In the late 1980s, universities began to badge their subjects differently, with subject titles replacing generic titles such as ‘Australian Literature’. The subject titles for Australian literature have included ‘Australian Authorship’, ‘Australia and the Colonial Imaginary’, ‘Australian Life Writing’, ‘Australian Literature’, ‘Aboriginal Writing’, ‘Writing and Culture in Australia’, ‘Women and Australian Writing since Federation’, ‘20th Century Australian Writing’, and ‘Wild Writing: The Australian Imaginary’. Australian literature is also taught in other subjects such as ‘Travel Writing and Postcolonialism’ and ‘Modern and Contemporary Literature’. In 2007, English became the ‘English and Theatre Studies’ program, which teaches ‘Australian Theatre and Performance’.

Thus it is clear that the University of Melbourne offers a diverse range of subjects on Australian writing,  from colonial to contemporary times. All these courses are designed to enrich the studies of those students who wish to explore the complex world of Australian literature.

Barbara Creed, Head, School of Culture and Communication,
The University of Melbourne

Dear Editor,

Stephanie Guest makes some important points about the relatively minor presence of Australian literature and Australian writing in tertiary education, and in the Arts degree offerings at the University of Melbourne.

As an Australian writer myself, I feel this keenly. I have talked with Stephanie about her experiences in Argentina, and felt inspired by her stories. I understand how much less spontaneous, passionate, political, and urgent experiences on an Australian campus might seem after such an experience. But there is a vital world of Australian writing, one that many readers know, and that Stephanie is beginning to encounter. I know too, from long experience, that when students do the reading, they become engaged, meeting the vitality of Australian writing with their own. It can be a matter of timing.

Without wanting to counter the points that Stephanie makes, it is important to let ABR readers know that Australian literature in an Arts degree is not confined to English programs. It is pervasive, for instance, in one of the newer disciplines in the humanities, Creative Writing. For several years the Creative Writing program in the Melbourne Arts degree has run a subject titled ‘Reading Australian Writing’, more recently transformed into ‘Writing Australia’, which features many of the contemporary writers Stephanie lists as her guests. In most Creative Writing subjects there are books, extracts, poems, films, and scripts produced by Australian writers set as necessary reading.

Over the past two years, the Australian writers, editors, and publishers who have lectured, read, and spoken to our students include Andrea Goldsmith, Cate Kennedy, Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Philip Salom, Jennifer Rowe, Tony Birch, Aviva Tuffield, Sally Heath, Arnold Zable, Wayne MacCauley, Claire Gaskin, and Emmett Stinson. In addition, the Creative Writing program in the School of Culture and Communication is host to Australia’s premier independent poetry publishing house, Five Islands Press, and to Going Down Swinging, a stylish, innovative literary journal.

There are many opportunities for students to encounter, and engage with, Australian writing and writers at the University of Melbourne.

Kevin Brophy, Brunswick, Vic.

Stephanie Guest replies:

Wanting to learn about Australian literature was our reason for creating the Australian Literature Reading Group. We are trying to promote the humanities, to promote the study of Australian literature (and Shakespeare, Old English, Classics, and Comparative literature for that matter). While I criticised the University of Melbourne for the apparent lack of any literary study of Australian writing in 2011, there is a broader question. Do Australian students really care less about their national literature than do students in Argentina or the United States? Our goal is to foster attention and interest in this subject, especially when it is here, in Australia, that we can understand and critique writing by Australians in a particularly sensitive and acute way.

Whether or not there are oases of Australian literary study at other universities, I doubt that it is a drought hovering over Parkville only. I have met young, curious, intelligent readers enrolled at other universities who have never heard of, say, Christina Stead (‘The name does ring a bell …’). Why is this so? One reason I suspect is that ‘Australian Literature’ has attracted a carapace of stereotypes. Melancholic landscapes, dust, mateship, birds, surf stinging pink skin … Without studying the intricacies and variety of Australian literature, we will never see beyond these clichés. Even though our literary traditions are strong and rich, our handling of them overall is patchy and uneasy.

In 1959 Vincent Buckley deplored the lack of critical engagement with, and the glut of indiscriminate praise of, Australian writing. He argued for the establishment of serious university courses that would:

[analyse] the development of Australian manners, and of the ideas and expectations which have at various stages been aroused in Australians, [develop a] critical pondering of what is generally held in this country to be our ‘tradition’ … [move towards] the setting-up of something like a canon among our chief works, and a placing of the very best of them among the canon, which already shakily exists, of English and American writing. [Finally, that would create] a clear space in which our young writers and critics may write better, because they see themselves, their ‘tradition’, and their environment, more clearly. (‘Towards an Australian Literature’, Meanjin)

Buckley’s point is still valid today – the literary discipline he writes of is quite distinct from the approach of Creative Writing or Indigenous Studies courses. Though I learnt a lot from reading the books set in the ‘Aboriginal Writing’ course last year, we did not subject them to close literary analysis. It would be electrifying to see a partnership between the English and Indigenous Studies departments in this case.

If examples of Australian writing were embraced by subjects across the English major, a new generation of students might recognise the vital and dynamic relationship between the best of Australian and international literature. What we need is an enveloping atmosphere of Australian literature, not just isolated rainfall. How thrilling to study Judith Wright in the light of Eliot and Yeats, or Patrick White in the context of Lawrence, Hemingway, Faulkner, and Melville, as Buckley suggested long ago.

Stephanie Guest, Northcote, Vic.

Dinner date

Dear Editor,

In my review of David Marr’s book (February 2012), I wrote that I had never shared a meal with David Marr. A couple of weeks after I wrote that, I came across an old diary entry that reminded me we have had at least one dinner together, many years ago, in Sydney. I take some pleasure in being able to correct my own review, and trust we can soon repeat the experience.

Dennis Altman, Clifton Hill, Vic.

John Shaw Neilson

Dear Editor,

It is disturbing to read in Geoffrey Lehmann and Robert Gray’s anthology Australian Poetry since 1788 an introduction to the work of John Shaw Neilson that is grossly misleading. To say that ‘after his early thirties he was unable to read for himself’ is complete nonsense, as is the comment that ‘his later poetry had to be dictated to his brother or sisters’. Neilson cites close to one hundred authors in correspondence, and the high incidence of letters and verses in his own hand, prior to 1928, indicates very clearly that dictation was as much a matter of convenience as necessity – except for a few very brief periods. Significantly, alterations and insertions occur in his own hand in material dictated before and after 1928.

I might add there is absolutely no evidence to support the statement that ‘Neilson suffered several nervous breakdowns, as did other members of his family’.

Margaret Roberts, East Launceston, Tas.