Australian Literature: an overview

Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a sovereign country comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands. Australia's capital is Canberra, and its largest city is Sydney. The country's other major metropolitan areas are Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, and Adelaide. Indigenous Australians inhabited the continent for about 65,000 years prior to the first arrival of Dutch explorers in the early 17th century, who named it New Holland. During its early Western history, Australia was a collection of British colonies, therefore, its recognised literary tradition begins with and is linked to the broader tradition of English literature. Thus, Australian literature can be categorized into three segments------- Indigenous/Aboriginal literature, Classic Australian Literature and Contemporary Australian literature.

INDIGENOUS/ ABORIGINAL LITERATURE

At the point of the first colonization, Indigenous Australians had not developed a system of writing, so the first literary accounts of Aboriginal people come from the journals of early European explorers, which contain descriptions of first contact, both violent and friendly. Early accounts by Dutch explorers and by the English buccaneer William Dampier wrote of the "natives of New Holland" as being "barbarous savages", but by the time of Captain James Cook and First Fleet marine Watkin Tench (the era of Jean-Jacques Rousseau), accounts of Aborigines were more sympathetic and romantic.

David Unaipon (1872–1967) is known as the first Aboriginal author who provided the first accounts of Aboriginal mythology written by an Aboriginal: Legendary Tales of the Aborigines. Oodgeroo Noonuccal (1920–1993), the first Aboriginal Australian to publish a book of verse was famous Aboriginal poet, writer and rights activist credited with publishing the first Aboriginal book of verse: We Are Going (1964). Sally Morgan's novel My Place was considered a breakthrough memoir about the experiences of the Stolen Generations, thus, bringing indigenous stories to wider notice. My Place is a story of a young Aboriginal girl growing up to false heritage and not knowing where she is from, an autobiographical account of Sally Morgan’s discovery of her family’s Indigenous roots, revolving around Morgan's own hometown, Perth, Western Australia, and also Corunna Downs Station-------- a search for truth into which a whole family is gradually drawn, finally freeing the tongues of the author’s mother and grandmother, allowing them to tell their own stories.

The voices of Indigenous Australians are being increasingly noticed and include the playwright Jack Davis and Kevin Gilbert. Jack Davis identified himself with the Western Australian Nyoongah tribe, also spelt Noongar, and he included some of this language into his plays. In conjunction with Davis’ use of his native language, academics have inferred that his work includes themes of Aboriginality and Aboriginalism. These literary concepts are used to communicate the relationship between cultures in his plays. Aboriginalism is much like Orientalism, where White society sees those of different race and culture as 'the other'. The concept is portrayed as white society needing to fix those cultural differences, which is referenced in Davis’ plays Kullark, The Dreamers, and No Sugar etc. Aboriginality encompasses the response to Aboriginalism and the reaction of Indigenous writers in reclaiming their culture and history. It is seen as a protest against white imperialism and assimilation policies that dominated the beginning of white settlement in Australia. The concept, Aboriginality, within literature also includes proposals of how both white and Indigenous people can move forward. This concept was introduced in the 1960s when Aboriginal literature was first published, proposing a new way forward.

Indigenous authors who have won Australia's high prestige Miles Franklin Award include Kim Scott who was joint winner (with Thea Astley) in 2000 for Benang, and the main contexts in the novel deals with the process of "breeding out the colour". This was a process in which children were forcibly removed from their homes and assimilated into the white Australian society. These children were forced to "breed" with white Australians in order to lessen the appearance of the Aboriginal in them. The novel presents how difficult it is to form a working history of a population who had been historically uprooted from their past following Harley, a young man who has gone through the process of “breeding out the colour”, as he pieces together his family history through documentation, such as photograph and his grandfather’s notes, as well as memories and experiences. Harley and his family have undergone a process of colonial scientific experimentation called “breeding of the colour” which separated individuals from their Indigenous Australian families and origins. Again in 2011 Scott achieved Miles Franklin Award for That Deadman Dance, exploring the early contact between the Aboriginal Noongar people, European settlers and American whalers. Alexis Wright won the award in 2007 for her novel Carpentaria. Melissa Lucashenko won the award in 2019 for her novel Too Much Lip, which was also short-listed for the Stella Prize for Australian women's writing.

Many notable works have been written by non-indigenous Australians on Aboriginal themes. Examples include the poems of Judith Wright; The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (The story is written from the perspective of Jimmy Blacksmith, an Indigenous Australian man on a mission of revenge. The story is a fictionalised retelling of the life of the infamous indigenous bushranger Jimmy Governor.) by Thomas Keneally, Ilbarana by Donald Stuart, and the short story by David Malouf: "The Only Speaker of his Tongue".

Classic Australian Literature

For centuries before the British settlement of Australia, European writers wrote fictional accounts of an imaginings of a Great Southern Land. The British satirist, Jonathan Swift, set the land of the Houyhnhnms of Gulliver's Travels to the west of Tasmania. In 1797 the British Romantic poet Robert Southey—then a young Jacobin—included a section in his collection, "Poems", a selection of poems under the heading, "Botany Bay Eclogues," in which he portrayed the plight and stories of transported convicts in New South Wales

POETRY: Among the important authors of classic Australian works are the poets Henry Lawson, Banjo Paterson, Dorothea Mackellar (wrote the iconic patriotic poem My Country). Henry Lawson was an Australian writer and bush poet of the colonial period. Lawson had no romantic illusions about a 'rural idyll', his grim view of the outback was far removed from the romantic idyll of brave horsemen and beautiful scenery depicted in the poetry of Banjo Paterson, whom he assaulted in his most successful prose collection is While the Billy Boils, published in 1896 that virtually reinvented Australian realism. Most of his work focuses on the Australian bush, such as the desolate "Past Carin'", and is considered by some to be among the first accurate descriptions of Australian life as it was at the time. His recurring characters include Joe Wilson, Jack Mitchell, Steelman and Smith, Dave Regan, Jim Bently and/or Andy Page, Brummy Hewson. Banjo Paterson was an Australian bush poet focusing particularly on the rural and outback areas, including the district around Binalong, New South Wales, where he spent much of his childhood. Paterson's more notable poems include "Clancy of the Overflow" (1889), "The Man from Snowy River" (1890) and "Waltzing Matilda" (1895), a bush ballad regarded widely as Australia's unofficial national anthem. Lawson and Paterson clashed in the famous "Bulletin Debate" over the nature of life in Australia with Lawson considered to have the harder edged view of the Bush and Paterson the romantic. Significant poets of the 20th century included Kenneth Slessor, A. D. Hope (wrote a book of "answers" to other poems, including one in response to the poem "To His Coy Mistress" by Andrew Marvell.), Judith Wright and Les Murray (described himself, perhaps half-jokingly, as the last of the "Jindyworobaks’ ", an Australian literary movement whose white members sought to promote indigenous Australian ideas and customs, particularly in poetry).

NOVEL: The first novel to be published in Australia was a crime novel by Henry Savery. Early popular works tended to be the 'ripping yarn' variety, telling tales of derring-do against the new frontier of the Australian outback. Writers such as Rolf Boldrewood (Robbery under Arms), Marcus Clarke (For the Term of His Natural Life: novelisation of life as a convict in early Australian history. At times relying on seemingly implausible coincidences, the story follows the fortunes of Rufus Dawes, a young man transported for a murder that he did not commit. The book clearly conveys the harsh and inhumane treatment meted out to the convicts, some of whom were transported for relatively minor crimes, and graphically describes the conditions the convicts experienced. The novel was based on research by the author as well as a visit to the penal settlement of Port Arthur, Tasmania. ), Henry Handel Richardson (The Fortunes of Richard Mahony) and Joseph Furphy (Such Is Life: It is a fictional account of the life of rural dwellers often described as Australia’s Moby-Dick because, like Melville’s book, it was neglected for thirty or forty years before being discovered as a classic.) embodied these stirring ideals in their tales and, particularly the latter, tried to accurately record the vernacular language of the common Australian. These novelists also gave valuable insights into the penal colonies which helped form the country and also the early rural settlements. Rolf Boldrewood: Thomas Alexander Browne (6 August 1826 – 11 March 1915) was an Australian author who published many of his works under the pseudonym Rolf Boldrewood. The name Boldrewood came from a line in the poem Marmion by Browne's favourite author, Sir Walter Scott. He is best known for his 1882 bush ranging novel Robbery Under Arms, considered a classic of Australian colonial literature. Writing in the first person, the narrator Dick Marston tells the story of his life and loves and his association with the notorious bushranger Captain Starlight, a renegade from a noble English family, set in the bush and goldfields of Australia in the 1850s. As a ripping yarn, originally told in periodical instalments, the story mostly centres around the lovable villains, who are adventurers and thieves but nevertheless with high moral standards and, in some ways, trapped by circumstances of their own making.

In 1838 The Guardian: a tale by Anna Maria Bunn was published in Sydney. It was the first Australian novel printed and published in mainland Australia and the first Australian novel written by a woman. It is a Gothic romance.
Miles Franklin (My Brilliant Career) and Jeannie Gunn (We of the Never Never) wrote of lives of European pioneers in the Australian bush from a female perspective. Ruth Park wrote of the sectarian divisions of life in impoverished 1940s inner city Sydney (The Harp in the South). The experience of Australian PoWs in the Pacific War is recounted by Nevil Shute in A Town like Alice.

Contemporary Australian Literature

Patrick White (1912–1990) became the first Australian to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1973 "for an epic and psychological narrative art which has introduced a new continent into literature". White's first novel, Happy Valley (1939) was inspired by the landscape and his work as a jackaroo on the land in the Snowy Mountains, but became an international success and won the Australian Literary Society's Gold Medal. Born to a conservative, wealthy Anglo-Australian family, he later wrote of conviction in left-wing causes and lived as a homosexual. Never destined for life on the land, he enrolled at Cambridge where he became a published poet. White developed as a novelist, but also had major theatrical success—including The Season at Sarsaparilla. White followed The Tree of Man (is a domestic drama chronicling the lives of the Parker family and their changing fortunes over many decades. It is steeped in Australian folklore and cultural myth, and is recognised as the author's attempt to infuse the idiosyncratic way of life in the remote Australian bush with some sense of the cultural traditions and ideologies that the epic history of Western civilisation has bequeathed to Australian society in general. The title comes from A. E. Housman's poetry cycle A Shropshire Lad.) and Voss ( , which became the first winner of the Miles Franklin Award. A subsequent novel, Riders in the Chariot also received a Miles Franklin award—but White later refused to permit his novels to be entered for literary prizes. He turned down a knighthood, and various literary awards—but in 1973 accepted the Nobel Prize. David Marr wrote of biography of White in 1991. Flaws in the Glass is the autobiography of White. White used the fictional setting of Sarsaparilla in his novels The Solid Mandala and Riders in the Chariot and his dramas The Season at Sarsaparilla and The Cheery Soul. His play Night on the Bald Mountain is considered to be the first true Australian tragedy.
Peter Carey: His first novel Bliss deals with the resuscitated life of Harry Joy. The second novel Illywhacker is a metafiction and magic realism narrated by the confidence man Herbert Badgery telling the story of his picaresque life in Australia. Carey won 1988 Booker Prize and 1989 Miles Franklin Award for his novel Oscar and Lucinda. Carey won 2001 Booker Prize and Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for his novel True History of the Kelly Gang, a fictional autobiography of Ned Kelly. Jack Maggs is a reworking of Dickens’ The Great Expectation, based on Magwitch and his search for Pip. My Life As a Fake (2003) drew its inspiration from McAuley and Stewart’s 1944 poetry hoax, whereas his Theft: A Love Story (2006) lampooned the international art market with a story of art fraud. Carey’s other 21st-century efforts included Parrot and Olivier in America (2009), focusing on a character modelled on 19th-century French social observer Alexis de Tocqueville, and Amnesia (2015), which employs cybercrime as the lens through which to view the Battle of Brisbane (1942), a clash between U.S. soldiers and Australian military personnel and civilians during World War II. A Long Way from Home is the last novel of Carey.
David Malouf: Johnno, the first novel by Malouf is a semi-autobiographical novel written in first person past tense and the narrator, nicknamed as “Dante”, tells the autobiographical account of his friendship with Johnno. An Imaginary Life is the second novel (novella) of Malouf, telling the story of the Roman poet Ovid during his exile in Tomis. Remembering Babylon is a magic realism, covering the themes of isolation, cultural conflict and consciousness of a boy Gemmy Fairley marooned in a foreign land and raised by the aborigines wrestles with his own identity on moving back to Europe. Ransom is a retelling of the story of Iliad from books 22 to 24, beginning with Achilles’ mourning on the death of Patroclus.
Geraldine Brooks: Her first novel Years of Wonders is a fictional account of the historical Bubonic Plague in 1666. She won Pulitzar Prize for fiction for her second novel March, retelling Louisa May Alcott’s novel “Little Woman” from the point of view of protagonist’s absent father Mr. March. Brooke tells the life of King David from the point of view of Prophet Nathan in his novel The Secret Chord, the title of which is taken from Leonard Cohen’s song Hallelujah. Brooks’ Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women is a non-fictional book that enquires the possibility of Islamic Feminism.
Colleen McCullough: Named a “living treasure” by the National Trust of Australia in 1997, Colleen McCullough, author of The Thorn Birds (1977) and the Masters of Rome series of historical novels (1990–2007), remained one of the country’s most prolific and best-selling novelists.
Thomas Keneally: Among his publications in the new millennium were American Scoundrel (2002), a biography of the infamous American politician and Civil War general Daniel Sickles; The Daughters of Mars (2012), a novel about volunteer nurses during World War I; and Shame and the Captives (2013), a fictionalized account of prison breakouts by Japanese prisoners of war in New South Wales during World War II.
Richard Flanagan Novelist, historian, and film director who won the 2002 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for best book for his novel Gould’s Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish (2001), the story of a convict living in 19th-century Tasmania. Flanagan’s engaging mystery The Unknown Terrorist (2006) offers a cynical view of the world in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks, and his The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2013) was much praised for its brutally stark depiction of the life of a prisoner of war during World War II.
Grunge lit (an abbreviation for "grunge literature") is an Australian literary genre usually applied to fictional or semi-autobiographical writing concerned with dissatisfied and disenfranchised young people living in suburban or inner-city surroundings. It was typically written by "new, young authors" who examined "gritty, dirty, real existences", of lower-income young people, whose lives revolve around a nihilistic pursuit of casual sex, recreational drug use and alcohol, which are used to escape boredom or a general flightiness. Romantic love is seldom, as instant gratification has become the norm. It has been described as both a sub-set of dirty realism and an offshoot of Generation X literature. The term "grunge" is from the 1990s-era music genre of grunge. Since its invention, the term "grunge lit" has been retrospectively applied to novels written as early as 1977, namely Helen Garner's Monkey Grip. Grunge lit is often raw, explicit, and vulgar, even to the point of Justine Ettler's The River Ophelia (1995) being called pornographic.

Fear of terrorism in the post-September 11 world is central in Janette Turner Hospital’s political thrillers Due Preparations for the Plague (2003) and Orpheus Lost (2007). The Secret River (2005), another tale of the life of a British convict in Australia, earned Kate Grenville the 2006 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for best book. Other Australians who published novels of note in the first decades of the 21st century were Sonya Hartnett, Roger McDonald, Alexis Wright, Steven Carroll, Steve Toltz, Christos Tsiolkas, Anna Funder, Patricia Mackintosh, and Sofie Laguna.

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