Australian literature is a major body of writing in the English language produced by authors born or living in Australia. It includes the writings of Indigenous people; European explorers; British settlers and their descendants; and more recent Asian, European, and Middle Eastern migrants.
The Indigenous people of Australia include the members of many different Aboriginal groups and Torres Strait Islander groups. They are the descendants of Australia’s first inhabitants. Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples draw on a vast oral literary tradition that spans tens of thousands of years. There was no paper record of their cultures prior to British settlement in the late 1700’s. For this reason, Indigenous people’s lore remained at the margins of Australian literature at least until the end of the 1800’s.
The British colonized Australia in the late 1700’s and the 1800’s. Literature written by British settlers and other European travelers sought to describe the strange new continent for the rest of the world. These authors’ sense of Australian uniqueness became valuable to writers in the 1900’s, when they began to explore ideas of national identity.
Beginnings of Australian literature
Nonfiction writing
dominates the earliest Australian literature. The accounts of the voyages of exploration to Australia are in many ways as colorful as fiction. The English navigator and mapmaker William Dampier visited the desolate coast of northwest Australia in 1688. Dampier wrote unfavorably about the Australian mainland, its plants and animals, and its native inhabitants.
In 1770, the British navigator Captain James Cook journeyed to the eastern coast of Australia. His travels resulted in many geographical and scientific discoveries. The official account of his first voyage, compiled from the journals of Cook and other crew members, was published in 1773. It caused a sensation. Publishers reprinted the book, and it was translated into many European languages. 
In the 1800’s, the published journals of explorers told of the previously unknown interior of Australia. Important journal writers included the explorers Edward John Eyre, Sir Thomas Livingstone Mitchell, and Charles Sturt of the United Kingdom, and Ludwig Leichhardt of Germany. These and other writers demonstrate the frequent connection between science and literature that brought Australia to the attention of Western civilization.
Early prose.
Colonial officials—military officers, doctors, and chaplains—wrote most of the accounts of the first colonial settlement of Australia. Most settlers were convicts transported to Australia from England and Ireland.
Few early accounts provided a personal, individual response to the completely new experiences. The best and liveliest description of the new colony was by Watkin Tench, a British officer who arrived on a ship of the First Fleet (the ships that brought the first convicts and guards to Australia in 1788). His works include A Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay (1789) and A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson (1793). Tench wrote about many aspects of the new settlement—the strange new country, its Aboriginal peoples, and the convicts. Despite the novelty, Tench found his tour of duty tedious and unsettling. He questioned whether British investment in the new colony was wise.
Tench’s uncertainty about the value of the colony was echoed by other settlers, explorers, and visitors. Barron Field, an English judge, complained that Australia was an unattractive land that did not inspire writing. However, Field wrote the first volume of poetry published in Australia, First Fruits of Australian Poetry (1819).
Indigenous writing of the late 1700’s and the 1800’s took the form of letters, petitions, and reports. Bennelong played an important role in the interaction between the colonists and the Aboriginal clans in the Sydney area. He dictated the earliest surviving letter composed by an Aboriginal Australian. His 1796 letter to the steward to the British Home Secretary provides insight into Aboriginal marriage practices and the dress and manners of the settlers. Before dictating this letter, Bennelong had lived between the two cultures for seven years.
By the 1820’s, the children of the first convict arrivals had grown up and started families of their own. A new generation of Australians was born. Their loyalty was to the country of their birth, not to the land of their parents. Writers began to create poetry and literature that was uniquely Australian.
The development of the novel.
British immigrants wrote the first significant Australian novels. Clara Morison (1854) is a novel by the Scottish-born writer, preacher, and feminist Catherine Helen Spence. The book offers a critical, realistic account of women’s home life in the colonies. The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn (1859) by the British-born novelist Henry Kingsley gives a clear description of a young colonial settler and celebrates life in rural Australia.
Many colonial novels, such as those of writer and naturalist Louisa Atkinson, served as travel guides or journalistic reports for prospective free emigrants and relatives in England. Atkinson became the first Australian-born woman novelist with the publication of Gertrude the Emigrant in 1857. Other important writers of the time include Rosa Campbell Praed and British-born authors Ada Cambridge and Louisa Meredith.
Australia’s early fiction was published in newspapers and magazines. Such publications carried serialized novels (novels published in separate parts) and short stories from such notable British-born writers as Marcus Clarke and Tasma (the pen name of Jessie Couvreur). Tasma’s Uncle Piper of Piper’s Hill was serialized in the Australasian magazine in 1888. It describes the relationship between two families, one newly emigrated and one long established in Melbourne. Clarke wrote one of the most important novels of the colonial period, His Natural Life (1870-1872, revised 1874 and later published as For the Term of His Natural Life). Clarke based his story on real details of the sufferings of convicts in Tasmania.
The British-born author Rolf Boldrewood (the pen name of Thomas Alexander Browne) wrote Robbery Under Arms (serialized in the Sydney Mail in 1882 and 1883 and issued in book form with revisions in 1888 and 1889). The book is an adventure tale about a gang of bushrangers (outlaws in the Australian countryside), told in the colorful speech of a colonial settler. The British-born writer Fergus Hume’s detective novel The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1886) was very popular in both Australia and England.
The bush tradition.
During the late 1800’s, many Australian writers began to define authentic Australia in literature. Colonial writers started to focus on different urban and rural cultures. As the pioneer life came to an end, Australian literature and theater mythologized the adventurous life in Australia’s remote countryside, called the bush. Writers typically dealt with the geography and history of the bush and its inhabitants, especially convicts, gold miners, bushrangers, and station (ranch) hands. The Australian inhabitants of the bush were central to popular perceptions of the typical Australian type of individual. Poems called bush ballads became popular.
Poetry.
Well-educated British and Australian-born poets such as John Dunmore Lang, Charles Tompson, and William Woolls depicted the land and the colony in styles typical of European poetry of the late 1700’s. Charles Harpur and Henry Kendall tried to write poetry that was more Australian-centered. Harpur was one of the first Australian poets to realistically portray the country’s life and landscape. In melodious lyric poems, Kendall described the fragile beauty of the Australian countryside. The colonies’ hopes and fears appear notably in “The Explorers” (1874), a long narrative poem by the British-born writer Catherine Martin.
The popular Australian poet Adam Lindsay Gordon, born in Portugal’s Azores Islands to Scottish parents, is sometimes regarded as the father of the bush ballad. Gordon developed that poetic form in the 1860’s, turning the gentleman sportsman and bushman into an Australian hero. His collection Bush Ballads and Galloping Rhymes was published the day before his death in 1870. It included the most widely admired bush ballad of the mid-1800’s, “The Sick Stockrider.”
Banjo Paterson’s ballad “The Man from Snowy River” (1890) is a tale of daring and adventure set in the bush. The unlikely young man who captures a runaway colt is typical of the male hero characters popularized by Gordon. The work still ranks among Australia’s most famous and best-loved poems. Paterson’s most famous work is “Waltzing Matilda” (1895), a song about a swagman (traveling farmhand) who resists the police. The song is popularly accepted as Australia’s unofficial national anthem.
Henry Lawson ranks with Paterson as the most prominent Australian ballad writer. Lawson wrote a series of ballads about life in the Australian bush. While Paterson celebrated the bush, for Lawson the Australian landscape was a maddening wasteland. Lawson’s most famous ballad, “The Teams,” was first published in 1889 and later revised. Lawson went on to become a distinguished short story writer. He used realism and humor to depict the fragility of life and relationships in the city and the bush.
Prose.
Short story writer and novelist Steele Rudd (the pen name of Arthur Hoey Davis) wrote many stories about struggling selectors (small farmers), who worked hard to make a living from the land. Like many other short story writers of the time, Rudd described the peculiarities of rural Australians. He is best known for a series of semi-autobiographical sketches collected in On Our Selection (1899). Actor and theater manager Bert Bailey adapted the collection into a popular play in 1912. The book and its sequels also have served as the basis for several motion pictures. Bailey contrasted local Australian speech with standard British English. Audiences loved these endearing tales of stubborn and sometimes humorous struggle.
In 1901, Miles Franklin had her novel My Brilliant Career published. The book is a study of the frustrations of youth in a pioneering society. Franklin was passionate about the bush. However, she also believed that bush life deprived young women of independence. In her will, Franklin established the Miles Franklin Literary Award, which became the most important literary prize in Australia. Joseph Furphy’s novel Such Is Life (1903) takes the form of entries from the diary of a government inspector who meets many colorful characters in the bush.
Jeannie Gunn, who also wrote under the name Mrs. Aeneas Gunn, described her experiences with Aboriginal peoples in the Northern Territory in the early 1900’s in the autobiographical work We of the Never-Never (1908). It became one of the most popular works in Australian literature. In a brief collection of short stories called Bush Studies (1902), Barbara Baynton portrayed life in the primitive bush as harsh, ugly, and cruel. The stories shocked readers by challenging the fashionable sentimental view of bush life.
The 1800’s and 1900’s
The Bulletin
As the individual Australian states approached federation, the literature of the time reflected optimism about Australia’s distinctive, democratic potential. However, writers also portrayed the loss and alienation that were part of the bush legend. This more serious view characterizes many examples of the period’s key form, the short story.
In Sydney in 1880, Jules Francois Archibald (whose birth name was John Feltham Archibald) helped establish the influential weekly magazine The Bulletin. He served as its editor for more than 20 years. Archibald encouraged the development of a national literature by inviting the magazine’s readers to contribute short stories and ballads of Australian interest. In 1901, the separate British colonies in Australia combined to form a federal union called the Commonwealth of Australia. A new national literature flourished.
The Bulletin encouraged its writers to participate in the international literary community while concentrating on Australian and Pacific subjects. Until the 1950’s, the magazine’s stable of short story writers updated the bush legend with stories of mateship (friendship among men). Perhaps the leading short story writer published by The Bulletin was Louis Becke. His stories in By Reef and Palm (1894) explored a life on islands in the South Pacific. Becke’s tales have been compared to the stories of the English writer Robert Louis Stevenson. Other important short story writers of the period included Edward George Dyson, Henry Lawson, and Price Warung (the pen name of British-born William Astley).
Some Australian literature during this period reflected fears about Asia. Until the 1960’s, The Bulletin carried the label “Australia for the White Man.” Some writers portrayed Chinese and Japanese men as hostile invaders and Asian women as dangerous. British-born William Lane’s novel White or Yellow? A Story of the Race War of A.D. 1908 (1888) and Carlton Dawe’s A Bride of Japan (1898) exploit these racial stereotypes. .
Fiction of the early 1900’s.
Many Australian writers told stories of the convict past and celebrated the achievements of those who opened up the land for settlement. The novelist and short story writer Vance Palmer excelled in character sketches of ordinary people in his short stories, plays, and novels. Short story writer Peter Cowan built on Palmer’s style. He also went on to experiment with the psychological focus associated with the Modernist movement.
The British novelist D. H. Lawrence visited Australia in 1922 and wrote about the country in his novel Kangaroo (1923). Soon after Lawrence’s visit, the Australian author Katharine Susannah Prichard adapted his descriptive poetic prose style to her novels, plays, and short stories. Prichard’s novel Working Bullocks (1926) described timber cutting in the forests of Western Australia. Her novel Coonardoo (1928) was one of the first sympathetic portrayals of an Aboriginal woman. David Unaipon (also spelled Ngunaitponi) was the first Aboriginal writer to publish a collection of short stories. Native Legends (published about 1929) combines the stories of his Ngarrindjeri (also spelled Norrinyeri) people with elements from Christianity.
In the 1930’s, Australians were producing distinctive novels of increasing complexity, most notably about generations of families slowly worn down by their experiences. Henry Handel Richardson (the pen name of Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson Robertson) wrote a trilogy called “The Fortunes of Richard Mahony” (1930). The work includes Australia Felix (1917), The Way Home (1925), and Ultima Thule (1929). The trilogy is an elaborate chronicle of the material wealth and spiritual emptiness of Australia during the gold rush era of the late 1800’s.
Two writers, Marjorie Barnard and Flora Eldershaw, wrote a number of novels together under the pen name M. Barnard Eldershaw. Like the Richard Mahony trilogy, their books were sagas that traced the changing fortunes of families over several generations. Barnard’s volume of short stories, The Persimmon Tree and Other Stories (1943), reflects trends in Modernist poetry of the time. Xavier Herbert‘s mock epic Capricornia (1938) uses comedy to criticize many aspects of Australian and world politics, including the cruel treatment of Aboriginal people and the misuse of the land.
Christina Stead’s novels are experiments with style and structure and varied in their settings and subjects. Stead is now considered one of Australia’s greatest novelists, though her work made little impact until the late 1960’s. She began her literary career in 1934 with the publication of a volume of related fantasy short stories, The Salzburg Tales. That same year, her first novel, Seven Poor Men of Sydney, appeared. The book describes politically radical workers. Her best-known novel is The Man Who Loved Children (1940), a portrait of a demanding, tyrannical father.
Poetry of the early 1900’s.
C. J. Dennis wrote humorous verses in the colorful slang of a larrikin (young hoodlum). His collection of comic ballads, The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke (1915), tells the story of a good-natured larrikin and his girlfriend. Poet-journalist Dame Mary Gilmore worked for the cause of women’s rights. She was among the earliest Australian poets to support Aboriginal rights. John Shaw Neilson‘s verse poems shimmer with strong imagery and extraordinary perception. His verse reflects the beauty he saw in the bush.
Christopher Brennan developed his own complex understanding of Symbolist poetry, which endows the world with a spiritual atmosphere by attributing to it a mystical quality. Lesbia Harford’s lyrics used colloquial language to address love and the need for socialist revolution, reflecting the political changes of the time. Her poems contrast sharply with Brennan’s obscure style and the abstract poems of Brennan’s contemporary Bernard O’Dowd. The influence of Modernism can be observed in Kenneth Slessor’s light verse and complex poems. In “Five Bells” (1939), a fellow poet falls overboard from a Sydney Harbour ferry and drowns. Between the bells that toll his death, the poem explores time, history, and memory.
Beginning in the late 1930’s, Rex Ingamells led the Jindyworobak movement, which sought to create a distinctive national literature. Jindyworobak poets sought to combine Aboriginal words and legends, often without understanding them, with traditional Australian literature. Ingamells adopted the name “Jindyworobak” from a book on Aboriginal cultures. The book defined the term as an Aboriginal word meaning to annex or to join.
Nonfiction of the 1890’s and early 1900’s.
Australians’ interest in their own geography was reflected in nonfiction writings, including Spinifex and Sand (1898) by the British explorer David Wynford Carnegie and Confessions of a Beachcomber (1908) by the British-born Australian naturalist E. J. Banfield. The Home of the Blizzard (1915), written by the English-born Australian geologist Sir Douglas Mawson, describes experiences in Antarctica.
Australian Legendary Tales (1896) presents Aboriginal myths and legends collected and rewritten by K. Longloh Parker (Catherine, or Katie, Longloh Parker). Journalist and diplomat G. E. “Chinese” Morrison typified the Australian habit of writing about Asia from the perspective of British superiority. His An Australian in China (1895) records his walk from Shanghai, China, to Burma (now Myanmar). British-born scholar James Murdoch wrote the respected three-volume survey A History of Japan (1903-1926), which reflected growing Australian interest in Japan at this time.
On the Wool Track (1910), by the Australian journalist C. E. W. Bean, depicts the hard lives of workers in the wool industry. Bean suggested that their experiences built character. Bean became the official war correspondent for Australia in 1914. He later edited the 12-volume Official History of Australia in the War of 1914-18 (1921-1942). Bean also wrote six of the volumes. He argued that the courage of the Australian soldier resulted from exposure to bush life.
In 1930, W. K. Hancock wrote an interpretive history, Australia, full of insights into the national character. Jack McLaren wrote of his experiences on remote Cape York in My Crowded Solitude (1926). Thomas Wood, a British visitor, wrote an energetic and widely read travelogue, Cobbers (1934). Cobber is an Australian term that means friend. Wood’s book tried to account for the differences he found across Australia.
Several books examined the country’s interior. These included C. T. Madigan’s Central Australia (1936) and Ernestine Hill‘s The Great Australian Loneliness (1937). Francis Ratcliffe, who moved from the United Kingdom to do conservation work, wrote Flying Fox and Drifting Sand (1938). Ion Idriess’s Lasseter’s Last Ride (1931) claims to tell the story of a prospector’s efforts to return to a rich gold deposit that he stumbled upon once and could never find again. The Scottish-born essayist Sir Walter Murdoch wrote whimsical and reflective essays charting the attitudes of Australians. They were especially popular from the 1930’s to the 1950’s.
Other writers brought Australian biography and autobiography to the level of an art form. Earlier autobiographical writing had appeared in the journals and letters of the colonial era and in memoirs of this period published after federation. For example, Rosa Campbell Praed’s My Australian Girlhood: Sketches and Impressions of Bush Life (1902) is typically nostalgic and filled with uncertainty about the legitimacy of European settlement.
Early literature for children.
The 1890’s and early 1900’s brought a wide range of books especially for children. Among the first were British-born author Ethel Turner‘s Seven Little Australians (1894) and its sequel, The Family at Misrule (1895). The novel describes the mischief and rebellion of the seven children of the Woolcott family. The stories rank as classics of Australian children’s literature for their warmth, humor, accurate portrayals of the behavior of children, and strong Australian atmosphere.
Settler values of hard work and honesty are reflected in many popular children’s fiction works of the time. Examples include British-born author Ethel Pedley’s Dot and the Kangaroo (1899) and Mary Grant Bruce’s “Billabong” series. The series, published from 1910 to 1942, is made up of 15 books about the Linton family of Billabong Station, a cattle and sheep farm in the Australian bush. Illustrated classics from the period include The Gumnut Babies (1916) and Snugglepot and Cuddlepie (1918), both written and illustrated by British-born author May Gibbs, and The Magic Pudding (1918) by cartoonist , artist, novelist, and critic Norman Lindsay.
Literature at mid-century
Poetry of the mid-1900’s.
In the early 1940’s, two young poets reacted to the influence of Modernism by staging a highly successful literary hoax. Harold Stewart and James Phillip McAuley, writing under the pen name Ern Malley, composed a set of Surrealist verses to mock modern experimental poetry. They sent the poems to the literary quarterly Angry Penguins, which published them as legitimate literature. The works received much praise from critics. McAuley and Stewart then revealed their hoax, attracting national and international attention. The resulting embarrassment discouraged many Australian poets from radical experimentation. McAuley later became a prominent lyric poet and critic, one of an outstanding generation of Australian poets during the mid-1900’s.
New Zealand-born Douglas Stewart wrote sharp, insightful images of Australian landscapes. Stewart was also a noted critic, editor, and dramatist. Judith Wright’s poetry is concerned with the environment, time, the responsibility of European settlers, and relations between genders. Rosemary Dobson wrote verse marked by understated wit and sophisticated commentary on life and art. A. D. Hope composed witty, satirical verses with new twists on familiar events, myths, and figures. Gwen Harwood wrote of language and friendship with playfulness and irony. Bruce Dawe’s relaxed style and use of Australian colloquialisms anticipated later experimentation. In 1964, Kath Walker’s verse collection We Are Going became the first volume of poems by an Aboriginal Australian woman to be published. From 1988 Walker wrote under her tribal name, Oodgeroo Noonuccal.
Fiction of the mid-1900’s.
The most important literary figure of the mid-1900’s in Australia was Patrick White. White became a novelist of international stature. His major novels include The Tree of Man (1955), about a couple struggling to establish a dairy farm, and Voss (1957), derived from the experiences of the German explorer Ludwig Leichhardt. White also wrote biting satires of suburban life. The short story “Down at the Dump” (1964) explores the narrow-mindedness the author perceived among Australians living in the suburbs. In 1973, White became the first Australian writer to win the Nobel Prize for literature. Other authors, including Thomas Keneally, Thea Astley, Randolph Stow, and Christopher Koch, experimented with the novel under White’s influence.
Martin Boyd produced novels of light social comedy in the 1920’s and 1930’s. In 1946, he completed the novel Lucinda Brayford (revised in 1954), a study of the continuing effect of the past on the present. Boyd further developed this theme in the “Langton Quartet” (1952-1962), four novels about several generations of a family. The Langtons can neither break completely with the United Kingdom nor fully become part of life in Australia.
Randolph Stow wrote To the Islands (1958, revised 1982), a powerful story about an Aboriginal man and a missionary. In later novels, Stow further explored his interest in anthropology.
In 1964, George Henry Johnston‘s autobiographical novel My Brother Jack was published. The story deals with two brothers in the years before and during World War II (1939-1945). Jack, a rugged outdoorsman and athlete, accidentally injures his knee at military training camp and cannot serve overseas. His sensitive younger brother becomes a leading war correspondent, as Johnston himself had been. In 1965, Colin Johnson wrote Wild Cat Falling. The book tells the story of a part-Aboriginal boy growing up in the outskirts of a country town in Western Australia during the 1960’s. Johnson later wrote under the Aboriginal name Mudrooroo.
Important short story writers of the mid-1900’s include Nancy Cato, Alan Marshall, David Rowbotham, and Russian-born Judah Waten. Instead of bush adventures, short stories at this time focused on identity and assimilation (becoming a part of the local culture). Mena Abdullah and Ray Matthew collaborated to write about experiences outside mainstream Australian society in their innovative short story collection The Time of the Peacock (1965). The stories of Peter Cowan, Shirley Hazzard, Hal Porter, and Patrick White show an increasing international focus.
Drama.
Significant modern Australian drama begins with the work of playwrights Oriel Gray, Mona Brand, and Ray Lawler. Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (1955) is about women’s life choices and the friendship between two aging sugarcane cutters. Like an earlier important play by Betty Roland, The Touch of Silk (1928, revised 1955), Lawler’s drama denies that the Australian bushman is a hero. Patrick White’s plays move between realism and abstraction to satirize Australian life.
Alan Seymour‘s The One Day of the Year (1960, revised 1985) challenges Australian beliefs about the observance of the patriotic holiday Anzac Day . Anzac Day honors those who have served in the armed forces of Australia and New Zealand. It originated as a commemoration of the attempt by the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) to seize the Gallipoli Peninsula from the Ottoman Empire during World War I (1914-1918).
Nonfiction of the mid-1900’s.
A number of influential books of social commentary appeared in the 1960’s. The Australian architect Robin Boyd‘s The Australian Ugliness (1960, revised 1968) criticized domestic architecture and interior design. Donald Horne, an author and editor for The Bulletin, questioned traditional attitudes about Australian society in The Lucky Country (1964, with multiple revised editions). Geoffrey Blainey discussed his theory of how Australia’s location influenced its colonial origins in The Tyranny of Distance (1966, revised 1982).
Alan Moorehead revisited colorful episodes from Australia’s past in Cooper’s Creek (1963), about the exploration of Australia’s interior. Moorehead’s The Fatal Impact (1966) tells about European exploration of the South Pacific. Historian Manning Clark’s narrative A History of Australia was published in six volumes from 1962 to 1987. Hal Porter’s intimate and controversial autobiography The Watcher on the Cast-Iron Balcony (1963) describes his early life in the Melbourne area.
Recent Australian literature
Children’s literature.
Writing for children in Australia became an important literary category in the 1960’s. Illustrated stories and novels for young readers depicted a multicultural Australia and questioned the bush myth. Many books told the story of children lost in the bush, a common theme in Australian art and literature, from the child’s perspective. Authors such as Hesba Fay Brinsmead, Mavis Thorpe Clark, and Ivan Southall wrote important books for young readers.
A number of children’s books by and for Aboriginal Australians use Aboriginal narrative styles and bilingual text to depict the stories and culture of the peoples. Do Not Go Around the Edges (1990), written by Daisy Utemorrah and illustrated by Pat Torres, combines Utemorrah’s poetry with her life story and explores the experience of growing up in two cultures. Maybe Tomorrow (1998, enlarged edition 2010) is an autobiography written by Boori Pryor, with the collaboration and photographs of Meme McDonald. It eloquently describes the Aboriginal author’s experiences growing up in Australia in the mid-1900’s.
In the early 2000’s, books for children and young adults focused on the experiences of refugees and new migrants to Australia. Important examples include Morris Gleitzman’s novels Boy Overboard (2002) and Girl Underground (2004). Shaun Tan’s The Lost Thing (2000) and the graphic novel The Arrival (2006) explore similar themes. A graphic novel is a book-length story that uses the conventions of comic books.
Recent poetry.
Les Murray, one of Australia’s best-known modern poets, wrote verse that honors Australian rural life in sophisticated language. Murray also compiled The New Oxford Book of Australian Verse in 1986 (expanded in 1991 and 1996).
The writings of Peter Porter, an Australian-born poet who lived in London, are strongly influenced by his Australian origins. John Tranter continually revises old poetic forms and influences, employing parody and satire.
Poets such as Lionel Fogarty, a leading spokesman for Aboriginal rights, and Mudrooroo use satire and nonstandard English. Among other issues, their poetry highlights the loss of Australian Aboriginal languages.
J. S. Harry’s satirical “Peter Henry Lepus” poems explore philosophy and world events through the eyes of a storybook rabbit. Dorothy Porter and Steven Herrick have written popular verse novels. Other important recent poets include Robert Adamson, Adam Aitken, Lisa Bellear, Pam Brown, Joanne Burns, Robert Gray, Antigone Kefala (born in Romania to Greek parents), Jennifer Maiden, Gig Ryan, Vivian Smith, Greek-born Dimitris Tsaloumas, Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Samuel Wagan Watson, and Alan Wearne.
Recent Australian novelists
have been highly successful internationally. In 1982, Thomas Keneally won the Booker Prize (the United Kingdom’s best-known literary award) for Schindler’s Ark. The work is known as Schindler’s List in the United States. The novel tells the story of a German businessman who saved the lives of more than 1,000 Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland during the Holocaust. Keneally’s works explore historical crises and themes of goodness, guilt, and sin. Peter Carey won the Booker Prize twice, for Oscar and Lucinda (1988), about two compulsive gamblers, and for True History of the Kelly Gang (2000), about a famous band of bushrangers. Richard Flanagan received the award, at that time called the Man Booker Prize, for Narrow Road to the Deep North in 2014.
New Zealand-born Ruth Park won critical praise for her novel Swords and Crowns and Rings (1977), about a dwarf growing up in an Australian country town. Author and journalist Christopher Koch’s The Year of Living Dangerously (1978) is a political thriller set in 1965, during the time shortly before the downfall of Indonesian President Sukarno. The Transit of Venus (1980) by Shirley Hazzard describes the experiences of two sisters who leave Australia to start a new life in England.
British-born novelist and short story writer Elizabeth Jolley mixed the absurd with a realist’s concern for responsibility. Her psychological mystery story The Well (1986) centers on two women who live together on a farm. One night their car strikes a man, and the women throw the body into a well on the farm. The incident drives the two women apart. In Cloudstreet (1991), Tim Winton explores the stormy relationship between two families sharing a house. The novel was adapted to the stage and is among Australia’s best-loved plays.
The novelist and poet David Malouf is an elegant and highly successful writer. His novel Remembering Babylon (1993) tells the story of an English boy who, after living among Aboriginal people for 16 years, finds his way back to the white world. The novelist and short story writer Thea Astley creates sharp, humorous portraits of small-town life. Her novel Drylands (1999) is about a drought-stricken rural community
Short fiction after 1970 is sensitive to the concerns of women and Australian society in the country’s post-colonial era. Carey, Malouf, and Winton are leading short story writers. Others include Carmel Bird, Beverley Farmer, Peter Goldsworthy, and Vietnamese-born Nam Le. Aboriginal storyteller Paddy Roe collaborated with scholar Stephen Muecke and artist Krim Benterrak to record traditional stories and explain how they show the meaning of the land in Aboriginal life. They created the important collection Reading the Country (1984).
Novelist and essayist Brian Castro, born in Hong Kong, combines European and Asian intellectual and literary traditions. His critical and fiction writing, including the 2003 fictional autobiography Shanghai Dancing, showcases the growing importance of Asian-Australian writers.
Several novelists have explored Australia’s naive attitudes about European and Aboriginal Australian history. The most important of their books include Dead Europe (2005) by Christos Tsiolkas, Carpentaria (2006) by Alexis Wright, and Benang: From the Heart (1999) and That Dead Man Dance (2010) by Kim Scott. These novels combine fable and social criticism.
Recent autobiography.
Modern Australian autobiography continues to explore nationhood and identity. This nationhood now reflects many cultures, including those of Aboriginal people and various minority groups. Albert Facey’s autobiography, A Fortunate Life (1981), is about the extraordinary life of a simple man. In My Place (1987), Sally Morgan told of coming to terms with her Aboriginal heritage. Jill Ker Conway’s The Road from Coorain (1989) recounts her struggle to make a place for herself in Australian educational life. It earned her a reputation as an important feminist writer.
Rather than defining identity through experiences of childhood and education, recent Australian autobiography often describes crises of migration, illness and death, and war. Among the most successful recent Australian autobiographies has been Romulus, My Father (1998), by philosopher Raimond Gaita, who arrived in Australia at the age of four with his Romanian family. His book deals with migration, mental illness, and fatherhood. Of enormous importance and impact have been the testimonies of Indigenous people contained in the 1997 government report Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families. Testimonies from the report were edited by Carmel Bird and published as The Stolen Children: Their Stories (1998).
Autobiography has been embraced by Jewish Australians to characterize the ongoing effects of the Holocaust. Aboriginal women have used autobiography to bring their experience to a broad audience. Ruby Langford Ginibi’s Don’t Take Your Love to Town (1988) describes the changing ways of life in rural and urban Aboriginal communities. It tells about the disintegration of traditional lifestyles and explores the renewal of Aboriginal culture in recent years.
Recent drama.
David Williamson has dominated Australian drama since the early 1970’s, with entertaining satires of Australian life and manners. Dramatists such as New Zealand-born Alexander Buzo, New Zealand-born Alma de Groen, Dorothy Hewett, and John Romeril have written more imaginative and stylistically varied plays. Michael Gow and Louis Nowra write on cultural history, and Stephen Sewell and Joanna Murray-Smith dramatize power relations. While Williamson and his peers focused on a white, middle-class Australian identity, other playwrights have explored various identities within multicultural Australia. For example, Jimmy Chi, Jack Davis, Wesley Enoch, and Eva Johnson have dramatized modern Aboriginal experience in formally varied and bilingual plays.
Recent nonfiction.
Germaine Greer began her career as a leading feminist with The Female Eunuch (1970). Robert Hughes won recognition as an historian with his history of early Australia, The Fatal Shore (1986). Hughes was also a noted art critic, known for his survey of modern art in The Shock of the New (1980, revised 1991). Clive James became an internationally known essayist. His essays on cultural and historical figures, primarily from the 1900’s, were collected in Cultural Amnesia (2007).
In Tracks (1980), Robyn Davidson recounted her solo journey on a camel across the vast deserts of western Australia. Burnum Burnum (born Henry Penrith) provided an Aboriginal perspective on the land and its history in Burnum Burnum’s Aboriginal Australia: A Traveller’s Guide (1988). Helen Garner aroused controversy with her attacks on some feminist attitudes in The First Stone (1995). She also gained attention for Joe Cinque’s Consolation (2004), her examination of an Australian murder trial. Anna Funder’s Stasiland (2002) vividly describes life in totalitarian East Germany following the end of World War II. Several influential books have changed attitudes about how people lived in early settlements in Australia. Among them are The Other Side of the Frontier (1981) by Henry Reynolds, Dancing With Strangers (2003) by Inga Clendinnen, and The Colony: A History of Early Sydney (2009) by Grace Karskens.
