Literature from 1970 to 2000

Hal Porter had already begun to establish himself as one of the more interesting short-story writers. His manner was arch, his perception ironic, his taste somewhat melodramatic. But his eye for detail was exact and his powers of recollection extraordinary. All these characteristics can be observed in the volumes The Cats of Venice (1965) and Fredo Fuss Love Life (1974). His insistence that he wrote only of what was fact, apart from impressing the reader that the world is a very strange place, put him completely at odds with the following generation of short-story writers as, for example, Frank Moorhouse, Michael Wilding, and Peter Carey. These writers, provocative and scandalous in the manner of the 1970s, broke free from all restraints and explored the many possibilities of fantasy—sexual, science fiction, gothic. Allowing for the liberalism of their values, their stories in fact display an almost moral preoccupation with social and political attitudes. They are each highly alert to the ironic possibilities of personal encounters. In the 1980s Carey extended his range and began writing novels, still exploiting fantasy and, as much postmodernist fiction does, the interpolation of stories within stories. He won the Booker Prize in 1988 with Oscar and Lucinda (1988).

Thomas Keneally commenced his prolific output in the late 1960s and attracted widespread notice with The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1972). Nearly all his novels explore the intersection of history and the individual life and contemplate just what kind of effect the insignificant individual can have on events of some moment. When Schindler’s Ark (1982), which is centrally about just this situation, won the Booker Prize in 1982, it caused something of a sensation for being as much a work of fact as of fiction. Keneally was a gifted storyteller, and his fiction appealed to both the serious and the popular audience. Several of his novels were made into films or plays.

Thea Astley was another highly successful novelist, droll and amusing, yet she wrote about serious issues. She developed a love-hate relation to many of her characters and subjects, but underlying her narrative is a warm humanity and a delight in accurate imagery and surprising turns of phrase. In Beachmasters (1985), one of her most accomplished novels, she re-creates the cultural tensions in a South Pacific island with aspirations to independence from joint English and French control. Randolph Stow had similarly written a sensitive and sympathetic novel of intercultural relations in the Trobriand Islands in Visitants (1979). Astley’s later novels—Drylands: A Book for the World’s Last Reader (1999), for example—were increasingly concerned with the dominant, two-pronged problem in late 20th-century Australia: not only how to effect reconciliation between Aboriginal peoples and European Australians but also how to reconcile white Australians to the dark side of their own past.

With An Imaginary Life (1978), David Malouf, already a promising poet, emerged as a major novelist. Nominally a story about Ovid in exile, the novel is really about the transforming power of the imagination. Malouf’s writing is spare, delicate, meticulous. Like many writers of the time, he thought carefully about language and the signs by which meaning is conveyed. He also reflected on the way in which place might influence perception; this interest lies behind his use of Queensland as a setting—as, for example, in Remembering Babylon (1993). C.J. Koch developed a similar interest in regional writing, using the exotic possibilities of Asia to provide a mythic reading of political events in The Year of Living Dangerously (1978) and Highways to a War (1995) and the shadowy otherness of Tasmania in The Doubleman (1985) and Out of Ireland (1999). Likewise, Shirley Hazzard wrote with great seriousness of purpose in her modern tragedy The Transit of Venus (1980), an ironic love story devised to contemplate how strangely things come about. Like so much of Australian fiction, it looks for patterns of meaning that might indicate some kind of proportion in destiny.

The 1980s also witnessed the emergence of a number of accomplished women writers—Janette Turner Hospital, Kate Grenville, Helen Garner, Glenda Adams, Barbara Hanrahan, and Elizabeth Jolley—and the first three of these continued to be prominent voices in the 1990s. In all her work Grenville treads a precarious line between darkness and superb comedy, from the extraordinary Lilian’s Story (1985) and its sequel, Dark Places (1994), to her clearly understated novel The Idea of Perfection (1999). Garner’s work includes The Children’s Bach (1984) and True Stories: Selected Non-Fiction (1996), which draws upon fact as well as fiction. Hospital’s Collected Stories 1970–1995 appeared in 1995. Jolley’s enigmatic fiction includes Miss Peabody’s Inheritance (1983) and The Well (1986). Among male writers, Brian Castro, Robert Drewe, David Foster, and Tim Winton similarly emerged as significant writers. Of these Winton and Foster are particularly notable for their volumes Cloudstreet (1991) and The Glade Within the Grove (1996), respectively.

The two leading poets of the 1980s were Les Murray, allusive and humane, concerned to find what evidence he could in the secular world of spiritual realities and to demonstrate the importance of poetry in ordinary life (a representative volume of his work is Dog Fox Field [1990]), and Bruce Dawe, who evinced the Australian voice in his contemporary, journalistic poetry appearing in, for example, Sometimes Gladness (1978). Robert Gray continued the tradition of spare, almost Imagistic lyric verse in such volumes of his as Piano (1988) and Certain Things (1993). Robert Adamson and John Tranter wrote more experimental verse, as is evinced, respectively, in The Clean Dark (1989) and The Floor of Heaven (1992).

David Williamson developed a kind of journalistic drama. He had a good ear for Australian idiom and a good eye for Australian social and cultural attitudes, including prejudice. His plays were topical, particularly in terms of current political interests, yet they also tapped much that was enduring and deep-seated in the collective identity. Two of his critically acclaimed plays are Travelling North (1980) and Dead White Males (1995). Other playwrights who came into prominence were Jack Hibberd, Alex Buzo, Peter Kenna, Louis Nowra, Steve J. Spears, and Michael Gow. Nowra’s Così (1992) was successfully adapted for film.

In nonfictional prose, the autobiographical mode continued. Patrick White’s Flaws in the Glass (1981) was of particular interest. Malouf and Koch both wrote a volume of essays, and these too were interesting for the light they shed upon the writers as well as being fine examples of the essay form. Travel writing continued to be published; one of the most interesting examples was Robyn Davidson’s Tracks (1982), an account of her trek across Australia with her camels. It is a shaped narrative, tracing her increasing awareness of the meaning and experience of the desert and leading toward self-discovery. Like the imaginative writers, she looked for a pattern of significance in her experience. A.B. Facey, recounting his life experience in A Fortunate Life (1981), accepted what life had offered, not with bitterness but with gratitude. Robert Dessaix in Night Letters: A Journey Through Switzerland and Italy (1996) wrote a series of highly cultivated reflections on the poignancy of life, art, and, ultimately, death. Drusilla Modjeska similarly interwove history and personal story, as in Stravinsky’s Lunch (1999).

In each of these modes of writing, Aboriginal people also began to make their presence known. Oodgeroo Noonuccal (Kath Walker) published her first volume of poetry, We Are Going, in 1964. Mudrooroo Narogin (Colin Johnson, whose Aboriginal identity, however, was questioned) published his first novel, Wild Cat Falling, in 1965. Jack Davis wrote several acclaimed plays. Sally Morgan’s autobiography, My Place (1987), is a moving account of her discovery of her identity and family history. It is also social and cultural history. And Kim Scott, with his novel Benang (1999), became the first Aboriginal writer to win the prestigious Miles Franklin Award (which he shared with Astley). By the example of these and other Aboriginal writers, Aboriginal people have asserted their claim to the imaginative territory of Australia—a claim especially significant in the last decade of the 20th century as Australians attempted to effect a process of mutual understanding and reconciliation.

Writing in Australia evolved through a number of phases. It began with mapping the difference and distinctiveness of a new society establishing itself in the antipodes and at a large imaginative distance from the rest of the world. Then it concentrated on finding and articulating its own cultural voice. This writing was characterized by unusual colloquialisms and figures of speech, ironic understatement, and laconic rhythms; it concentrated on representing—even asserting—a nationalist sentiment. Beyond that phase, Australian writing became more sophisticated, discovering the universal in its own local symbolism. Until the mid-20th century, Australians had written as though their work was that of a more or less homogeneous society. In the closing decades of the 20th century, however, the country’s literature began the discovery of differences within itself: regional, cultural, and ethnic.