated for its vibrant literary culture, Melbourne supports a diverse range of writers, a prosperous publishing industry, a successful culture of independent bookselling, a wide variety of literary organisations, a well-established culture of reading and is actively involved in many events and festivals.

In addition to this, Melbourne has its own City of Literature website, in which it describes what this means and what Melbourne does to support literature and reading.

Now here’s the thing, and why I am writing this post today, Melbourne’s credentials are currently being questioned by some of its own, for a couple of very good reasons. Last year, Melbourne University Press announced that it would cease publication of one of Australia’s longest-running literary magazines, Meanjin, at the end of 2025. Established in Brisbane in 1940, Meanjin had been published in Melbourne since 1945. This was devastating news to the literary community, because this magazine is one of our treasures, for both its history and what it still does. Fortunately, a last minute reprieve has seen Meanjin return to its originating state with the Queensland University of Technology acquiring it early this year. This is great for Meanjin, but it does nothing for the City of Literature.

And then, in January of this year, Writers Victoria (about which I have written before in my writers centre series) was told it would not receive the funding it had been receiving from the State Government (via Creative Victoria). It was given emergency funding to help it survive through to June 30, but no more after that. As Angela Glindemann wrote in The Conversation, the loss of this centre – if it cannot change the government’s mind or obtain other funding – “would make Victoria (whose capital, Melbourne, is a UNESCO City of Literature) the only mainland state without a state government-funded peak organisation for writers”. 

In the last three months, I have heard several literary commentators, besides The Conversation’s Glindemann, raise the issue of Melbourne’s City of Literature status in relation to these literary losses. The others include literary journalist Jason Steger (who was Literary Editor for Melbourne’s The Age newspaper), authors and podcasters Irma Gold and Karen Viggers (in Secrets from the Green Room, Season 7 Episode 79), and academic Patrick Stokes in ArtsHub.

Steger wrote earlier this month in his weekly emailed newsletter:

It’s dismally ironic that in Melbourne, Writers Victoria has been denied funding by the state government. Ironic because in 2008 Melbourne became only the second UNESCO City of Literature, but now could become the only state capital in Australia not to have an organisation that supports its writers.

[…]

Why are writers organisations important? Because they give crucial support to writers at all stages of their careers. They provide information, resources, workshops and plenty more. They also employ writers to conduct workshops and teach. In 2025 Writers Victoria employed 70 tutors, paying $50,000 in fees.

Irma Gold and Karen Viggers in their podcast speak from personal experience about the value of writers organisations to their careers, as does Toni Jordan in The Conversation’s article. These three writers (as did others I quoted in my Writers Victoria post) see writers centres as critical to supporting emerging writers and to the ongoing education of established writers. (Worryingly, The Conversation says that Writers Victoria is not the only one to confront threats to its existence in recent times.)

Stokes brings into his argument a recent controversy involving the State Library of Victoria and its direction, about which you can read at the ArtsHub link I’ve provided. Here I will simply share Stokes’ main point which is that

A library that is reduced to a museum has lost its inherent function. Likewise, the City of Literature designation shouldn’t turn a city into a sort of literary museum, a celebration of past glories now preserved under glass or atop marble plinths. It needs to reflect a commitment that’s as much forward-directed as backward. Cities of Literature ought to be as much about the books that are not yet written as the ones that already are.

I’m not sure that these actions would – or should – affect Melbourne’s City of Literature status, but they are a worry, on their own and as potentially indicative of a trend (particularly in Victoria right now) to cutting support for the arts. If you are a Victorian resident, you can sign a petition to the Victorian Parliament requesting it to “reverse the decision to cut state funding to Writers Victoria”. The petition is open until late April.

Thoughts?

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?

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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Help Books Clker.com
(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?