Laurie Clancy
Laurie Clancy (1942–2010) was a leading Australian critic, fiction-writer, and teacher. His novel A Collapsible Man (1975) was a joint winner of the National Book Council Award for Fiction while Perfect Love won the FAW/ANA Literary Award in 1984. He published book-length studies of Christina Stead, Xavier Herbert, and Vladimir Nabokov as well as A Reader's Guide to Australian Fiction (1992). In 1980, he joined ABR as associate editor.
Marjorie Barnard, is, of course, a collaborator with Flora Eldershaw in the writing of five novels as well as several other books, under the collective name of M. Barnard Eldershaw. The stories in this collection, most of which were first published in various Australian magazines before they were brought together in 1943, represent her only attempt at solo fiction writing. All of them have some va ... (read more)
Confronted with a tide like Thomas Hardy’s English the reviewer is likely to exclaim waspishly ‘I know that!’, but any tendency towards frivolity disappears once one begins to read this book. This is an extraordinarily thorough, exhaustive and illuminating study of the amazingly varied resources Hardy drew on for his language. The book is part of a series known as The Language Library and it ... (read more)
This sixth work of fiction by Frank Moorhouse consists of four groups of related stories. The first and by far the best group, ‘Pacific City’, contains six stories centred around the figure of Irving Bow, proprietor of a cinema located near an unbuilt town named Pacific City during the late nineteen-twenties (not the nineteen-thirties as the back cover claims).
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A few years ago I was teaching an anthology of Australian short stories to a group of very bright Spanish honours students at the University of Barcelona. As one would expect, some of the stories were written by Australia’s most famous and highly regarded writers but at the end of the course the students voted unanimously for Serge Liberman’s ‘Envy’s Fire’ as the finest story they had re ... (read more)
An Illywhacker, Peter Carey reminds us at the start of his latest and by far his longest novel, is a trickster or spieler. Wilkes cites it in Kylie Tennant’s famous novel of 1941, The Battlers. The other epigraph to the novel is also preoccupied with deception and is familiar to anyone who knows Carey’s work: Brian Kiernan used it as the title of his anthology of new Australian short story wri ... (read more)
Leonard Mann’s account of his experiences in World War One, Flesh in Armour, has recently been reissued. It may be the case that there are certain experiences that are impossible to write about unless one has personally undergone them. The three great Australian classics of World War One – Flesh in Armour, The Middle Parts of Fortune and When the Blackbirds Sing – all convey an air of total ... (read more)
This is the largest and most eclectic of Wilding’s four collections of short stories so far. Its 284 pages include stories ranging from ninety pages and two. Mostly written in the first person, they range in space between England and Australia, go back to the childhood of the narrator(s) (sometimes identified as Mike or Michael, making the autobiographical inferences irresistible) and in mode ra ... (read more)
Laurie Clancy reviews 'Henry Handel Richardson: The letters' edited by Clive Probyn and Bruce Steele
The status of Henry Handel Richardson as a writer in Australia has always been somewhat problematic. Some people put that down to the fact that she was an expatriate. Leaving Australia at the age of eighteen, she returned only once, very briefly, in 1912. Expatriates, however, have often been paranoid about their reputation in this country and inclined to imagine that the Australian public is puni ... (read more)
Gideon Haigh is turning into something of a one-man industry on cricket in Australia. Following highly successful books on the Packer revolution, Allan Border’s reign, and a recent defence of the Ashes, he has now turned his attention to the crucial years 1949 to 1971 when Australia went from being undisputed world champions to a side being overtaken, not merely by England but for the first time ... (read more)
