Vintage

In Glenice Whitting’s début novel, a dying man, Frederick, recalls his childhood in Footscray from before World War I to the end of his life at the close of the twentieth century. The theme is the split identity of an Australian-born man who has strong connections to his German heritage. His formative influence is his charismatic grandmother who raises him when he is rejected by his mother. This remains the centre of his personality even when, as he grows older, he craves acceptance as an Australian. Frederick is more like a first-generation immigrant than a second, especially as the grandmother names him Frederick Joseph Heinrich Frank Fritschenburg, a name destined to become a burden in his childhood as Australia succumbs to rabid anti-German propaganda during World War I. A similar predicament impels the family to change their name to Fraser.

Consider the plight of the established novelist. The readership (that’s us) comes to recognise a particular style, a particular set of themes, and presumably that is one of the reasons to go on buying the writer’s books. Should the next book always be in the same mould – in which case we might become a tad bored – or should there be something quite out of character, causing us to gasp with disbelief? After all, it is usually disastrous when a diva starts singing popular songs. Christopher Koch’s new book sets up these kinds of tension. Something new about what is remembered?

It is surely impossible to read a new work of Australian historical fiction without doing so through the lens of Inga Clendinnen’s much-discussed essay The History Question (2006). One of Clendinnen’s arguments is against claims for the superiority of fiction over history because the former brings the past to life through imaginative empathy, allowing readers to ‘get inside the experience’, while history is merely a desiccated ‘world of facts’. Clendinnen also sets out the differences she sees between fiction and history, which are standing on either side of a ‘ravine’. In her response to correspondence in the following Quarterly Essay, she expressed her position concisely: ‘Fiction carries us deeply, effortlessly into imagined individual subjectivities. History is the sustained attempt to penetrate the minds and experiences of actual others.’

On Valentine’s Day, the State Library of Victoria will host its third literary speed-dating dinner, an event that makes explicit something that has long been implicit in contemporary courtship chatter: you can judge a lover by their book. Participants in these events have about three minutes to impress each potential partner with the one book they brought along for show-and-tell. At the first such dinner, one man brought along The Story of O, which at least made it clear that he was there for a good time, if not a long one.

Elaine Lewis established and ran the Australian Bookshop in Paris from 1996 to 1998. It acted as an outlet in France for Australian books, a nexus for travelling Australian writers and a cultural hub in the Parisian arts scene. This is the story of the bookshop in its heyday, before Lewis returned to Australia and the bookshop retired to an online existence.

If you can say immediately what you think a novel is ‘about’, then the chances are that it may not be a very good novel. Fiction as a genre gives writers and readers imaginative room to move, to work on a vertical axis of layers of meaning as well as along the horizontal forward movement of narrative development ...

How much do you care about sheep? I mean really care about sheep. Because The Ballad of Desmond Kale is up to its woolly neck in them. It’s an unusual and inspired variation on the classic Australian colonial novel of hunters for fortune, for identity and for redemption ...

So often, the language used to discuss Australian literature is that of anxiety. A.A. Phillips’s ‘cultural cringe’, coined in 1950, is never far from the critical surface as readers and commentators grapple with questions of national and literary identity. The report of the 1995 Miles Franklin Award’s judges offers one such example ...

Charles Edwin Woodrow Bean was born in Bathurst, New South Wales, in 1879, but his family moved to England ten years later. Bean returned to Australia in 1904 and became a junior reporter on the Sydney Morning Herald. On assignment in western New South Wales to produce a series of articles on the wool industry, Bean decided that the most important part of the industry was the men on whose labour it depended. He collected these articles in On the Wool Track, published in 1910. Bean’s monument is his official history of Australia in World War I, which can be – and has been – interpreted as an exegesis of his famous sentence: ‘it was on 25th April, 1915, that the consciousness of Australian nationhood was born’. But the earlier On the Wool Track is an Australian classic, also: an elegant memorial of a vanished pastoral age.

Kate Finlayson’s first novel is a bumpy bronco ride, as exhilarating, confronting, and messy as the Northern Territory that she writes about so passionately. Finlayson’s protagonist, Connie, is stuck barmaiding in a rough city pub. Despite her street smarts and university degree, Connie is starting to go to the dogs along with the pub’s patrons. She decides to leave Sydney to pursue a post-adolescent obsession with Rod Ansell, the inspiration for the Crocodile Dundee films. Ansell (his real name) is hiding somewhere in the Territory, and Connie fantasises about finding him and turning him into her ideal lover, her longed-for soul mate.