Kings In Grass Castles
Mary Durack, 1959 Mary Durack’s Kings in Grass Castles (1959) is also an intensely imaginative piece of non-fiction though its use of fictionalising technique is at an opposite pole to Jeannie Gunn’s in something the same way that Robert Hughes’ The Fatal Shore has little in [...]
The Generations Of Men
Judith Wright, 1959 Judith Wright’s The Generations of Men was published in 1959, and is a pioneer story presented in almost lyrical mode, which may seem to figure given that it is the work of a distinguished poet who became universally recognised around this time. The author [...]
We Of The Never-Never
Mrs Aeneas Gunn, 1908 Of the classic accounts of the pioneer experience Mrs Aeneas Gunn’s We of the Never-Never is the first and in some ways the most inward of all of them. Jeannie Gunn was born in 1870, the year Bismarck unified Germany, and she [...]
Cloudstreet
Tim Winton, 1991 There is a strong case for seeing Cloudstreet (1991) as the greatest novel of its period, perhaps indeed since the death of Patrick White. When the famously astute and none-too-easily pleased English novelist Philip Hensher was asked what contemporary novel he would like [...]
Five Bells
Kenneth Slessor, 1939 Kenneth Slessor (1901-1971) sits amongst names such as Francis Webb, Oodgeroo Noonuccal, Les Murray, Gwen Harwood, Judith Wright, and John Forbes in the pantheon of Australia’s most important poets, with some arguing he deserves close to top billing. Recently, more than sixty Australian [...]
My Island Home
Neil Murray, 1987 Due at least in part to the fact that Wikipedia has it wrong, describing it as co-written, it comes as a surprise to many that ‘My Island Home’, made famous by Christine Anu in 1994 then more famous by her at the 2000 [...]
Oscar and Lucinda
Peter Carey, 1988 The Oxford critic John Bayley, the sometime husband of Iris Murdoch, says somewhere, that there are the great novels we remember and the greater ones we forget. Normally this is taken to refer to the vast mimetic grandeur of Tolstoy or, a bit [...]
The Glass Canoe
David Ireland, 1976 David Ireland’s Miles Franklin winning novel The Glass Canoe (1976) occupies a unique space in the IPA’s Australian Canon. It depicts an Australian way of life that has now all but vanished: It is a Shakespearean vision of white, male, working class, post-WWII Australia. [...]
