Australian literature and writers

In recent decades nationalism has sometimes been classed in the same category of immoral behaviours as racism and sexism. Reading from the historical and literary…

Mary Lord interviews Hal Porter about his career, approach to writing, critical reception and literary influences.

The exotically named convict ship the 'Pestonjee Bomanjee' sailed from Plymouth on the 18 April 1852, with 291 transportees, 30 pensioners as guards 24 women…

Dorothy Green is quite right when she notes that Grant Watson's psychological and metaphysical disturbance looks forward to the novels of Patrick White, although the…

In an interview on Canadian Radio, Peter Carey talked about a church from his home town in Australia that he had wanted to save -…

‘This essay develops on the premise of imagining, which is the heart of story-making: imagine the physicality of story. Imagine the deployment strategies, the covert…

The main concerns of this essay are the nature and intensity of the literary experience in the setting of the increasingly popular literary festivals in…

As a 'regional celebrity writer' of national and international acclaim, Australian writer Tim Winton contributes to the process of re- defining sustaining myths of identity…

As the epigraph for True History ifthe Kelly Gang (2000), Peter Carey chooses these lines from William Faulkner's Requiem for a Nun (1950): 'The past…

The scent of opium, the 'tears' of the poppy flower, the dried secretions of papaver somniferum, wafts throughout many histories of life in the late…

‘Patrick White’s fiction has been ambivalently received. For all its celebration, dissenters continue to insist on a gap between its reputation and its actual achievements…

Sometime during the early 1920s, Lesbia Harford wrote The Invaluable Mystery, a novel which concerns Sally, an urban working-class woman, and her struggle to…

Since the finding of the Australian High Court in what has come to be known as the Mabo decision of January 1992, the phrase Terra…

‘Michel Foucault defined history as ‘the discourse of power’ (Society 68), arguing that the function of a ‘counter-history’ is ‘to show that laws deceive, that…

‘In 1934 Miles Franklin described Eleanor Dark’s second novel, Prelude to Christopher, as ‘a terribly beautiful piece of work’ (128). One of Dark’s earliest…

‘This essay attempts to outline the relationship between the ‘raw nerves’ that Denis Byrne describes in the epigraph above, and the cultivation of ‘indifference’ that…