Outback Press

‘Love, longing and loneliness: The fiction of Elizabeth Jolley’ by Laurie Clancy

Elizabeth Jolley has been around as a writer for some time. Her work dates back to the late 1950s (she came to Australia from England in 1959) and her stories began appearing in anthologies and journals in the mid1960s, but it was not until 1976 that her first collection, Five Acre Virgin and other stories, was published by the Fremantle Arts Centre Press. Since then, her rate of publication has been phenomenal, and it is perhaps no accident that it coincided with the rise of an indigenous Western Australian Press: three of her first four books were published by the FACP, which, in its few years of existence, has been responsible for the discovery of a remarkable amount of talent.

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Australian Conservatism edited by Cameron Hazelhurst & The Deep North by Deane Wells

by Dan O'Neill •

April 1980, no. 19

Dan O'Neill reviews 'Australian Conservatism' by Cameron Hazelhurst, 'The Deep North' by Deane Wells, and 'Illusions of Power' by Michael Sexton

It is impossible to think clearly about modern ideologies without perceiving their rootedness in class-related concepts of a better society. Nor can we understand this without seeing that class is a radical rearrangement in fact and in political discourse of the realities previously referred to as ‘orders’ and ‘ranks’. This vast shift into simpler and fewer forms of relation to the means of production is one way of understanding the enormous change in power and dynamism of western capitalist societies that we abbreviate for discussion into the familiar terms of the French and Industrial Revolutions.

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Words & Classes on Having Words by Chris Mann

by Roger McDonald •

September 1978, no. 4

At a lucid moment in this otherwise obscure document the author writes: ‘It strikes me that each piece is more or less obvious and I hope I’m not writing in code – suppose there’s no way to tell.’ Never has the shotgun theory had such a devout adherent. If the author can’t tell, what hope has the reader? The best one can wish for Words and Classes is that it is a deliberately nonsensical fraud, concocted by part-time schizophrenics at Outback Press. Here are the opening three lines: ‘an opportunist on crossing out the case: mind the spelling/ on trying to sell credit to he who has none: if I had the time, I’d ask you / to commit your sums you need take your fingers out of your mouth’.

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Outback Press

Love, longing and loneliness: The fiction of Elizabeth Jolley

Australian Conservatism edited by Cameron Hazelhurst & The Deep North by Deane Wells

Words & Classes on Having Words by Chris Mann