Australian writing in English

                                            Australian Literature

Lawler, Ray (1921– ), Australian actor and dramatist, whose work includes Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (1954), a play about sugarcane cutters. He played the lead role in its first production in Melbourne, Australia. It was later produced in New York City on Broadway (1956) and off-Broadway (1968), and as a film, Season of Passion (1961).

White, Patrick Victor Martindale (1912-1990), Australian author and Nobel laureate, born in London on one of his parents' periodic visits. White returned to England to attend the University of Cambridge, and served in the Royal Air Force during World War II (1939-1945). His first novel, Happy Valley (1939), was set in Australia, as were such later successful works as The Tree of Man (1955), about the struggles of a farmer in the Australian wilderness, and Voss (1957); these are considered his outstanding works and set his reputation. Other works include Riders in the Chariot (1961), The Solid Mandala (1966), and The Eye of the Storm (1973). Rich in symbolism and allegory, they deal with the individual's search for meaning in a harsh, potentially brutal country searching for its own self-definition. The Twyborn Affair (1979) explores sexual and spiritual confusion and ends in the London blitz. White, who in 1973 became the first Australian awarded the Nobel Prize in literature, was cited for his “epic and psychological narrative art which has introduced a new continent into literature.” His highly original writing style has been praised by critics for its oblique yet forceful descriptive power. His autobiography, Flaws in the Glass, was published in 1980.

Carey, Peter (1943- ), Australian novelist and short-story writer, known for his vivid stories of contemporary life, which combine surreal, grotesque, and humorous elements. Carey’s first published work, a collection of short stories, The Fat Man in History (1974), was well received and established him as one of Australia’s important contemporary writers and literary innovators. The series of novels that followed confirmed his reputation and consolidated his style, a mixture of realism and fantasy that has been compared to the work of American novelist Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez, and Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. Bliss (1981), Carey’s first novel, is the story of an advertising executive who sees his life and the world around him differently after a near-fatal heart attack. Bliss was made into a motion picture in 1985, with a screenplay by Carey.

Among Carey’s other novels are Illywhacker (1985), a work of epic scope about a 139-year-old conman, and Oscar and Lucinda (1988), a love story set in the 19th century, which won Britain’s highest literary award, the Booker Prize. His novel The Tax Inspector (1991) describes the unusual investigation of the Catchprice family by a tax inspector who is eight months pregnant. The Unusual Life of Tristam Smith (1994) tells the story of a boy’s search for his father’s identity while struggling to come to terms with a birth defect. The novel Jack Maggs (1998) is an imaginative reworking of Great Expectations (1860-1861) by English writer Charles Dickens. Carey’s fiction also includes War Crimes (1979), a second collection of short stories, and The Big Bazoohley (1995), a novel of fantasy for children. In 2001 Carey won his second Booker Prize, this one for the novel True History of the Kelly Gang, a fictional account of the life of famed Australian outlaw Ned Kelly. Carey became just the second writer to win the Booker Prize twice (South African author J. M. Coetzee was the first).

An early Australian fictional work is Tales of the Colonies (1843) by Charles Rowcroft; but the most frequently reprinted is Geoffrey Hamlyn (1859) by Henry Kingsley, brother of the English novelist Charles Kingsley. Kingsley originated the novel of Australian pastoral life. His main characters are, however, Englishmen who come to Australia for colonial experience and then return to England, as he did. Two fairly prolific early novelists were Marcus Clarke and Thomas Alexander Browne, the latter of whom wrote under the name of Rolf Boldrewood. Clarke is most famous for his classic story of the convict era, For the Term of His Natural Life (1874), which exploits the horrors of convict life in the heightened realistic manner of Charles Dickens. Browne's reputation rests on Robbery Under Arms (1888), a classic story of bushranging. It may be described as an Australian Western, a narrative about bush life full of vivid adventures. Recently two important early works on Australian themes, both on the borderline between fiction and reportage, have come to notice. These are Ralph Rashleigh (1952), probably written in the early 1840s by James Tucker, but belatedly discovered, and Settlers and Convicts (1852), written under the pen name “An Emigrant Mechanic” by Alexander Harris.

Among authors who wrote in the first decades of the 20th century, Henry Hertzberg Lawson is noteworthy as a writer of sketches. Poorly educated, he identified himself with the working people and wrote prolifically about them and their feelings toward Australia. His best work appeared during the 1880s in the weekly newspaper The Bulletin. Humor as well as bitterness is evident in his sketches, which range from sentimental vignettes to strongly realistic studies. Perhaps the volume for which he is best known abroad is While the Billy Boils, published in Travellers' Library in 1927. Miles Franklin (full name Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin; 1879-1954) is best known for her feminist novel My Brilliant Career (1901); an unsparing picture of outback life and a woman writer's beginnings, it was later made into a highly successful film. The finest single work of fiction expressing basic Australian attitudes is Such Is Life (1903) by Joseph Furphy, who used the pen name Tom Collins. Furphy's life was spent as a farmer and driver of bullock teams before the days of the railroad. His book, written in diary form, is a compound of episodic adventures, philosophic and literary opinions, and homely observations about people and conditions in Australia. Katharine Susannah Prichard, whose work began to appear before World War I, interprets Australian life in terms of class struggle. Her best fiction is contained in Working Bullocks (1926), a story of lumbering in Western Australia, and Coonardoo (1929), a study of intermarriage.

One of the finest craftsmen of Australian fiction was Frank Dalby Davison, known primarily for his animal stories. The most distinctive of these, Man-Shy, was published in the United States as Red Heifer (1934). It is a subtly conceived story of a maverick on a Queensland cattle station. He is quite as discerning in his stories of human character, as, for example, in his study of pre-World War II suburban life in Sydney, the novel The White Thorn Tree (1968). Eleanor Dark wrote excellent historical novels, especially The Timeless Land (1941), which is about the founding of Australia; she also wrote novels of contemporary life. Both types of her fiction are distinguished by psychological perception and brilliant descriptions of the landscape. Xavier Herbert showed his passionate concern for the plight of the Aborigines in such novels as Capricornia (1938).

The Australian writer of the middle generation who was best known abroad was Henry Handel Richardson, the pen name of Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson. Her earliest novel of note was Maurice Guest (1908), an autobiographical story of an Australian studying music in Germany, but her trilogy, The Fortunes of Richard Mahony (1917, 1925, 1929), is by far her most widely appreciated work. The latter novel, based on the life of the author's father, begins with the gold rushes of the 1850s and then penetratingly describes various aspects of Australian life in later decades. The main character, after whom the trilogy is named, is an unstable Irish doctor who intensely dislikes Australian life; he is considered one of the major creations of Australian literature. With profound insight, Richardson develops Australian themes in the European tradition of psychological realism.

Several other 20th-century Australian novelists enjoy reputations outside their own country. One of them is Kylie Tennant, whose first novel, Tiburon (1935), was a distinguished achievement. Among her major works are The Joyful Condemned (1953), a novel concerned with working women in the Sydney slums, and The Battlers (1954), a regional novel of caravan life in southwestern Australia. These hardheaded realistic studies are characterized by a fine sense of comedy and are written in a racy Australian idiom. Tennant's nonfiction includes Australia: Her Story; Notes on a Nation (1953).

Jon Cleary, author of The Sundowners (1952), scored notable popular success. John O'Grady, under the pen name Nino Culotta, wrote They're a Weird Mob (1957), a comic novel that became one of the best-sellers of all Australian novels. International bestsellerdom was achieved by Colleen McCullough's The Thorn Birds (1977), a family saga translated into many languages and made into a television drama. Worldwide fame was achieved by Christina Stead and Morris West. Stead's finest novel was a bitter depiction of a failed marriage, The Man Who Loved Children (1940; revised ed. 1965); among her other fiction was The Little Hotel (1973). West wrote several international best-sellers, including The Devil's Advocate (1959) and The Shoes of the Fisherman (1963). Thomas Michael Keneally has received overseas acclaim for The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1972), the story of an Aborigine's revenge, which was made into an equally powerful film; and Schindler's Ark (1982), which won the prestigious Booker Prize in England. Other important recent novelists are Elizabeth Jolley, whose Miss Peabody's Inheritance (1984) and Foxybaby (1985) have excited interest abroad; and David Malouf, whose fiction includes An Imaginary Life (1978), designated by the National Book Council as one of Australia's Ten Best Books of the Decade, and Harland's Half Acre (1984), the story of an Australian artist and the cultural life of his country.

The journalist and lawyer Andrew Barton Paterson gave the greatest literary development to the bush ballad, a kind of popular poem about life in the outback, the scrub country of the interior. His ballad “Waltzing Matilda” (1917), which was sung by Australian troops in both world wars, gained great popularity among all English-speaking people. The Man from Snowy River contains Paterson's best ballads. C. J. Dennis was another popular versifier who expressed in dialect the feelings and experiences of the “dinkum Aussie bloke,” or true Australian guy, notably in The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke (1915).

A number of 20th-century Australian poets have written works of the highest distinction. Notable among them is Robert FitzGerald, whose long, semiphilosophical discourses in verse blend themes of Australian experience with those of more universal interest. The work of Kenneth Slessor, written between 1919 and 1939, ranges from examples of pallid aestheticism to amusing realistic sketches of historical characters done in a variety of forms. Among other distinguished modern poets are A. D. Hope; Douglas Stewart, the author of verse drama; Judith Wright, who established an international reputation; and David Malouf, who also writes distinguished fiction. A sampling of Australian poetry, beginning with the work of Harpur, is A Book of Australian Verse (1956; 2nd ed. 1968), edited by Judith Wright.

                                                         New Zealand

Two of the earliest novels written and published in New Zealand were Taranaki: A Tale of the War (1861) by Henry Butler Stoney and The Story of Wild Will Enderby (1873) by Vincent Pike. Novelists of greater importance are Jane Mander, whose novel The Story of a New Zealand River (1920) is a sensitive portrayal of life in an lumber-milling community; Jean Devanny, who wrote socialist-humanitarian novels such as The Butcher Shop (1926); Robin Hyde, who dramatized the aftermath of World War I (1914-1918) in Passport to Hell (1936) and Nor the Years Condemn (1938); and John Mulgan, whose Man Alone (1939) shows the stylistic influence of American author Ernest Hemingway.

Frame, Janet (1924- ), New Zealand novelist and short-story writer. Extremely lonely through her time at the University of Otago teacher-training college, Frame attempted suicide when she was faced with the prospect of a lifetime teaching, and was committed to a mental institution. Misdiagnosed as a schizophrenic, she was caught up in a cycle of dehumanizing treatments. In hospital, she read the classics voraciously and started to write. She only avoided serious psychosurgery because her first collection of stories, The Lagoon: Stories (1951), won the Hubert Church prose award. Frank Sargeson, himself an influential author in New Zealand, let Frame stay in his shed to complete her first novel, Owls Do Cry (1957). This novel explores the themes of the worth of an individual and the ambiguous border between sanity and madness. Frame sees a society that is unable to cope with disorder, irrationality, and madness as incomplete and inadequate. She has now written 11 novels, including Faces in the Water (1961), The Rainbirds (1968), Living in the Maniototo (1979), and The Carpathians, which won the Commonwealth Writers Prize in 1989; four collections of short stories and sketches, a volume of poetry, The Pocket Mirror (1967), and a children's book, Mona Minim and the Smell of the Sun (1969). However it was the publication of Frame's three-volume Autobiography (1989), comprising To the Is-land (1982; James Wattie Book of the Year Award, 1983), An Angel at My Table (1984; New Zealand Literature Award for Non-Fiction, 1984), and The Envoy from Mirror City (1985), and its subsequent translation into an award-winning film (An Angel at My Table, 1990; adapted by Laura Jones, and directed by Jane Campion), that brought her writing a popular audience to match her critical reputation. Frame's novels combine brutal self-honesty with literary experimentation, using interior monologue and elaborately developed symbolism to parallel her personal experience of insecurity with the isolation of those who feel they have no place in the “normal” world. In 1983, Janet Frame was awarded the CBE.

Ashton-Warner, Sylvia (1905-84), New Zealand teacher and writer. She started writing while teaching Maori youngsters, the descendants of the original Polynesian inhabitants. Her early novels, Spinster (1958) and Incense to Idols (1960), bordered on the flamboyant, but the forceful, sensitive women portrayed in her novels attracted many readers. She received worldwide recognition with Teacher (1963), an account of her innovative teaching methods. After teaching in the U.S., she wrote Spearpoint, “Teacher” in America (1972), a critical commentary on television-influenced educational developments in the United States.

Hulme, Keri (1947- ), New Zealand novelist, poet, and short-story writer, best known for her first novel, The Bone People (1983). The work won the Booker Prize, the United Kingdom's most prestigious literary award, in 1985, as well as New Zealand's Pegasus Prize for Maori Literature, in 1984.Hulme, of English, Scottish, and Maori (the original peoples of New Zealand) ancestry, was born in Christchurch and educated at Canterbury University. She later worked as a tobacco picker, pharmacist's assistant, and postwoman. Her first published work was a poetry collection entitled The Silence Between: Moeraki Conversations (1982). Hulme has developed a writing style and vocabulary that are distinctly of New Zealand, even though they draw on the traditions of English, Irish, and American Literature. Her writing is often reliant on dream imagery and myth. Her other works include the novella Lost Possessions (1985), the short-story collection The Windeater/Te Kaihau (1986), and a second collection of poetry, Shards (1992).

Ihimaera, Witi (1944- ), New Zealand writer, best known for his novels and short stories, which portray the Maori people and their customs, as well as their constant struggle to maintain their community against often destructive European forces. His works were written in English, but he used Maori words and phrases in the narrative to give a sense of Maori culture.

His first collection of short stories, Pounamu Pounamu (Jade), was published in 1974. It and two novels—Tangi (Mourning, 1973), on the grief of a son for his father, and Whanau (Extended Family, 1974)— combined to form a trilogy on rural life. The New Net Goes Fishing (1977), however, is a collection of short stories set in the city. Ihimaera was long occupied with his work as a professional diplomat, and it was not until 1986 that he published a longer novel, The Matriarch, which deals with the wars between the Maori and the European colonists in New Zealand between 1860 and 1872. The book The Whale Rider (1987) marked a return to his earlier, simpler style. In 1994 Bulibasha, a seriocomic tale of two sheep-shearing families in conflict near Gisborne, was published. In 1995 it was followed by Nights in the Garden of Spain, a novel concerning issues of homosexuality. Ihimaera was also the editor of Into the World Of Light (1978), a collection of contemporary Maori writing.