Ian Syson

To someone who teaches the history, theory and practice of editing and publishing, Richard Nile's The Making of the Australian Literary Imagination presents itself as a particularly useful book, perhaps even a text book. Unfortunately, some of my reasons for…

At the 1998 Victorian Premier's Literary Awards the keynote speech was given by visiting English actress Claire Bloom. She admitted to the audience that she hadn't read much Australian writing apart from Patrick White's Voss, ofwhich she was reminded as…

Michael Wilding's 'Canal Run', a story from The West Midland Underground (1975), fuses two of his powerful early influences, D.H. Lawrence and Alan Sillitoe. In so doing it introduces a number of themes which come to typify his creative writing…

For Australian literary criticism it is the best of times. It is also the worst of times. On the one hand, we are seeing the diverse and largely positive benefits of a generation's engagement with theory. Critics and writers, informed…

THE colonisation of Aboriginal land is a moment of at least two clear examples of British imperial barbarity. In their study Dark Side of the Dream (1990), Bob Hodge and Vijay Mishra make the claim that:

Australia was founded on…