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Wikipedia

Australian literature

May 01, 2023

Australian literature is the written or literary work produced in the area or by the people of the Commonwealth of Australia and its preceding colonies. During its early Western history, Australia was a collection of British colonies; as such, its recognised literary tradition begins with and is linked to the broader tradition of English literature. However, the narrative art of Australian writers has, since 1788, introduced the character of a new continent into literature—exploring such themes as Aboriginality, mateship, egalitarianism, democracy, national identity, migration, Australia's unique location and geography, the complexities of urban living, and "the beauty and the terror" of life in the Australian bush.

Overview

 
Patrick White became the first Australian to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1973.

Australian writers who have obtained international renown include the Nobel-winning author Patrick White, as well as authors Christina Stead, David Malouf, Peter Carey, Bradley Trevor Greive, Thomas Keneally, Colleen McCullough, Nevil Shute and Morris West. Notable contemporary expatriate authors include the feminist Germaine Greer, art historian Robert Hughes and humorists Barry Humphries and Clive James.[1]

Among the important authors of classic Australian works are the poets Henry Lawson, Banjo Paterson, C. J. Dennis and Dorothea Mackellar. Dennis wrote in the Australian vernacular, while Mackellar wrote the iconic patriotic poem My Country. Lawson and Paterson clashed in the famous "Bulletin Debate" over the nature of life in Australia with Lawson considered to have the harder edged view of the Bush and Paterson the romantic.[2] Lawson is widely regarded as one of Australia's greatest writers of short stories, while Paterson's poems remain amongst the most popular Australian bush poems. Significant poets of the 20th century included Dame Mary Gilmore, Kenneth Slessor, A. D. Hope and Judith Wright. Among the best known contemporary poets are Les Murray and Bruce Dawe, whose poems are often studied in Australian high schools.

Novelists of classic Australian works include Marcus Clarke (For the Term of His Natural Life), Miles Franklin (My Brilliant Career), Henry Handel Richardson (The Fortunes of Richard Mahony), Joseph Furphy (Such Is Life), Rolf Boldrewood (Robbery Under Arms) and Ruth Park (The Harp in the South). In terms of children's literature, Norman Lindsay (The Magic Pudding), Mem Fox (Possum Magic), and May Gibbs (Snugglepot and Cuddlepie) are among the Australian classics, while Melina Marchetta (Looking for Alibrandi) is a modern YA classic. Eminent Australian playwrights have included Ray Lawler, David Williamson, Alan Seymour and Nick Enright. Among prominent short story writers are Steele Rudd, Henry Lawson, Beverley Farmer, Kate Grenville, and Helen Garner.

Although historically only a small proportion of Australia's population have lived outside the major cities, many of Australia's most distinctive stories and legends originate in the outback, in the drovers and squatters and people of the barren, dusty plains.[3]

David Unaipon is known as the first Aboriginal author. Oodgeroo Noonuccal was the first Aboriginal Australian to publish a book of verse.[4] A ground-breaking memoir about the experiences of the Stolen Generations can be found in Sally Morgan's My Place.

Charles Bean, Geoffrey Blainey, Robert Hughes, Manning Clark, Claire Wright, and Marcia Langton are authors of important Australian histories.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writers and themes

 
David Unaipon (1872-1967), the first Aboriginal author.
Main article: Indigenous Australian literature

Writing by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people

While his father, James Unaipon (c.1835-1907), contributed to accounts of Aboriginal mythology written by the missionary George Taplin,[5] David Unaipon (1872–1967) provided the first accounts of Aboriginal mythology written by an Aboriginal: Legendary Tales of the Aborigines. For this he is known as the first Aboriginal author. Oodgeroo Noonuccal (1920–1993) was a famous Aboriginal poet, writer and rights activist credited with publishing the first Aboriginal book of verse: We Are Going (1964).[6] Sally Morgan's novel My Place was considered a breakthrough memoir in terms of bringing indigenous stories to wider notice. Leading Aboriginal activists Marcia Langton (First Australians, 2008) and Noel Pearson (Up from the Mission, 2009) are active contemporary contributors to Australian literature.

The voices of Indigenous Australians are being increasingly noticed and include the playwright Jack Davis and Kevin Gilbert. Writers coming to prominence in the 21st century include Kim Scott, Alexis Wright, Kate Howarth, Tara June Winch, Yvette Holt and Anita Heiss. Indigenous authors who have won Australia's high prestige Miles Franklin Award include Kim Scott who was joint winner (with Thea Astley) in 2000 for Benang and again in 2011 for That Deadman Dance. Alexis Wright won the award in 2007 for her novel Carpentaria. Melissa Lucashenko won the award in 2019 for her novel Too Much Lip, which was also short-listed for the Stella Prize for Australian women's writing.

Letters written by notable Aboriginal leaders like Bennelong and Sir Douglas Nicholls are also retained as treasures of Australian literature, as is the historic Yirrkala bark petitions of 1963 which is the first traditional Aboriginal document recognised by the Australian Parliament.[7] AustLit's BlackWords project provides a comprehensive listing of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Writers and Storytellers.

Writing about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples

At the point of the first colonization, Indigenous Australians had not developed a system of writing, so the first literary accounts of Aboriginal people come from the journals of early European explorers, which contain descriptions of first contact, both violent and friendly.[8] Early accounts by Dutch explorers and by the English buccaneer William Dampier wrote of the "natives of New Holland" as being "barbarous savages", but by the time of Captain James Cook and First Fleet marine Watkin Tench (the era of Jean-Jacques Rousseau), accounts of Aborigines were more sympathetic and romantic: "these people may truly be said to be in the pure state of nature, and may appear to some to be the most wretched upon the earth; but in reality they are far happier than ... we Europeans", wrote Cook in his journal on 23 August 1770.[9]

 
Noel Pearson is an Aboriginal lawyer, rights activist and essayist.

Many notable works have been written by non-indigenous Australians on Aboriginal themes. Examples include the poems of Judith Wright; The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith by Thomas Keneally, Ilbarana by Donald Stuart, and the short story by David Malouf: "The Only Speaker of his Tongue".[10] Histories covering Indigenous themes include Watkin Tench (Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay et Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson); Roderick J. Flanagan (The Aborigines of Australia, 1888); The Native Tribes of Central Australia by Spencer and Gillen, 1899; the diaries of Donald Thomson on the subject of the Yolngu people of Arnhem Land (c.1935-1943); Alan Moorehead (The fatal Impact, 1966); Geoffrey Blainey (Triumph of the Nomads, 1975); Henry Reynolds (The Other Side of the Frontier, 1981); and Marcia Langton (First Australians, 2008). Differing interpretations of Aboriginal history are also the subject of contemporary debate in Australia, notably between the essayists Robert Manne and Keith Windschuttle.

Early and classic works

 
Watkin Tench, an officer of the marines on the First Fleet and author.
 
Henry Lawson (right) with J. F. Archibald, the co-founder of The Bulletin
 
Henry Handel Richardson/Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson in 1945. A number of notable women authors used male pseudonyms.

For centuries before the British settlement of Australia, European writers wrote fictional accounts of an imaginings of a Great Southern Land. In 1642 Abel Janszoon Tasman landed in Tasmania and after examining notches cut at considerable distances on tree trunks, speculated that the newly discovered country must be peopled by giants. Later, the British satirist, Jonathan Swift, set the land of the Houyhnhnms of Gulliver's Travels to the west of Tasmania.[11] In 1797 the British Romantic poet Robert Southey—then a young Jacobin—included a section in his collection, "Poems", a selection of poems under the heading, "Botany Bay Eclogues," in which he portrayed the plight and stories of transported convicts in New South Wales.

Among the first true works of literature produced in Australia were the accounts of the settlement of Sydney by Watkin Tench, a captain of the marines on the First Fleet to arrive in 1788. In 1819, poet, explorer, journalist and politician William Wentworth published the first book written by an Australian: A Statistical, Historical, and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and Its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land, With a Particular Enumeration of the Advantages Which These Colonies Offer for Emigration and Their Superiority in Many Respects Over Those Possessed by the United States of America, in which he advocated an elected assembly for New South Wales, trial by jury and settlement of Australia by free emigrants rather than convicts

The first novel to be published in Australia was a crime novel, Quintus Servinton: A Tale founded upon Incidents of Real Occurrence[12][13] by Henry Savery published in Hobart in 1830.[14] Early popular works tended to be the 'ripping yarn' variety, telling tales of derring-do against the new frontier of the Australian outback. Writers such as Rolf Boldrewood (Robbery Under Arms), Marcus Clarke (For the Term of His Natural Life), Henry Handel Richardson (The Fortunes of Richard Mahony) and Joseph Furphy (Such Is Life) embodied these stirring ideals in their tales and, particularly the latter, tried to accurately record the vernacular language of the common Australian. These novelists also gave valuable insights into the penal colonies which helped form the country and also the early rural settlements.

In 1838 The Guardian: a tale by Anna Maria Bunn was published in Sydney. It was the first Australian novel printed and published in mainland Australia and the first Australian novel written by a woman. It is a Gothic romance.[15]

Miles Franklin (My Brilliant Career) and Jeannie Gunn (We of the Never Never) wrote of lives of European pioneers in the Australian bush from a female perspective. Albert Facey wrote of the experiences of the Goldfields and of Gallipoli (A Fortunate Life). Ruth Park wrote of the sectarian divisions of life in impoverished 1940s inner city Sydney (The Harp in the South). The experience of Australian PoWs in the Pacific War is recounted by Nevil Shute in A Town Like Alice and in the autobiography of Sir Edward Dunlop. Alan Moorehead was an Australian war correspondent and novelist who gained international acclaim.

A number of notable classic works by international writers deal with Australian subjects, among them D. H. Lawrence's Kangaroo. The journals of Charles Darwin contain the famous naturalist's first impressions of Australia, gained on his tour aboard the Beagle that inspired his writing of On the Origin of Species. The Wayward Tourist: Mark Twain's Adventures in Australia contains the acclaimed American humourist's musings on Australia from his 1895 lecture tour.

In 2012, The Age reported that Text Publishing was releasing an Australian classics series in 2012, to address a "neglect of Australian literature" by universities and "British dominated" publishing houses—citing out of print Miles Franklin award winners such as David Ireland's The Glass Canoe and Sumner Locke Elliott's Careful, He Might Hear You as key examples.[16]

Children's literature

 
Seven Little Australians by Ethel Turner is the first and only book by an Australian author to have been continuously in print for 100 years.

Ethel Turner's Seven Little Australians, which relates the adventures of seven mischievous children in Sydney, has been in print since 1894, longer than any other Australian children's novel.[17] The Getting of Wisdom (1910) by Henry Handel Richardson, about an unconventional schoolgirl in Melbourne, has enjoyed a similar success and been praised by H. G. Wells and Germaine Greer.[18]

Other perennial favourites of Australian children's literature include Dorothy Wall's Blinky Bill, Ethel Pedley's Dot and the Kangaroo, May Gibbs' Snugglepot and Cuddlepie, Norman Lindsay's The Magic Pudding, Ruth Park's The Muddleheaded Wombat and Mem Fox's Possum Magic. These classic works employ anthropomorphism to bring alive the creatures of the Australian bush, thus Bunyip Bluegum of The Magic Pudding is a koala who leaves his tree in search of adventure, while in Dot and the Kangaroo a little girl lost in the bush is befriended by a group of marsupials. May Gibbs crafted a story of protagonists modelled on the appearance of young eucalyptus (gum tree) nuts and pitted these gumnut babies, Snugglepot and Cuddlepie, against the antagonist Banksia men. Gibbs' influence has lasted through the generations – contemporary children's author Ursula Dubosarsky has cited Snugglepot and Cuddlepie as one of her favourite books.[19]

In the middle of the twentieth century, children's literature languished, with popular British authors dominating the Australian market. But in the 1960s Oxford University Press published several Australian children's authors, and Angus & Robertson appointed their first specialist children's editor. The best-known writers to emerge in this period were Hesba Brinsmead, Ivan Southall, Colin Thiele, Patricia Wrightson, Nan Chauncy, Joan Phipson and Eleanor Spence, their works primarily set in the Australian landscape.[20] In 1971, Southall won the Carnegie Medal for Josh.[21] In 1986, Patricia Wrightson received the international Hans Christian Andersen Award.[22]

The Children's Book Council of Australia has presented annual awards for books of literary merit since 1946 and has other awards for outstanding contributions to Australian children's literature. Notable winners and shortlisted works have inspired several well-known Australian films from original novels, including the Silver Brumby series, a collection by Elyne Mitchell which recount the life and adventures of Thowra, a Snowy Mountains brumby stallion; Storm Boy (1964), by Colin Thiele, about a boy and his pelican and the relationships he has with his father, the pelican, and an outcast Aboriginal man called Fingerbone; the Sydney-based Victorian era time travel adventure Playing Beatie Bow (1980) by Ruth Park; and, for older children and mature readers, Melina Marchetta's 1993 novel about a Sydney high school girl Looking for Alibrandi. Robin Klein's Came Back to Show You I Could Fly is a story about the beautiful relationship between an eleven-year-old boy and an older, drug-addicted girl.[23]

Jackie French, widely described as Australia's most popular children's author, has written about 170 books, including two CBCA Children's Book of the Year Award winners. One of them, the critically acclaimed Hitler's Daughter (1999), is a "what if?" story that explores mind-provoking issues about what would have happened if Adolf Hitler had had a daughter. French is also the author of the highly praised Diary of a Wombat (2003), which won awards such as the 2003 COOL Award and 2004 BILBY Award, among others. It was also named an honour book for the CBCA Children's Book of the Year Award for picture books.

Paul Jennings is a prolific writer of contemporary Australian fiction for young people whose career began with collections of short stories such as Unreal! (1985) and Unbelievable! (1987); many of the stories were adapted as episodes of the award-winning television show Round the Twist.[24]

The world's richest prize in children's literature has been received by two Australians, Sonya Hartnett, who won the 2008 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award[25] and Shaun Tan, who won in 2011. Hartnett has a long and distinguished career, publishing her first novel at 15. She is known for her dark and often controversial themes. She has won several awards, including the Kathleen Mitchell Award and the Victorian Premier's Award for Sleeping Dogs, Guardian Children's Fiction Prize and the Aurealis Award, Best Young Adult Novel (Australian speculative fiction) for Thursday's Child and the CBCA Children's Book of the Year Award: Older Readers for Forest.[26][circular reference] Tan won this for his career contribution to "children's and young adult literature in the broadest sense".[27] Tan has been awarded various literary awards, including the Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis in 2009 for Tales from Outer Suburbia and a New York Times Best Illustrated Children's Books award in 2007 for The Arrival.[27] Alongside his numerous literary awards, Tan's adaption of his book The Lost Thing also won him an Oscar for best animated short film.[28] Other awards Tan has won include a World Fantasy Award for Best Artist,[29] and a Hugo Award for Best Professional Artist.[30]

Expatriate authors

 
Cover of The Female Eunuch (1970) by Germaine Greer. The book was a bestseller and helped usher in second-wave feminism in Australia and the world. Greer relocated to England for many years, but now divides her time between England and Queensland.

A generation of leading contemporary international writers who left Australia for Britain and the United States in the 1960s have remained regular and passionate contributors of Australian themed literary works throughout their careers including: Clive James, Robert Hughes, Barry Humphries, Geoffrey Robertson and Germaine Greer. Several of these writers had links to the Sydney Push intellectual sub-culture in Sydney from the late 1940s to the early 1970s; and to Oz, a satirical magazine originating in Sydney, and later produced in London (from 1967 to 1973).

After a long media career, Clive James remained as a leading humourist and author based in Britain whose memoir series was rich in reflections on Australian society (including his 2007 book Cultural Amnesia). Robert Hughes has produced a number of historical works on Australia (including The Art of Australia (1966) and The Fatal Shore (1987)).

Barry Humphries took his dadaist absurdist theatrical talents and pen to London in the 1960s, becoming an institution on British television and later attaining popularity in the USA. Humphries' outlandish Australian caricatures, including Dame Edna Everage, Barry McKenzie and Les Patterson have starred in books, stage and screen to great acclaim over five decades and his biographer Anne Pender described him in 2010 as the most significant comedian since Charles Chaplin. His own literary works include the Dame Edna biographies My Gorgeous Life (1989) and Handling Edna (2010) and the autobiography My Life As Me: A Memoir (2002). Geoffrey Robertson KC is a leading international human rights lawyer, academic, author and broadcaster whose books include The Justice Game (1998) and Crimes Against Humanity (1999). Leading feminist Germaine Greer, author of The Female Eunuch, has spent much of her career in England but continues to study, critique, condemn and adore her homeland (recent work includes Whitefella Jump Up: The Shortest Way to Nationhood, 2004).

Other contemporary works and authors

Martin Boyd (1893–1972) was a distinguished memoirist, novelist and poet, whose works included social comedies and the serious reflections of a pacifist faced with a time of war. Among his Langton series of novels—The Cardboard Crown (1952), A Difficult Young Man (1955), Outbreak of Love (1957)—earned high praise in Britain and the United States, though despite their Australian themes, were largely ignored in Australia.[31]

Patrick White (1912–1990) became the first Australian to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1973 "for an epic and psychological narrative art which has introduced a new continent into literature".[32] White's first novel, Happy Valley (1939) was inspired by the landscape and his work as a jackaroo on the land at Adaminaby in the Snowy Mountains, but became an international success and won the Australian Literary Society's gold medal.[33][34] Born to a conservative, wealthy Anglo-Australian family, he later wrote of conviction in left-wing causes and lived as a homosexual. Never destined for life on the land, he enrolled at Cambridge where he became a published poet. White developed as a novelist, but also had major theatrical success—including The Season at Sarsaparilla. White followed The Tree of Man with Voss, which became the first winner of the Miles Franklin Award. A subsequent novel, Riders in the Chariot also received a Miles Franklin award—but White later refused to permit his novels to be entered for literary prizes. He turned down a knighthood, and various literary awards—but in 1973 accepted the Nobel prize. David Marr wrote of biography of White in 1991.[33]

J. M. Coetzee, who was born in South Africa and was resident there when awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003,[35] now lives in Adelaide, South Australia, and is an Australian citizen.[36] Colleen McCullough's The Thorn Birds, 1977, is Australia's highest selling novel and one of the biggest selling novels of all time with around 30 million copies sold by 2009.[37] Thomas Keneally wrote The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, 1972 and Schindler's Ark, 1982. This latter work was the inspiration for the film Schindler's List. Other notable Australian novels converted to celluloid include: Paul Brickhill's The Great Escape; Pamela Lyndon Travers' Mary Poppins; Morris West's The Shoes of the Fisherman and Bryce Courtenay's The Power of One.

Careful, He Might Hear You by Sumner Locke Elliott won the Miles Franklin Award in 1963, and was the subject of a 1983 Australian film. Author David Ireland won the Miles Franklin Award three times, including for The Glass Canoe (1976).[38] Peter Carey has also won the Miles Franklin Award three times (Jack Maggs 1998; Oscar and Lucinda 1989; and Bliss 1981). He has twice won the Booker Prize with 1988's Oscar and Lucinda and 2001's True History of the Kelly Gang. DBC Pierre's Vernon God Little won the Booker Prize in 2003. Other notable writers to have emerged since the 1970s include Kate Grenville, David Malouf, Helen Garner, Janette Turner Hospital, Marion Halligan, Susan Johnson, Christopher Koch, Alex Miller, Shirley Hazzard, Richard Flanagan, Gerald Murnane, Brenda Walker, Rod Jones and Tim Winton.

James Clavell in The Asian Saga discusses an important feature of Australian literature: its portrayal of far eastern culture, from the admittedly even further east, but nevertheless western cultural viewpoint, as Nevil Shute did. Clavell was also a successful screenwriter and along with such writers as Thomas Keneally (see above), has expanded the topics of Australian literature far beyond that one country. Other novelists to use international themes are David Malouf, Beverley Farmer and Rod Jones. The Secret River (2005) is an historical fiction by Kate Grenville imagining encounters between Aboriginal and colonial Australia which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. The Slap (2008) was an internationally successful novel by Christos Tsiolkas which was adapted for television by ABC1 in 2011, and was described in a review by Gerard Windsor as "something of an anatomy of the rising Australian middle class".[39]

1991–1996: Grunge lit

Main article: Grunge lit
 
Justine Ettler's novel The River Ophelia (1995) details the lives of a group of attractive yuppie twenty-year-old Sydneysiders with masochistic and narcissistic tendencies: their days run the gamut of BDSM, sexual hedonism and illicit drug use. The protagonist, university student Justine, is in a destructive relationship with sadist Sade, Ettler's nod to the Marquis de Sade.

Grunge lit (an abbreviation for "grunge literature") is an Australian literary genre usually applied to fictional or semi-autobiographical writing concerned with dissatisfied and disenfranchised[40] young people living in suburban or inner-city surroundings. It was typically written by "new, young authors"[41] who examined "gritty, dirty, real existences",[41] of lower-income young people, whose lives revolve around a nihilistic pursuit of casual sex, recreational drug use and alcohol, which are used to escape boredom or a general flightiness. Romantic love is seldom, as instant gratification has become the norm.[42] It has been described as both a sub-set of dirty realism and an offshoot of Generation X literature.[43] The term "grunge" is from the 1990s-era music genre of grunge.

The genre was first coined in 1995 following the success of Andrew McGahan's first novel Praise which had been released in 1991 and became popular with sub-30-year-old readers, a previously under-investigated demographic.[41] Other authors considered to be "grunge lit" include Linda Jaivin, Fiona McGregor and Justine Ettler. Since its invention, the term "grunge lit" has been retrospectively applied to novels written as early as 1977, namely Helen Garner's Monkey Grip.[43] Grunge lit is often raw, explicit, and vulgar, even to the point of Ettler's The River Ophelia (1995) being called pornographic.

The term "grunge lit" and its use to categorize and market this diverse group of writers and authorial styles has bees the subject of debate and criticism. Linda Jaivin disagreed with putting all these authors in one category, Christios Tsiolkas called the term a "media creation", and Murray Waldren denied grunge lit even was a new genre; he said the works actually are a type of the pre-existing dirty realism genre.

1998–2010s: Post-grunge lit

Post-grunge lit is a genre of Australian fiction from the late 1990s, 2000s and 2010s. It is called "post-grunge lit" to denote that this genre appeared after the 1990s Australian literary genre known as grunge lit. Michael Robert Christie's 2009 PhD dissertation, "Unbecoming-of-Age: Australian Grunge Fiction, the Bildungsroman and the Long Labor Decade" states that there is a genre called "post Grunge [lit]" which follows the grunge lit period. Christie names three examples of Australian "post-grunge lit": Elliot Perlman's Three Dollars (1998), Andrew McCann's Subtopia (2005) and Anthony Macris' Capital. Christie's dissertation interprets and explains these three post-grunge lit works "as responses to the embedding of Neoliberalism in Australian and global political culture".

Kalinda Ashton (born 1978) has been called a post-grunge writer, in part due to influences from grunge lit author Christos Tsiolkas. Ashton is the author of the novel The Danger Game. Samantha Dagg's 2017 thesis on grunge lit and post-grunge lit states that Luke Carman is a post-grunge writer.[44] Carman's first work, a collection of interlinked semi-autobiographical short stories, explores the authentic experiences of working-class Australians in the suburbs, including issues such as drug addiction and a sense of disillusionment.

Australian writing in languages other than English

Australia has migrant groups from many countries, and members of those communities (not always of the first generation) have produced Australian writing in a variety of languages. These include Italian, Greek, Arabic, Chinese, Vietnamese, Lao, Filipino, Latvian, Ukrainian, Polish, Russian, Serbian, Yiddish and Irish.[45]

Comparatively little attention has been devoted to such writing by mainstream critics. It has been argued that, in relation to the national literary landscape, such literary communities have a quite separate existence, with their own poetry festivals, literary competitions, magazine and newspaper reviews and features, and even local publishers.[46] Some writers, like the Greek Australian Dimitris Tsaloumas, have published bilingually. There are now signs that such writing is attracting more academic interest.[47] Some older works in languages other than English have been translated and received critical and historical attention long after their first publication; for example, the first Chinese-language novel to be published in Australia (and possibly the West), The Poison of Polygamy (1909–10) by Wong Shee Ping, was published in English for the first time in 2019, in a bilingual parallel edition.[48]

Histories

 
Portrait of Charles Bean, official World War I historian
Main article: History of Australia

History has been an important discipline in the development of Australian writing. Watkin Tench (1758–1833) - a British officer who arrived with the First Fleet in 1788 - later published two books on the subject of the foundations of New South Wales: Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay and Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson. Written with a spirit of humanity his accounts are considered by writers including Robert Hughes and Thomas Keneally to be essential reading for the early history of Australia/ Charles Bean was the official war historian of the First World War and was influential in establishing the importance of ANZAC in Australian history and mythology, with such prose as "Anzac stood, and still stands, for reckless valor in a good cause, for enterprise, resourcefulness, fidelity, comradeship and endurance, that will never own defeat".[49] (see works including The Story of ANZAC: From the Outbreak of War to the End of the First Phase of the Gallipoli Campaign 4 May 1915, 1921).

Australia in the War of 1939–1945 is a 22 volume official history dedicated to Australia's Second World War efforts. the series was published by the Australian War Memorial between 1952 and 1977. The main editor was Gavin Long. A significant milestone was the historian Manning Clark's six volume History of Australia, which is regarded by some as the definitive account of the nation. Clark had a talent for narrative prose and the work (published between 1969 and 1987) remains a popular and influential work. Clark's one time student Geoffrey Blainey stands as another to have deeply influenced Australian historiography. His important works include The Tyranny of Distance (1966) and Triumph of the Nomads: A History of Ancient Australia (1975). Robert Hughes' much-debated history The Fatal Shore: The epic of Australia's founding (1987) is a popular and influential work on early Australian history. Marcia Langton is one of the principal contemporary Indigenous Australian academics and her 2008 collaboration with Rachel Perkins chronicles Australian history from an Indigenous perspective: First Australians. An Illustrated History.

Writing and identity

A complicated, multi-faceted relationship to Australia is displayed in much Australian writing, often through writing about landscape. Barbara Baynton's short stories from the late 19th century/early 20th century convey people living in the bush, a landscape that is alive but also threatening and alienating. Kenneth Cook's Wake in Fright (1961) portrayed the outback as a nightmare with a blazing sun, from which there is no escape. Colin Thiele's novels reflected the life and times of rural and regional Australians in the 20th century, showing aspects of Australian life unknown to many city dwellers.

In Australian literature, the term mateship has often been employed to denote an intensely loyal relationship of shared experience, mutual respect and unconditional assistance existing between friends (mates) in Australia. This relationship of (often male) loyalty has remained a central subject of Australian literature from colonial times to the present day. In 1847, Alexander Harris wrote of habits of mutual helpfulness between mates arising in the "otherwise solitary bush" in which men would often "stand by one another through thick and thin; in fact it is a universal feeling that a man ought to be able to trust his own mate in anything". Henry Lawson, a son of the Goldfields wrote extensively of an egalitarian mateship, in such works as A Sketch of Mateship and Shearers, in which he wrote:

They tramp in mateship side by side -
The Protestant and Roman
They call no biped lord or sir
And touch their hat to no man.[50]
 
Miles Franklin, author of My Brilliant Career, in 1901

What it means to be Australian is another issue that Australian literature explores. Miles Franklin struggled to find a place for herself as a female writer in Australia, fictionalising this experience in My Brilliant Career (1901). Marie Bjelke Petersen's popular romance novels, published between 1917 and 1937, offered a fresh upbeat interpretation of the Australian bush. The central character in Patrick White's The Twyborn Affair tries to conform to expectations of pre–World War II Australian masculinity but cannot, and instead, post-war, tries out another identity—and gender—overseas. Peter Carey has toyed with the idea of a national Australian identity as a series of 'beautiful lies', and this is a recurrent theme in his novels. Andrew McGahan's Praise (1992), Christos Tsiolkas's Loaded (1995), Justine Ettler's The River Ophelia (1995) and Brendan Cowell's How It Feels (2010) introduced a grunge lit, a type of 'gritty realism' take on questions of Australian identity in the 1990s, though an important precursor to such work came some years earlier with Helen Garner's Monkey Grip (1977), about a single mother living on and off with a male heroin addict in Melbourne share housing.

Australian literature has had several scandals surrounding the identity of writers. In the 1930s, a misunderstanding with a printer caused Maude Hepplestone's bush poetry collection "Songs of the Kookaburra" to be mistakenly lauded internationally as a modernist masterpiece. The 1944 Ern Malley affair led to an obscenity trial and is often blamed for the lack of modernist poetry in Australia. To mark the 60th anniversary of the Ern Malley affair, another Australian writer, Leon Carmen, set out to make a point about the prejudice of Australian publishers against white Australians.[citation needed] Unable to find publication as a white Australian he was an instant success using the false Aboriginal identity of "Wanda Koolmatrie" with My Own Sweet Time. In the 1980s Streten Bozik also managed to become published by assuming the Aboriginal identity of B. Wongar. In the 1990s, Helen Darville used the pen-name "Helen Demidenko" and won major literary prizes for her Hand that Signed the Paper before being discovered, sparking a controversy over the content of her novel, a fictionalised and highly tendentious account of the Nazi occupation of the Ukraine. Mudrooroo—previously known as Colin Johnson—was acclaimed as an Aboriginal writer until his Aboriginality came under question (his mother was Irish/English and his father was Irish/African-American, however he has strong connections with Aboriginal tribes); he now avoids adopting a specific ethnic identity and his works deconstruct such notions.

Poetry

"Australian poetry" redirects here. For the organisation, see Australian Poetry.
 
Australia's first published poet Michael Massey Robinson in a watercolour by Edward Charles Close c1817. State Library of New South Wales
 
C.J. Dennis, poet and humourist of the Australian vernacular.

Poetry played an important part in early Australian literature. The first poet to be published in Australia was Michael Massey Robinson (1744-1826), convict and public servant, whose odes appeared in The Sydney Gazette.[51] Charles Harpur and Henry Kendall were the first poets of any consequence.

Henry Lawson, son of a Norwegian sailor born in 1867, was widely recognised as Australia's poet of the people and, in 1922, became the first Australian writer to be honoured with a state funeral. Two poets who are amongst the great Australian poets are Christopher Brennan and Adam Lindsay Gordon; Gordon was once referred to as the "national poet of Australia" and is the only Australian with a monument in Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey in England. Both Gordon's and Brennan's (but particularly Brennan's) works conformed to traditional styles of poetry, with many classical allusions, and therefore fell within the domain of high culture.

However, at the same time Australia was blessed with a competing, vibrant tradition of folk songs and ballads. Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson were two of the chief exponents of these popular ballads, and 'Banjo' himself was responsible for creating what is probably the most famous Australian verse, "Waltzing Matilda". At one point, Lawson and Paterson contributed a series of verses to The Bulletin magazine in which they engaged in a literary debate about the nature of life in Australia. Lawson said Paterson was a romantic and Paterson said Lawson was full of doom and gloom.[2] Lawson is widely regarded as one of Australia's greatest writers of short stories, while Paterson's poems "The Man From Snowy River" and "Clancy of the Overflow" remain amongst the most popular Australian bush poems. Romanticised views of the outback and the rugged characters that inhabited it played an important part in shaping the Australian nation's psyche, just as the cowboys of the American Old West and the gauchos of the Argentine pampa became part of the self-image of those nations.

Other poets who reflected a sense of Australian identity include C J Dennis and Dorothea McKellar. Dennis wrote in the Australian vernacular ("The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke"), while McKellar wrote the iconic patriotic poem "My Country". Prominent Australian poets of the 20th century include Dame Mary Gilmore, A. D. Hope, Judith Wright, Gwen Harwood, Kenneth Slessor, Les Murray, Bruce Dawe and more recently Robert Gray, John Forbes, John Tranter, John Kinsella and Judith Beveridge.

 
Dorothea Mackellar(1885-1968), writer of My Country.

Contemporary Australian poetry is mostly published by small, independent book publishers. However, other kinds of publication, including new media and online journals, spoken word and live events, and public poetry projects are gaining an increasingly vibrant and popular presence. 1992–1999 saw poetry and art collaborations in Sydney and Newcastle buses and ferries, including Artransit from Meuse Press. Some of the more interesting and innovative contributions to Australian poetry have emerged from artist-run galleries in recent years, such as Textbase which had its beginnings as part of the 1st Floor gallery in Fitzroy. In addition, Red Room Company is a major exponent of innovative projects. Bankstown Poetry Slam has become a notable venue for spoken-word poetry and for community intersection with poetry as an art form to be shared.[52] With its roots in Western Sydney it has a strong following from first and second generation Australians, often giving a platform to voices that are more marginalised in mainstream Australian society.

The Australian Poetry Library contains a wide range of Australian poetry as well as critical and contextual material relating to them, such as interviews, photographs and audio/visual recordings. As of 2018 it contains over 42,000 poems, from more than 170 Australian poets. Begun in 2004 by leading Australian poet John Tranter, it is a joint initiative of the University of Sydney and the Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) with funding by the Australian Research Council.[53]

Plays

Main article: Theatre in Australia

European traditions came to Australia with the First Fleet in 1788, with the first production being performed in 1789 by convicts : The Recruiting Officer by George Farquhar.[54] Two centuries later, the extraordinary circumstances of the foundations of Australian theatre were recounted in Our Country's Good by Timberlake Wertenbaker: the participants were prisoners watched by sadistic guards and the leading lady was under threat of the death penalty. The play is based on Thomas Keneally's novel The Playmaker.[54] After Australian Federation in 1901, plays evidenced a new sense of national identity. On Our Selection (1912) by Steele Rudd, told of the adventures of a pioneer farming family and became immensely popular. In 1955, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll by Ray Lawler portrayed resolutely Australian characters and went on to international acclaim. A new wave of Australian theatre debuted in the 1970s with the works of writers including David Williamson, Barry Oakley and Jack Hibberd. The Belvoir St Theatre presented works by Nick Enright and David Williamson. Williamson is Australia's best known playwright, with major works including: The Club, Emerald City, and Brilliant Lies.

In The One Day of the Year, Alan Seymour studied the paradoxical nature of the ANZAC Day commemoration by Australians of the defeat of the Battle of Gallipoli. Ngapartji Ngapartji, by Scott Rankin and Trevor Jamieson, recounts the story of the effects on the Pitjantjatjara people of nuclear testing in the Western Desert during the Cold War. It is an example of the contemporary fusion of traditions of drama in Australia with Pitjantjatjara actors being supported by a multicultural cast of Greek, Afghan, Japanese and New Zealand heritage.[55] Eminent contemporary Australian playwrights include David Williamson, Alan Seymour, Stephen Sewell, the late Nick Enright and Justin Fleming.[56] The Australian government supports a website (australianplays.org The Home of Australian Playscripts | AustralianPlays.org) that aims to combine playwright biographies and script information. Scripts are also available there.

Science fiction and fantasy

Main article: Australian science fiction

Australia, unlike Europe, does not have a long history in the genre of science fiction. Nevil Shute's On the Beach, published in 1957, and filmed in 1959, was perhaps the first notable international success. Though not born in Australia, Shute spent his latter years there, and the book was set in Australia. It might have been worse had the imports of American pulp magazines not been restricted during WWII, forcing local writers into the field. Various compilation magazines began appearing in the 1960s and the field has continued to expand into some significance. Today Australia has a thriving SF/Fantasy genre with names recognised around the world. In 2013 a trilogy by Sydney-born Ben Peek was sold at auction to a UK publisher for a six-figure deal .[57]

Crime

The crime fiction genre is currently thriving in Australia, most notably through books written by Kerry Greenwood, Shane Maloney, Peter Temple, Barry Maitland, Arthur Upfield and Peter Corris, among others.

High-profile, highly publicised court cases and murders have seen a significant amount of non-fiction crime literature, perhaps the most recognisable writer in this field being Helen Garner. Garner's published accounts of three court cases: The First Stone, about a sexual harassment scandal at the University of Melbourne, Joe Cinque's Consolation, about a young man murdered by his girlfriend in Canberra, and This House of Grief, about Victorian child-killer Robert Farquharson. Each of Garner's works incorporates the style reminiscent of a fictional narrative novel, a stylistic device known as the non-fiction novel.

Chloe Hooper published The Tall Man: Death and Life on Palm Island in 2008 as a response to the death of an Aboriginal man, Cameron Doomadgee, in police custody in Palm Island, Queensland.

Literary journals

The first periodical that could be called a literary journal in Australia was The Australian Magazine (June 1821 - May 1822).[58] It featured poetry, a two-part story and articles on theology and general topics. Most of the others that followed in the 19th century were based in either Sydney or Melbourne. Few lasted long due to difficulties that included a lack of capital, the small local market and competition from literary journals from Britain.

Most recent Australian literary journals have originated from universities, and specifically English or Communications departments. They include:

Other journals include:

A number of newspapers also carry literary review supplements:

Awards

Main article: List of Australian literary awards

Current literary awards in Australia include:

Australian authors are also eligible for a number of other literary awards, such as the:

See also

References

  1. ^ . Archived from the original on 20 November 2010. Retrieved 23 October 2010.
  2. ^ a b . Archived from the original on 8 April 2011. Retrieved 29 January 2011.
  3. ^ Seal, Graham (1989). The Hidden Culture: Folklore in Australian Society. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. p. 50. ISBN 978-0-19-554919-5.
  4. ^ "Oodgeroo Noonuccal." Encyclopedia of World Biography Supplement, Vol. 27. Gale, 2007
  5. ^ Jenkin, Graham (1979). Conquest of the Ngarrindjeri. Adelaide: Rigby.
  6. ^ (in English) "Modern Australian poetry". Ministère de la culture.
  7. ^ . Archived from the original on 1 June 2011. Retrieved 2 June 2011.
  8. ^ Genoni, Paul (2004). Subverting the Empire: Explorers and Exploration in Australian Fiction. Altona, VIC: Common Ground.
  9. ^ Cook, James (1977). The Journal of HMS Endeavour, 1768-1771. Surrey, England: Genesis. ISBN 0904351025.
  10. ^ Home Page | W. W. Norton & Company
  11. ^ . Archived from the original on 10 January 2011. Retrieved 21 October 2010.
  12. ^ Savery, Henry (1830), Quintus Servinton : a tale founded upon incidents of real occurrence, Henry Melville, printer, retrieved 13 January 2015
  13. ^ Savery, Henry. "Quintus Servinton: A Tale founded upon Incidents of Real Occurrence". Project Gutenberg. Retrieved 13 January 2015.
  14. ^ Franks, Rachel. (PDF). State Library of New South Wales. Archived from the original (PDF) on 13 January 2015. Retrieved 13 January 2015.
  15. ^ Turcotte, Gerry (1998). "Australian Gothic" (PDF, 12 pages). Faculty of Arts—Papers. University of Wollongong. Retrieved 9 January 2008.
  16. ^ "Call to revive Aussie classics". The Age. Melbourne.
  17. ^ 100 Objects, Mitchell Library Centenary Exhibition 22 June 2014 at the Wayback Machine, State Library of New South Wales
  18. ^ The Getting of Wisdom at Text Publishing
  19. ^ Ursula Dubosarsky 7 February 2012 at the Wayback Machine. Retrieved 3 July 2012
  20. ^ Eleanor Spence's obituary Retrieved 2 April 2015
  21. ^ Carnegie Living Archive: Josh 27 September 2011 at the Wayback Machine Retrieved 2 April 2015
  22. ^ HCAA Winners 1956-2016 at IBBY
  23. ^ CBCA awards history 20 November 2011 at the Wayback Machine
  24. ^ "How Paul did a dare". The Age. Melbourne. 28 May 2005.
  25. ^ . Archived from the original on 23 August 2010.
  26. ^ Sonya Hartnett
  27. ^ a b . Archived from the original on 15 January 2013. Retrieved 14 December 2012.
  28. ^ "Underdog Aussie's Oscar triumph". The Sydney Morning Herald.
  29. ^ World Fantasy Awards 1 December 2010 at the Wayback Machine
  30. ^ Hugo award winners
  31. ^ Niall, Brenda (1933). "Boyd, Martin à Beckett (1893–1972)". Australian Dictionary of Biography. Vol. 13. Melbourne University Press.
  32. ^ "The Nobel Prize in Literature 1973 – Patrick White". Nobelprize.org. Retrieved 10 March 2016.
  33. ^ a b Webby, Elizabeth (2012). "White, Patrick Victor (Paddy) (1912–1990)". Australian Dictionary of Biography. Vol. 18. Melbourne University Press.
  34. ^ "Patrick White's rare first novel revived for a new audience". The Sydney Morning Herald.
  35. ^ "The Nobel Prize in Literature 2003 – J. M. Coetzee". Nobelprize.org. Retrieved 10 March 2016.
  36. ^ "JM Coetzee becomes an Australian citizen". M&G. 6 March 2006. Retrieved 10 March 2016.
  37. ^ Price, Karen (29 March 2013). "The Thorn Birds' author on why she'll never write a sequel". Wales Online.
  38. ^ . Miles Franklin Literary Award. Archived from the original on 8 January 2015.
  39. ^ "When the smoke clears". The Sydney Morning Herald. 1 November 2008.
  40. ^ Vernay, Jean-François. "Grunge Fiction". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 6 November 2008 accessed 18 December 2017.
  41. ^ a b c Leishman, Kirsty, 'Australian Grunge Literature and the Conflict between Literary Generations', Journal of Australian Studies, 23.63 (1999), pp. 94–102
  42. ^ Vernav, Jean-François (2016). A Brief Take on the Australian Novel. Wakefield Press (Adelaide, South Australia). p. 127. ISBN 978-1-74305-404-8.
  43. ^ a b Vernay, Jean-François, 'Grunge Fiction', The Literary Encyclopedia, 6 November 2008, accessed 9 September 2009
  44. ^ Dagg, Samantha. "Still digging: from grunge to post-grunge in Australian fiction". Thesis, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1342404
  45. ^ For an overview of Australian poetry in Italian, see [1] Gaetano Rando (University of Wollongong), 'Italian-Australian Poetry by First Generation Writers: An Overview'. Examples of Australian writing in Irish can be found in An Gael: see http://angaelmagazine.com/inneacs/udar.asp?iAINM=colinryan. See also Teachtaireacht by Colin Ryan, Cló Iar-Chonnacht: https://www.cic.ie/en/books/published-books/teachtaireacht
  46. ^ Michael Jacklin (University of Wollongong), "Desde Australia para todo el mundo hispano": Australia's Spanish-Language Magazines and Latin American/Australian Writing.
  47. ^ PhD Spanish Writing in Australia: Scholarship Description 13 April 2013 at the Wayback Machine
  48. ^ Wong Shee Ping (author); Ely Finch (translator); Mei-Fen Kuo (translator); Michael Williams (26 June 2019). The poison of polygamy : a social novel. University Of Sydney, NSW. ISBN 9781743326022. OCLC 1101172962. {{cite book}}: |last= has generic name (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  49. ^ Charles Edwin Woodrow Bean - Despatches from Gallipoli - National Library of Australia Online Exhibition
  50. ^ . Culture and Recreation. Australian Government. Archived from the original on 12 March 2011. Retrieved 18 March 2022.
  51. ^ Clarke, Donovan, "Michael Massey Robinson," Australian Dictionary of Biography, accessed 13 June 2019
  52. ^ Bankstown Poetry Slam: In the Media
  53. ^ "About Us". Australian Poetry Library. Retrieved 4 March 2017.
  54. ^ a b The Recruiting Officer & Our Country's Good – Stantonbury Campus Theatre Company, 2000
  55. ^ No Cookies | Daily Telegraph
  56. ^ Play search | Australian Plays Transform
  57. ^ . Archived from the original on 10 January 2017. Retrieved 9 January 2017.
  58. ^ Lurline Stuart (1979), Nineteenth century Australian periodicals: an annotated bibliography, Sydney, Hale & Iremonger, p.2 & 35.ISBN 0908094531

External links

 
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Literature of Australia.
 
Wikisource has original text related to this article:
Australian literature
  • The Library of Australiana page at Project Gutenberg of Australia
  • at Freeread
  • "AustLit: The Australian Literature Resource" (2000-)
  • List of Australian Writers in English


May 01, 2023
australian, literature, written, literary, work, produced, area, people, commonwealth, australia, preceding, colonies, during, early, western, history, australia, collection, british, colonies, such, recognised, literary, tradition, begins, with, linked, broad. Australian literature is the written or literary work produced in the area or by the people of the Commonwealth of Australia and its preceding colonies During its early Western history Australia was a collection of British colonies as such its recognised literary tradition begins with and is linked to the broader tradition of English literature However the narrative art of Australian writers has since 1788 introduced the character of a new continent into literature exploring such themes as Aboriginality mateship egalitarianism democracy national identity migration Australia s unique location and geography the complexities of urban living and the beauty and the terror of life in the Australian bush Contents 1 Overview 2 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writers and themes 3 Early and classic works 4 Children s literature 5 Expatriate authors 6 Other contemporary works and authors 6 1 1991 1996 Grunge lit 6 2 1998 2010s Post grunge lit 7 Australian writing in languages other than English 8 Histories 9 Writing and identity 10 Poetry 11 Plays 12 Science fiction and fantasy 13 Crime 14 Literary journals 15 Awards 16 See also 17 References 18 External linksOverview Edit Patrick White became the first Australian to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1973 Australian writers who have obtained international renown include the Nobel winning author Patrick White as well as authors Christina Stead David Malouf Peter Carey Bradley Trevor Greive Thomas Keneally Colleen McCullough Nevil Shute and Morris West Notable contemporary expatriate authors include the feminist Germaine Greer art historian Robert Hughes and humorists Barry Humphries and Clive James 1 Among the important authors of classic Australian works are the poets Henry Lawson Banjo Paterson C J Dennis and Dorothea Mackellar Dennis wrote in the Australian vernacular while Mackellar wrote the iconic patriotic poemMy Country Lawson and Paterson clashed in the famous Bulletin Debate over the nature of life in Australia with Lawson considered to have the harder edged view of the Bush and Paterson the romantic 2 Lawson is widely regarded as one of Australia s greatest writers of short stories while Paterson s poems remain amongst the most popular Australian bush poems Significant poets of the 20th century included Dame Mary Gilmore Kenneth Slessor A D Hope and Judith Wright Among the best known contemporary poets are Les Murray and Bruce Dawe whose poems are often studied in Australian high schools Novelists of classic Australian works include Marcus Clarke For the Term of His Natural Life Miles Franklin My Brilliant Career Henry Handel Richardson The Fortunes of Richard Mahony Joseph Furphy Such Is Life Rolf Boldrewood Robbery Under Arms and Ruth Park The Harp in the South In terms of children s literature Norman Lindsay The Magic Pudding Mem Fox Possum Magic and May Gibbs Snugglepot and Cuddlepie are among the Australian classics while Melina Marchetta Looking for Alibrandi is a modern YA classic Eminent Australian playwrights have included Ray Lawler David Williamson Alan Seymour and Nick Enright Among prominent short story writers are Steele Rudd Henry Lawson Beverley Farmer Kate Grenville and Helen Garner Although historically only a small proportion of Australia s population have lived outside the major cities many of Australia s most distinctive stories and legends originate in the outback in the drovers and squatters and people of the barren dusty plains 3 David Unaipon is known as the first Aboriginal author Oodgeroo Noonuccal was the first Aboriginal Australian to publish a book of verse 4 A ground breaking memoir about the experiences of the Stolen Generations can be found in Sally Morgan s My Place Charles Bean Geoffrey Blainey Robert Hughes Manning Clark Claire Wright and Marcia Langton are authors of important Australian histories Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writers and themes Edit David Unaipon 1872 1967 the first Aboriginal author Main article Indigenous Australian literature Writing by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peopleWhile his father James Unaipon c 1835 1907 contributed to accounts of Aboriginal mythology written by the missionary George Taplin 5 David Unaipon 1872 1967 provided the first accounts of Aboriginal mythology written by an Aboriginal Legendary Tales of the Aborigines For this he is known as the first Aboriginal author Oodgeroo Noonuccal 1920 1993 was a famous Aboriginal poet writer and rights activist credited with publishing the first Aboriginal book of verse We Are Going 1964 6 Sally Morgan s novel My Place was considered a breakthrough memoir in terms of bringing indigenous stories to wider notice Leading Aboriginal activists Marcia Langton First Australians 2008 and Noel Pearson Up from the Mission 2009 are active contemporary contributors to Australian literature The voices of Indigenous Australians are being increasingly noticed and include the playwright Jack Davis and Kevin Gilbert Writers coming to prominence in the 21st century include Kim Scott Alexis Wright Kate Howarth Tara June Winch Yvette Holt and Anita Heiss Indigenous authors who have won Australia s high prestige Miles Franklin Award include Kim Scott who was joint winner with Thea Astley in 2000 for Benang and again in 2011 for That Deadman Dance Alexis Wright won the award in 2007 for her novel Carpentaria Melissa Lucashenko won the award in 2019 for her novel Too Much Lip which was also short listed for the Stella Prize for Australian women s writing Letters written by notable Aboriginal leaders like Bennelong and Sir Douglas Nicholls are also retained as treasures of Australian literature as is the historic Yirrkala bark petitions of 1963 which is the first traditional Aboriginal document recognised by the Australian Parliament 7 AustLit s BlackWords project provides a comprehensive listing of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Writers and Storytellers Writing about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoplesAt the point of the first colonization Indigenous Australians had not developed a system of writing so the first literary accounts of Aboriginal people come from the journals of early European explorers which contain descriptions of first contact both violent and friendly 8 Early accounts by Dutch explorers and by the English buccaneer William Dampier wrote of the natives of New Holland as being barbarous savages but by the time of Captain James Cook and First Fleet marine Watkin Tench the era of Jean Jacques Rousseau accounts of Aborigines were more sympathetic and romantic these people may truly be said to be in the pure state of nature and may appear to some to be the most wretched upon the earth but in reality they are far happier than we Europeans wrote Cook in his journal on 23 August 1770 9 Noel Pearson is an Aboriginal lawyer rights activist and essayist Many notable works have been written by non indigenous Australians on Aboriginal themes Examples include the poems of Judith Wright The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith by Thomas Keneally Ilbarana by Donald Stuart and the short story by David Malouf The Only Speaker of his Tongue 10 Histories covering Indigenous themes include Watkin Tench Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay et Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson Roderick J Flanagan The Aborigines of Australia 1888 The Native Tribes of Central Australia by Spencer and Gillen 1899 the diaries of Donald Thomson on the subject of the Yolngu people of Arnhem Land c 1935 1943 Alan Moorehead The fatal Impact 1966 Geoffrey Blainey Triumph of the Nomads 1975 Henry Reynolds The Other Side of the Frontier 1981 and Marcia Langton First Australians 2008 Differing interpretations of Aboriginal history are also the subject of contemporary debate in Australia notably between the essayists Robert Manne and Keith Windschuttle Early and classic works Edit Watkin Tench an officer of the marines on the First Fleet and author Joseph Furphy Henry Lawson right with J F Archibald the co founder of The Bulletin Henry Handel Richardson Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson in 1945 A number of notable women authors used male pseudonyms For centuries before the British settlement of Australia European writers wrote fictional accounts of an imaginings of a Great Southern Land In 1642 Abel Janszoon Tasman landed in Tasmania and after examining notches cut at considerable distances on tree trunks speculated that the newly discovered country must be peopled by giants Later the British satirist Jonathan Swift set the land of the Houyhnhnms of Gulliver s Travels to the west of Tasmania 11 In 1797 the British Romantic poet Robert Southey then a young Jacobin included a section in his collection Poems a selection of poems under the heading Botany Bay Eclogues in which he portrayed the plight and stories of transported convicts in New South Wales Among the first true works of literature produced in Australia were the accounts of the settlement of Sydney by Watkin Tench a captain of the marines on the First Fleet to arrive in 1788 In 1819 poet explorer journalist and politician William Wentworth published the first book written by an Australian A Statistical Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and Its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen s Land With a Particular Enumeration of the Advantages Which These Colonies Offer for Emigration and Their Superiority in Many Respects Over Those Possessed by the United States of America in which he advocated an elected assembly for New South Wales trial by jury and settlement of Australia by free emigrants rather than convictsThe first novel to be published in Australia was a crime novel Quintus Servinton A Tale founded upon Incidents of Real Occurrence 12 13 by Henry Savery published in Hobart in 1830 14 Early popular works tended to be the ripping yarn variety telling tales of derring do against the new frontier of the Australian outback Writers such as Rolf Boldrewood Robbery Under Arms Marcus Clarke For the Term of His Natural Life Henry Handel Richardson The Fortunes of Richard Mahony and Joseph Furphy Such Is Life embodied these stirring ideals in their tales and particularly the latter tried to accurately record the vernacular language of the common Australian These novelists also gave valuable insights into the penal colonies which helped form the country and also the early rural settlements In 1838 The Guardian a tale by Anna Maria Bunn was published in Sydney It was the first Australian novel printed and published in mainland Australia and the first Australian novel written by a woman It is a Gothic romance 15 Miles Franklin My Brilliant Career and Jeannie Gunn We of the Never Never wrote of lives of European pioneers in the Australian bush from a female perspective Albert Facey wrote of the experiences of the Goldfields and of Gallipoli A Fortunate Life Ruth Park wrote of the sectarian divisions of life in impoverished 1940s inner city Sydney The Harp in the South The experience of Australian PoWs in the Pacific War is recounted by Nevil Shute in A Town Like Alice and in the autobiography of Sir Edward Dunlop Alan Moorehead was an Australian war correspondent and novelist who gained international acclaim A number of notable classic works by international writers deal with Australian subjects among them D H Lawrence s Kangaroo The journals of Charles Darwin contain the famous naturalist s first impressions of Australia gained on his tour aboard the Beagle that inspired his writing of On the Origin of Species The Wayward Tourist Mark Twain s Adventures in Australia contains the acclaimed American humourist s musings on Australia from his 1895 lecture tour In 2012 The Age reported that Text Publishing was releasing an Australian classics series in 2012 to address a neglect of Australian literature by universities and British dominated publishing houses citing out of print Miles Franklin award winners such as David Ireland s The Glass Canoe and Sumner Locke Elliott s Careful He Might Hear You as key examples 16 Children s literature Edit Seven Little Australians by Ethel Turner is the first and only book by an Australian author to have been continuously in print for 100 years The Magic Pudding by Norman Lindsay Ethel Turner s Seven Little Australians which relates the adventures of seven mischievous children in Sydney has been in print since 1894 longer than any other Australian children s novel 17 The Getting of Wisdom 1910 by Henry Handel Richardson about an unconventional schoolgirl in Melbourne has enjoyed a similar success and been praised by H G Wells and Germaine Greer 18 Other perennial favourites of Australian children s literature include Dorothy Wall s Blinky Bill Ethel Pedley s Dot and the Kangaroo May Gibbs Snugglepot and Cuddlepie Norman Lindsay s The Magic Pudding Ruth Park s The Muddleheaded Wombat and Mem Fox s Possum Magic These classic works employ anthropomorphism to bring alive the creatures of the Australian bush thus Bunyip Bluegum of The Magic Pudding is a koala who leaves his tree in search of adventure while in Dot and the Kangaroo a little girl lost in the bush is befriended by a group of marsupials May Gibbs crafted a story of protagonists modelled on the appearance of young eucalyptus gum tree nuts and pitted these gumnut babies Snugglepot and Cuddlepie against the antagonist Banksia men Gibbs influence has lasted through the generations contemporary children s author Ursula Dubosarsky has cited Snugglepot and Cuddlepie as one of her favourite books 19 In the middle of the twentieth century children s literature languished with popular British authors dominating the Australian market But in the 1960s Oxford University Press published several Australian children s authors and Angus amp Robertson appointed their first specialist children s editor The best known writers to emerge in this period were Hesba Brinsmead Ivan Southall Colin Thiele Patricia Wrightson Nan Chauncy Joan Phipson and Eleanor Spence their works primarily set in the Australian landscape 20 In 1971 Southall won the Carnegie Medal for Josh 21 In 1986 Patricia Wrightson received the international Hans Christian Andersen Award 22 The Children s Book Council of Australia has presented annual awards for books of literary merit since 1946 and has other awards for outstanding contributions to Australian children s literature Notable winners and shortlisted works have inspired several well known Australian films from original novels including the Silver Brumby series a collection by Elyne Mitchell which recount the life and adventures of Thowra a Snowy Mountains brumby stallion Storm Boy 1964 by Colin Thiele about a boy and his pelican and the relationships he has with his father the pelican and an outcast Aboriginal man called Fingerbone the Sydney based Victorian era time travel adventure Playing Beatie Bow 1980 by Ruth Park and for older children and mature readers Melina Marchetta s 1993 novel about a Sydney high school girl Looking for Alibrandi Robin Klein s Came Back to Show You I Could Fly is a story about the beautiful relationship between an eleven year old boy and an older drug addicted girl 23 Jackie French widely described as Australia s most popular children s author has written about 170 books including two CBCA Children s Book of the Year Award winners One of them the critically acclaimed Hitler s Daughter 1999 is a what if story that explores mind provoking issues about what would have happened if Adolf Hitler had had a daughter French is also the author of the highly praised Diary of a Wombat 2003 which won awards such as the 2003 COOL Award and 2004 BILBY Award among others It was also named an honour book for the CBCA Children s Book of the Year Award for picture books Paul Jennings is a prolific writer of contemporary Australian fiction for young people whose career began with collections of short stories such as Unreal 1985 and Unbelievable 1987 many of the stories were adapted as episodes of the award winning television show Round the Twist 24 The world s richest prize in children s literature has been received by two Australians Sonya Hartnett who won the 2008 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award 25 and Shaun Tan who won in 2011 Hartnett has a long and distinguished career publishing her first novel at 15 She is known for her dark and often controversial themes She has won several awards including the Kathleen Mitchell Award and the Victorian Premier s Award for Sleeping Dogs Guardian Children s Fiction Prize and the Aurealis Award Best Young Adult Novel Australian speculative fiction for Thursday s Child and the CBCA Children s Book of the Year Award Older Readers for Forest 26 circular reference Tan won this for his career contribution to children s and young adult literature in the broadest sense 27 Tan has been awarded various literary awards including the Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis in 2009 for Tales from Outer Suburbia and a New York Times Best Illustrated Children s Books award in 2007 for The Arrival 27 Alongside his numerous literary awards Tan s adaption of his book The Lost Thing also won him an Oscar for best animated short film 28 Other awards Tan has won include a World Fantasy Award for Best Artist 29 and a Hugo Award for Best Professional Artist 30 Expatriate authors Edit Cover of The Female Eunuch 1970 by Germaine Greer The book was a bestseller and helped usher in second wave feminism in Australia and the world Greer relocated to England for many years but now divides her time between England and Queensland A generation of leading contemporary international writers who left Australia for Britain and the United States in the 1960s have remained regular and passionate contributors of Australian themed literary works throughout their careers including Clive James Robert Hughes Barry Humphries Geoffrey Robertson and Germaine Greer Several of these writers had links to the Sydney Push intellectual sub culture in Sydney from the late 1940s to the early 1970s and to Oz a satirical magazine originating in Sydney and later produced in London from 1967 to 1973 After a long media career Clive James remained as a leading humourist and author based in Britain whose memoir series was rich in reflections on Australian society including his 2007 book Cultural Amnesia Robert Hughes has produced a number of historical works on Australia including The Art of Australia 1966 and The Fatal Shore 1987 Barry Humphries took his dadaist absurdist theatrical talents and pen to London in the 1960s becoming an institution on British television and later attaining popularity in the USA Humphries outlandish Australian caricatures including Dame Edna Everage Barry McKenzie and Les Patterson have starred in books stage and screen to great acclaim over five decades and his biographer Anne Pender described him in 2010 as the most significant comedian since Charles Chaplin His own literary works include the Dame Edna biographies My Gorgeous Life 1989 and Handling Edna 2010 and the autobiography My Life As Me A Memoir 2002 Geoffrey Robertson KC is a leading international human rights lawyer academic author and broadcaster whose books include The Justice Game 1998 and Crimes Against Humanity 1999 Leading feminist Germaine Greer author of The Female Eunuch has spent much of her career in England but continues to study critique condemn and adore her homeland recent work includes Whitefella Jump Up The Shortest Way to Nationhood 2004 Other contemporary works and authors EditMartin Boyd 1893 1972 was a distinguished memoirist novelist and poet whose works included social comedies and the serious reflections of a pacifist faced with a time of war Among his Langton series of novels The Cardboard Crown 1952 A Difficult Young Man 1955 Outbreak of Love 1957 earned high praise in Britain and the United States though despite their Australian themes were largely ignored in Australia 31 Patrick White 1912 1990 became the first Australian to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1973 for an epic and psychological narrative art which has introduced a new continent into literature 32 White s first novel Happy Valley 1939 was inspired by the landscape and his work as a jackaroo on the land at Adaminaby in the Snowy Mountains but became an international success and won the Australian Literary Society s gold medal 33 34 Born to a conservative wealthy Anglo Australian family he later wrote of conviction in left wing causes and lived as a homosexual Never destined for life on the land he enrolled at Cambridge where he became a published poet White developed as a novelist but also had major theatrical success including The Season at Sarsaparilla White followed The Tree of Man with Voss which became the first winner of the Miles Franklin Award A subsequent novel Riders in the Chariot also received a Miles Franklin award but White later refused to permit his novels to be entered for literary prizes He turned down a knighthood and various literary awards but in 1973 accepted the Nobel prize David Marr wrote of biography of White in 1991 33 J M Coetzee who was born in South Africa and was resident there when awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003 35 now lives in Adelaide South Australia and is an Australian citizen 36 Colleen McCullough s The Thorn Birds 1977 is Australia s highest selling novel and one of the biggest selling novels of all time with around 30 million copies sold by 2009 37 Thomas Keneally wrote The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith 1972 and Schindler s Ark 1982 This latter work was the inspiration for the film Schindler s List Other notable Australian novels converted to celluloid include Paul Brickhill s The Great Escape Pamela Lyndon Travers Mary Poppins Morris West s The Shoes of the Fisherman and Bryce Courtenay s The Power of One Careful He Might Hear You by Sumner Locke Elliott won the Miles Franklin Award in 1963 and was the subject of a 1983 Australian film Author David Ireland won the Miles Franklin Award three times including for The Glass Canoe 1976 38 Peter Carey has also won the Miles Franklin Award three times Jack Maggs 1998 Oscar and Lucinda 1989 and Bliss 1981 He has twice won the Booker Prize with 1988 s Oscar and Lucinda and 2001 s True History of the Kelly Gang DBC Pierre s Vernon God Little won the Booker Prize in 2003 Other notable writers to have emerged since the 1970s include Kate Grenville David Malouf Helen Garner Janette Turner Hospital Marion Halligan Susan Johnson Christopher Koch Alex Miller Shirley Hazzard Richard Flanagan Gerald Murnane Brenda Walker Rod Jones and Tim Winton James Clavell in The Asian Saga discusses an important feature of Australian literature its portrayal of far eastern culture from the admittedly even further east but nevertheless western cultural viewpoint as Nevil Shute did Clavell was also a successful screenwriter and along with such writers as Thomas Keneally see above has expanded the topics of Australian literature far beyond that one country Other novelists to use international themes are David Malouf Beverley Farmer and Rod Jones The Secret River 2005 is an historical fiction by Kate Grenville imagining encounters between Aboriginal and colonial Australia which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize The Slap 2008 was an internationally successful novel by Christos Tsiolkas which was adapted for television by ABC1 in 2011 and was described in a review by Gerard Windsor as something of an anatomy of the rising Australian middle class 39 1991 1996 Grunge lit Edit Main article Grunge lit Justine Ettler s novel The River Ophelia 1995 details the lives of a group of attractive yuppie twenty year old Sydneysiders with masochistic and narcissistic tendencies their days run the gamut of BDSM sexual hedonism and illicit drug use The protagonist university student Justine is in a destructive relationship with sadist Sade Ettler s nod to the Marquis de Sade Grunge lit an abbreviation for grunge literature is an Australian literary genre usually applied to fictional or semi autobiographical writing concerned with dissatisfied and disenfranchised 40 young people living in suburban or inner city surroundings It was typically written by new young authors 41 who examined gritty dirty real existences 41 of lower income young people whose lives revolve around a nihilistic pursuit of casual sex recreational drug use and alcohol which are used to escape boredom or a general flightiness Romantic love is seldom as instant gratification has become the norm 42 It has been described as both a sub set of dirty realism and an offshoot of Generation X literature 43 The term grunge is from the 1990s era music genre of grunge The genre was first coined in 1995 following the success of Andrew McGahan s first novel Praise which had been released in 1991 and became popular with sub 30 year old readers a previously under investigated demographic 41 Other authors considered to be grunge lit include Linda Jaivin Fiona McGregor and Justine Ettler Since its invention the term grunge lit has been retrospectively applied to novels written as early as 1977 namely Helen Garner s Monkey Grip 43 Grunge lit is often raw explicit and vulgar even to the point of Ettler s The River Ophelia 1995 being called pornographic The term grunge lit and its use to categorize and market this diverse group of writers and authorial styles has bees the subject of debate and criticism Linda Jaivin disagreed with putting all these authors in one category Christios Tsiolkas called the term a media creation and Murray Waldren denied grunge lit even was a new genre he said the works actually are a type of the pre existing dirty realism genre 1998 2010s Post grunge lit Edit Post grunge lit is a genre of Australian fiction from the late 1990s 2000s and 2010s It is called post grunge lit to denote that this genre appeared after the 1990s Australian literary genre known as grunge lit Michael Robert Christie s 2009 PhD dissertation Unbecoming of Age Australian Grunge Fiction the Bildungsroman and the Long Labor Decade states that there is a genre called post Grunge lit which follows the grunge lit period Christie names three examples of Australian post grunge lit Elliot Perlman s Three Dollars 1998 Andrew McCann s Subtopia 2005 and Anthony Macris Capital Christie s dissertation interprets and explains these three post grunge lit works as responses to the embedding of Neoliberalism in Australian and global political culture Kalinda Ashton born 1978 has been called a post grunge writer in part due to influences from grunge lit author Christos Tsiolkas Ashton is the author of the novel The Danger Game Samantha Dagg s 2017 thesis on grunge lit and post grunge lit states that Luke Carman is a post grunge writer 44 Carman s first work a collection of interlinked semi autobiographical short stories explores the authentic experiences of working class Australians in the suburbs including issues such as drug addiction and a sense of disillusionment Australian writing in languages other than English EditAustralia has migrant groups from many countries and members of those communities not always of the first generation have produced Australian writing in a variety of languages These include Italian Greek Arabic Chinese Vietnamese Lao Filipino Latvian Ukrainian Polish Russian Serbian Yiddish and Irish 45 Comparatively little attention has been devoted to such writing by mainstream critics It has been argued that in relation to the national literary landscape such literary communities have a quite separate existence with their own poetry festivals literary competitions magazine and newspaper reviews and features and even local publishers 46 Some writers like the Greek Australian Dimitris Tsaloumas have published bilingually There are now signs that such writing is attracting more academic interest 47 Some older works in languages other than English have been translated and received critical and historical attention long after their first publication for example the first Chinese language novel to be published in Australia and possibly the West The Poison of Polygamy 1909 10 by Wong Shee Ping was published in English for the first time in 2019 in a bilingual parallel edition 48 Histories Edit Portrait of Charles Bean official World War I historian Main article History of Australia History has been an important discipline in the development of Australian writing Watkin Tench 1758 1833 a British officer who arrived with the First Fleet in 1788 later published two books on the subject of the foundations of New South Wales Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay and Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson Written with a spirit of humanity his accounts are considered by writers including Robert Hughes and Thomas Keneally to be essential reading for the early history of Australia Charles Bean was the official war historian of the First World War and was influential in establishing the importance of ANZAC in Australian history and mythology with such prose as Anzac stood and still stands for reckless valor in a good cause for enterprise resourcefulness fidelity comradeship and endurance that will never own defeat 49 see works including The Story of ANZAC From the Outbreak of War to the End of the First Phase of the Gallipoli Campaign 4 May 1915 1921 Australia in the War of 1939 1945 is a 22 volume official history dedicated to Australia s Second World War efforts the series was published by the Australian War Memorial between 1952 and 1977 The main editor was Gavin Long A significant milestone was the historian Manning Clark s six volume History of Australia which is regarded by some as the definitive account of the nation Clark had a talent for narrative prose and the work published between 1969 and 1987 remains a popular and influential work Clark s one time student Geoffrey Blainey stands as another to have deeply influenced Australian historiography His important works include The Tyranny of Distance 1966 and Triumph of the Nomads A History of Ancient Australia 1975 Robert Hughes much debated history The Fatal Shore The epic of Australia s founding 1987 is a popular and influential work on early Australian history Marcia Langton is one of the principal contemporary Indigenous Australian academics and her 2008 collaboration with Rachel Perkins chronicles Australian history from an Indigenous perspective First Australians An Illustrated History Writing and identity Edit Barbara Baynton A complicated multi faceted relationship to Australia is displayed in much Australian writing often through writing about landscape Barbara Baynton s short stories from the late 19th century early 20th century convey people living in the bush a landscape that is alive but also threatening and alienating Kenneth Cook s Wake in Fright 1961 portrayed the outback as a nightmare with a blazing sun from which there is no escape Colin Thiele s novels reflected the life and times of rural and regional Australians in the 20th century showing aspects of Australian life unknown to many city dwellers In Australian literature the term mateship has often been employed to denote an intensely loyal relationship of shared experience mutual respect and unconditional assistance existing between friends mates in Australia This relationship of often male loyalty has remained a central subject of Australian literature from colonial times to the present day In 1847 Alexander Harris wrote of habits of mutual helpfulness between mates arising in the otherwise solitary bush in which men would often stand by one another through thick and thin in fact it is a universal feeling that a man ought to be able to trust his own mate in anything Henry Lawson a son of the Goldfields wrote extensively of an egalitarian mateship in such works as A Sketch of Mateship and Shearers in which he wrote They tramp in mateship side by side The Protestant and Roman They call no biped lord or sir And touch their hat to no man 50 Miles Franklin author of My Brilliant Career in 1901 What it means to be Australian is another issue that Australian literature explores Miles Franklin struggled to find a place for herself as a female writer in Australia fictionalising this experience in My Brilliant Career 1901 Marie Bjelke Petersen s popular romance novels published between 1917 and 1937 offered a fresh upbeat interpretation of the Australian bush The central character in Patrick White s The Twyborn Affair tries to conform to expectations of pre World War II Australian masculinity but cannot and instead post war tries out another identity and gender overseas Peter Carey has toyed with the idea of a national Australian identity as a series of beautiful lies and this is a recurrent theme in his novels Andrew McGahan s Praise 1992 Christos Tsiolkas s Loaded 1995 Justine Ettler s The River Ophelia 1995 and Brendan Cowell s How It Feels 2010 introduced a grunge lit a type of gritty realism take on questions of Australian identity in the 1990s though an important precursor to such work came some years earlier with Helen Garner s Monkey Grip 1977 about a single mother living on and off with a male heroin addict in Melbourne share housing Australian literature has had several scandals surrounding the identity of writers In the 1930s a misunderstanding with a printer caused Maude Hepplestone s bush poetry collection Songs of the Kookaburra to be mistakenly lauded internationally as a modernist masterpiece The 1944 Ern Malley affair led to an obscenity trial and is often blamed for the lack of modernist poetry in Australia To mark the 60th anniversary of the Ern Malley affair another Australian writer Leon Carmen set out to make a point about the prejudice of Australian publishers against white Australians citation needed Unable to find publication as a white Australian he was an instant success using the false Aboriginal identity of Wanda Koolmatrie with My Own Sweet Time In the 1980s Streten Bozik also managed to become published by assuming the Aboriginal identity of B Wongar In the 1990s Helen Darville used the pen name Helen Demidenko and won major literary prizes for her Hand that Signed the Paper before being discovered sparking a controversy over the content of her novel a fictionalised and highly tendentious account of the Nazi occupation of the Ukraine Mudrooroo previously known as Colin Johnson was acclaimed as an Aboriginal writer until his Aboriginality came under question his mother was Irish English and his father was Irish African American however he has strong connections with Aboriginal tribes he now avoids adopting a specific ethnic identity and his works deconstruct such notions Poetry Edit Australian poetry redirects here For the organisation see Australian Poetry Australia s first published poet Michael Massey Robinson in a watercolour by Edward Charles Close c1817 State Library of New South Wales C J Dennis poet and humourist of the Australian vernacular Poetry played an important part in early Australian literature The first poet to be published in Australia was Michael Massey Robinson 1744 1826 convict and public servant whose odes appeared in The Sydney Gazette 51 Charles Harpur and Henry Kendall were the first poets of any consequence Henry Lawson son of a Norwegian sailor born in 1867 was widely recognised as Australia s poet of the people and in 1922 became the first Australian writer to be honoured with a state funeral Two poets who are amongst the great Australian poets are Christopher Brennan and Adam Lindsay Gordon Gordon was once referred to as the national poet of Australia and is the only Australian with a monument in Poets Corner of Westminster Abbey in England Both Gordon s and Brennan s but particularly Brennan s works conformed to traditional styles of poetry with many classical allusions and therefore fell within the domain of high culture However at the same time Australia was blessed with a competing vibrant tradition of folk songs and ballads Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson were two of the chief exponents of these popular ballads and Banjo himself was responsible for creating what is probably the most famous Australian verse Waltzing Matilda At one point Lawson and Paterson contributed a series of verses to The Bulletin magazine in which they engaged in a literary debate about the nature of life in Australia Lawson said Paterson was a romantic and Paterson said Lawson was full of doom and gloom 2 Lawson is widely regarded as one of Australia s greatest writers of short stories while Paterson s poems The Man From Snowy River and Clancy of the Overflow remain amongst the most popular Australian bush poems Romanticised views of the outback and the rugged characters that inhabited it played an important part in shaping the Australian nation s psyche just as the cowboys of the American Old West and the gauchos of the Argentine pampa became part of the self image of those nations The bush balladeer Banjo Paterson Other poets who reflected a sense of Australian identity include C J Dennis and Dorothea McKellar Dennis wrote in the Australian vernacular The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke while McKellar wrote the iconic patriotic poem My Country Prominent Australian poets of the 20th century include Dame Mary Gilmore A D Hope Judith Wright Gwen Harwood Kenneth Slessor Les Murray Bruce Dawe and more recently Robert Gray John Forbes John Tranter John Kinsella and Judith Beveridge Dorothea Mackellar 1885 1968 writer of My Country Contemporary Australian poetry is mostly published by small independent book publishers However other kinds of publication including new media and online journals spoken word and live events and public poetry projects are gaining an increasingly vibrant and popular presence 1992 1999 saw poetry and art collaborations in Sydney and Newcastle buses and ferries including Artransit from Meuse Press Some of the more interesting and innovative contributions to Australian poetry have emerged from artist run galleries in recent years such as Textbase which had its beginnings as part of the 1st Floor gallery in Fitzroy In addition Red Room Company is a major exponent of innovative projects Bankstown Poetry Slam has become a notable venue for spoken word poetry and for community intersection with poetry as an art form to be shared 52 With its roots in Western Sydney it has a strong following from first and second generation Australians often giving a platform to voices that are more marginalised in mainstream Australian society Les Murray The Australian Poetry Library contains a wide range of Australian poetry as well as critical and contextual material relating to them such as interviews photographs and audio visual recordings As of 2018 update it contains over 42 000 poems from more than 170 Australian poets Begun in 2004 by leading Australian poet John Tranter it is a joint initiative of the University of Sydney and the Copyright Agency Limited CAL with funding by the Australian Research Council 53 Plays EditMain article Theatre in Australia European traditions came to Australia with the First Fleet in 1788 with the first production being performed in 1789 by convicts The Recruiting Officer by George Farquhar 54 Two centuries later the extraordinary circumstances of the foundations of Australian theatre were recounted in Our Country s Good by Timberlake Wertenbaker the participants were prisoners watched by sadistic guards and the leading lady was under threat of the death penalty The play is based on Thomas Keneally s novel The Playmaker 54 After Australian Federation in 1901 plays evidenced a new sense of national identity On Our Selection 1912 by Steele Rudd told of the adventures of a pioneer farming family and became immensely popular In 1955 Summer of the Seventeenth Doll by Ray Lawler portrayed resolutely Australian characters and went on to international acclaim A new wave of Australian theatre debuted in the 1970s with the works of writers including David Williamson Barry Oakley and Jack Hibberd The Belvoir St Theatre presented works by Nick Enright and David Williamson Williamson is Australia s best known playwright with major works including The Club Emerald City and Brilliant Lies In The One Day of the Year Alan Seymour studied the paradoxical nature of the ANZAC Day commemoration by Australians of the defeat of the Battle of Gallipoli Ngapartji Ngapartji by Scott Rankin and Trevor Jamieson recounts the story of the effects on the Pitjantjatjara people of nuclear testing in the Western Desert during the Cold War It is an example of the contemporary fusion of traditions of drama in Australia with Pitjantjatjara actors being supported by a multicultural cast of Greek Afghan Japanese and New Zealand heritage 55 Eminent contemporary Australian playwrights include David Williamson Alan Seymour Stephen Sewell the late Nick Enright and Justin Fleming 56 The Australian government supports a website australianplays org The Home of Australian Playscripts AustralianPlays org that aims to combine playwright biographies and script information Scripts are also available there Science fiction and fantasy EditThis section needs expansion You can help by adding to it October 2010 Main article Australian science fiction Australia unlike Europe does not have a long history in the genre of science fiction Nevil Shute s On the Beach published in 1957 and filmed in 1959 was perhaps the first notable international success Though not born in Australia Shute spent his latter years there and the book was set in Australia It might have been worse had the imports of American pulp magazines not been restricted during WWII forcing local writers into the field Various compilation magazines began appearing in the 1960s and the field has continued to expand into some significance Today Australia has a thriving SF Fantasy genre with names recognised around the world In 2013 a trilogy by Sydney born Ben Peek was sold at auction to a UK publisher for a six figure deal 57 Crime EditThis section needs expansion You can help by adding to it October 2010 The crime fiction genre is currently thriving in Australia most notably through books written by Kerry Greenwood Shane Maloney Peter Temple Barry Maitland Arthur Upfield and Peter Corris among others High profile highly publicised court cases and murders have seen a significant amount of non fiction crime literature perhaps the most recognisable writer in this field being Helen Garner Garner s published accounts of three court cases The First Stone about a sexual harassment scandal at the University of Melbourne Joe Cinque s Consolation about a young man murdered by his girlfriend in Canberra and This House of Grief about Victorian child killer Robert Farquharson Each of Garner s works incorporates the style reminiscent of a fictional narrative novel a stylistic device known as the non fiction novel Chloe Hooper published The Tall Man Death and Life on Palm Island in 2008 as a response to the death of an Aboriginal man Cameron Doomadgee in police custody in Palm Island Queensland Literary journals EditThe first periodical that could be called a literary journal in Australia was The Australian Magazine June 1821 May 1822 58 It featured poetry a two part story and articles on theology and general topics Most of the others that followed in the 19th century were based in either Sydney or Melbourne Few lasted long due to difficulties that included a lack of capital the small local market and competition from literary journals from Britain Most recent Australian literary journals have originated from universities and specifically English or Communications departments They include Meanjin Overland HEAT Southerly WesterlyOther journals include Quadrant Australian Book Review Island Voiceworks Wet Ink now closed The Lifted Brow Red Leaves 紅葉 Kill Your DarlingsA number of newspapers also carry literary review supplements Australian Literary ReviewAwards EditMain article List of Australian literary awards Current literary awards in Australia include Anne Elder Award The Australian Vogel Literary Award Children s Book Council of Australia Ditmar Award Science Fiction includes Fantasy amp Horror Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry Mary Gilmore Prize for a first book of poetry Miles Franklin Award New South Wales Premier s Literary Awards Patrick White Award Peter Blazey Fellowship Prime Minister s Literary Awards Queensland Premier s Literary Awards Stella Prize Victorian Premier s Literary Award Western Australian Premier s Book AwardsAustralian authors are also eligible for a number of other literary awards such as the Booker Prize Commonwealth Writers Prize Women s Prize for FictionSee also EditAustLit The Australian Literature Resource Australian film Australian outback literature of the 20th century Australian performance poetry List of Australian novelists List of Australian poets List of years in Australian literature Tasmanian literature Tasmanian Gothic Indigenous Australian literatureReferences Edit Australian language letters and literature Australia s Culture Portal Archived from the original on 20 November 2010 Retrieved 23 October 2010 a b Henry Lawson Australian writer Australia s Culture Portal Archived from the original on 8 April 2011 Retrieved 29 January 2011 Seal Graham 1989 The Hidden Culture Folklore in Australian Society Melbourne Oxford University Press p 50 ISBN 978 0 19 554919 5 Oodgeroo Noonuccal Encyclopedia of World Biography Supplement Vol 27 Gale 2007 Jenkin Graham 1979 Conquest of the Ngarrindjeri Adelaide Rigby in English Modern Australian poetry Ministere de la culture Documenting Democracy Archived from the original on 1 June 2011 Retrieved 2 June 2011 Genoni Paul 2004 Subverting the Empire Explorers and Exploration in Australian Fiction Altona VIC Common Ground Cook James 1977 The Journal of HMS Endeavour 1768 1771 Surrey England Genesis ISBN 0904351025 Home Page W W Norton amp Company Dunalley Tasmania About Australia Archived from the original on 10 January 2011 Retrieved 21 October 2010 Savery Henry 1830 Quintus Servinton a tale founded upon incidents of real occurrence Henry Melville printer retrieved 13 January 2015 Savery Henry Quintus Servinton A Tale founded upon Incidents of Real Occurrence Project Gutenberg Retrieved 13 January 2015 Franks Rachel Crime Fiction Novels and the History of Libraries Presented at Libraries for the People the 11th Australian Library History Forum 18 19 November 2014 Sydney NSW PDF State Library of New South Wales Archived from the original PDF on 13 January 2015 Retrieved 13 January 2015 Turcotte Gerry 1998 Australian Gothic PDF 12 pages Faculty of Arts Papers University of Wollongong Retrieved 9 January 2008 Call to revive Aussie classics The Age Melbourne 100 Objects Mitchell Library Centenary Exhibition Archived 22 June 2014 at the Wayback Machine State Library of New South Wales The Getting of Wisdom at Text Publishing Ursula Dubosarsky Archived 7 February 2012 at the Wayback Machine Retrieved 3 July 2012 Eleanor Spence s obituary Retrieved 2 April 2015 Carnegie Living Archive Josh Archived 27 September 2011 at the Wayback Machine Retrieved 2 April 2015 HCAA Winners 1956 2016 at IBBY CBCA awards history Archived 20 November 2011 at the Wayback Machine How Paul did a dare The Age Melbourne 28 May 2005 Beautiful award ceremony when Hartnett recieved sic prize PublicTemplates Archived from the original on 23 August 2010 Sonya Hartnett a b ALMA award winners 2011 Archived from the original on 15 January 2013 Retrieved 14 December 2012 Underdog Aussie s Oscar triumph The Sydney Morning Herald World Fantasy Awards Archived 1 December 2010 at the Wayback Machine Hugo award winners Niall Brenda 1933 Boyd Martin a Beckett 1893 1972 Australian Dictionary of Biography Vol 13 Melbourne University Press The Nobel Prize in Literature 1973 Patrick White Nobelprize org Retrieved 10 March 2016 a b Webby Elizabeth 2012 White Patrick Victor Paddy 1912 1990 Australian Dictionary of Biography Vol 18 Melbourne University Press Patrick White s rare first novel revived for a new audience The Sydney Morning Herald The Nobel Prize in Literature 2003 J M Coetzee Nobelprize org Retrieved 10 March 2016 JM Coetzee becomes an Australian citizen M amp G 6 March 2006 Retrieved 10 March 2016 Price Karen 29 March 2013 The Thorn Birds author on why she ll never write a sequel Wales Online Miles Franklin Literary Award Past winners Miles Franklin Literary Award Archived from the original on 8 January 2015 When the smoke clears The Sydney Morning Herald 1 November 2008 Vernay Jean Francois Grunge Fiction The Literary Encyclopedia First published 6 November 2008 accessed 18 December 2017 a b c Leishman Kirsty Australian Grunge Literature and the Conflict between Literary Generations Journal of Australian Studies 23 63 1999 pp 94 102 Vernav Jean Francois 2016 A Brief Take on the Australian Novel Wakefield Press Adelaide South Australia p 127 ISBN 978 1 74305 404 8 a b Vernay Jean Francois Grunge Fiction The Literary Encyclopedia 6 November 2008 accessed 9 September 2009 Dagg Samantha Still digging from grunge to post grunge in Australian fiction Thesis 2017 http hdl handle net 1959 13 1342404 For an overview of Australian poetry in Italian see 1 Gaetano Rando University of Wollongong Italian Australian Poetry by First Generation Writers An Overview Examples of Australian writing in Irish can be found in An Gael see http angaelmagazine com inneacs udar asp iAINM colinryan See also Teachtaireacht by Colin Ryan Clo Iar Chonnacht https www cic ie en books published books teachtaireacht Michael Jacklin University of Wollongong Desde Australia para todo el mundo hispano Australia s Spanish Language Magazines and Latin American Australian Writing PhD Spanish Writing in Australia Scholarship Description Archived 13 April 2013 at the Wayback Machine Wong Shee Ping author Ely Finch translator Mei Fen Kuo translator Michael Williams 26 June 2019 The poison of polygamy a social novel University Of Sydney NSW ISBN 9781743326022 OCLC 1101172962 a href Template Cite book html title Template Cite book cite book a last has generic name help CS1 maint multiple names authors list link Charles Edwin Woodrow Bean Despatches from Gallipoli National Library of Australia Online Exhibition Mateship diggers and wartime Culture and Recreation Australian Government Archived from the original on 12 March 2011 Retrieved 18 March 2022 Clarke Donovan Michael Massey Robinson Australian Dictionary of Biography accessed 13 June 2019 Bankstown Poetry Slam In the Media About Us Australian Poetry Library Retrieved 4 March 2017 a b The Recruiting Officer amp Our Country s Good Stantonbury Campus Theatre Company 2000 No Cookies Daily Telegraph Play search Australian Plays Transform TOR UK ACQUIRES NEW FANTASY TRILOGY BY AUSTRALIAN BEN PEEK April 22 2013 By Julie Crisp Archived from the original on 10 January 2017 Retrieved 9 January 2017 Lurline Stuart 1979 Nineteenth century Australian periodicals an annotated bibliography Sydney Hale amp Iremonger p 2 amp 35 ISBN 0908094531External links Edit Wikimedia Commons has media related to Literature of Australia Wikisource has original text related to this article Australian literature The Library of Australiana page at Project Gutenberg of Australia Bibliography of Australian Literature to 1954 at Freeread AustLit The Australian Literature Resource 2000 List of Australian Writers in English Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Australian literature amp oldid 1148039922, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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