Writer's inspiration

Stead discusses her career, relationship to Australia and approach to writing among other topics.

Beverley Farmer discusses her literary 'preoccupations', including the experience of loss.

There is a clear autobiographical dimension to Beverley Farmer's fiction: her own life and experience provide the material that goes into her writing, and the…

Prominent among the wilder bohemians of Sydney in the 1920s was Joseph Lynch, a gifted black-and-white artist originally from New Zealand. Jack Lindsay placed him…

Examines the relationship between autobiographical truths and 'fictional embroidering' in Richardson's autobiography in terms of its representation of familial relationships, arguing that the work is…

Everyone knows that novelists, like painters, draw from life. What we need to understand is more about the ways particular novelists transform real people into…

Henry Rouse, prisoner 18485, also known as Henry Beresford Garrett, Long Harry, John Heathcote and Klodhopr, spent about 38 years in gaols in England, Norfolk…

Christopher Koch discusses his career and approach to writing.

Francis Webb's verse-sequence on St Francis of Assisi, 'The Canticle', from Birthday (1953) has been acknowledged as a watershed in his career (Griffith, Life and…

Child's Play is entirely textually oriented, a novel which takes its own development as its subject, its own form as its entire reality. The analysis…

There is something mysterious about titles. The other day I sat down thinking that I might begin by trying to tap into the ramifications of…

Winton discusses his career, literary influences, and approach to form and style.

It is still commonly assumed that Ada Cambridge's descriptions of 'the Camp' in Thirty Years in Australia, A Marked Man and Fidelis refer to…

Les Murray introduces some of his poems and discusses their inspiration and his process of writing them.

Considers Webb's adaptation of Eyre's 'realization of his complete isolation' during his ill-fated exploratory journey of 1841, with particular emphasis on the poem's engagement with…

Janette Turner Hospital is a writer who travels: geographically, spiritually, emotionally, generically. She takes risks, crosses borders, makes radical departures (her third novel is entitled…

Editor's Note: The 1999 Barry Andrews Memorial Lecture is reprinted here because of its wider relevance to developments in Australian literary studies, a main topic…

Within the sequence of The Idyll Wheel (1989) Les Murray brought to a close the mythic journey of 'home-coming', which had sustained much of his…

Where did Henry Kingsley work or get acquainted with cattle while he was in Australia? The question arises from a close look at one of…

Judith Rodriguez discusses her approach to poetry and the development of her work.