Australian writers

It fascinates me how young Edison was able to develop a love of books. Picturing the world he described, I can’t see how he could grow to become such an avid reader. He tells me, ‘the only thing I could see in my village was a radio…but then not everybody owned one…’

Since his disappearance, Leichhardt has accrued a massive secondary literature. The historical studies conventionally move through the evidence towards a hypothesis of the explorer’s fate, but Hurley is more concerned with contrasting representations than likely answers.

She was in full possession of her craft from the very start; The Transit of Venus amounts to a general mobilisation of literary resources that were already present, but not yet fully evident, in the earlier stories.

Rowe brings remarkable discernment as she notices what Farmer notices, abstract and concrete – death, insect morphology, marine life – all ‘egalitarian in the designation of worthiness.’ She does so with deference to Farmer’s intense lyricism and with appropriate essayistic economy.

This, Clive James’s final book, is a collection of his writings on Larkin and his work. James takes his title from the final words of Larkin’s ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ (1959). The ninety four pages, which include copies of one manuscript letter and two typed letters from Larkin to James, don’t offer very much book for your money, but you do get Clive James, who’s always good value. His explanation of why Jack Nicholson is the only Hollywood actor appropriate to play Larkin onscreen justifies the price of admission.

‘Though few would associate one with the other, the ‘Bard of Bunyah’ and the writer once renowned for being the country’s first Aboriginal novelist lived remarkably parallel literary lives. They were born three months apart in 1938; they both lost parents early in life and endured difficult childhoods in rural towns; they led somewhat peripatetic existences in their early twenties before publishing their first books to modest acclaim in 1965; they rose in reputation through the 1970s and 80s (Murray much more quickly than Mudrooroo) and by the 1990s had become singular presences in Australian literature; they had life and career defining moments in 1996 that brought on the final phase of their literary careers. Last year, they died four months apart. In all, Murray spent 42 more days on this earth than Mudrooroo.’

All this inventiveness reveals to us Farrell’s true love, his pedagogic feel for aesthetics. It is what can keep his humour deadpan and philosophical even as he serves up disintegrated language in novel, variously formed ways

We’d never met in the flesh before, but we knew each other from articles and photos and from reading each other’s work, and, most importantly, from years of exchanging handwritten letters.

I am not certain that Elizabeth von Arnim remembered her Australian beginnings but neither am I convinced that she had forgotten them altogether.

As a young writer in the early 1980s I had the good fortune to come to the attention and into the company of Patrick White. Now, I know not everyone whose path crossed Patrick’s in that period will describe their encounter as an instance of luck working in their favour, but that is how it was for me and still how I see it today. I learned much from him back then and, as far as I can tell, failed him only once.