The first thing one notices about these eight new A&R Classics titles is their wonderfully contemporary appearance and design. They look totally unlike any earlier series of ‘Australian Classics’, where the ‘heritage’ look has always been favoured – classic Australian paintings to match the classic book. HarperCollins has, rightly, chosen to emphasise the contemporary relevance of these texts, using historic photographs but not making the actual image the focus of the design, so that one has to really look hard to see what it is. These books will, I hope, attract younger readers and others who might in the past have been put off by the ‘old-fashioned’ associations of heritage or nationalist images.

These eight books can be divided into three groups. There is a pair of what one might call ‘Federation classics’: Henry Lawson’s Selected Stories ($19.95pb, 0 207 19708 3) and Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career ($19.95pb, 0 207 19724 5). Then there are three titles from that great flourishing of Australian women’s fiction during the 1940s: Dymphna Cusack and Florence James’s Come in Spinner, Kylie Tennant’s Ride on Stranger ($19.95pb, 0 207 19740 7), and Eve Langley’s The Pea-pickers (19.95pb, 0 207 19764 4). Finally, there are three more recent titles from the late 1960s and early 1970s, a time when Australian fiction was dominated by male writers: Mudrooroo’s Wild Cat Falling (19.95pb, 0 207 19732 6), Tom Keneally’s The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith ($19.95pb, 0 207 19850 0), and George Johnston’s Clean Straw for Nothing ($19.95pb, 0 207 19748 2), together with his unfinished A Cartload of Clay.

The selection from Henry Lawson’s stories is particularly generous; far more so than any previous selection to appear in paperback. As a teacher, I think it is bound to suit any approach one would be likely to take, unlike earlier selections, which always seemed to be missing one or two of the stories I really wanted. For someone coming to Lawson for the first time, it will provide a wonderful introduction to the many aspects of his fiction. There are, for example, those stunningly economical early travel sketches such as ‘In a Dry Season’, describing the train journey from Sydney to Bourke, and ‘In a Wet Season’, on the trip in reverse. Alternatively, one can trace the development of Lawson’s skills in character drawing through the brief early stories about Mitchell, the swagman, through to the series on Steelman, the spieler, and finally to his acknowledged masterpieces, the Joe Wilson stories.

Some years ago, when teaching a course on the short story that included stories by Chekhov as well as Lawson, I was intrigued to note a number of similarities in their early lives. Both came from poverty-stricken, non-metropolitan backgrounds; both had very unhappy childhoods. One can’t of course push the comparisons too far; even before Chekhov went to Moscow to study medicine, he had received a much better education than was available to Lawson, and in Moscow he was able to move in a more sophisticated and richer literary society than Lawson found in Sydney. And Chekhov’s contribution to world literature has been much greater, especially through his plays. But as writers of short stories, both published most of their best work in the 1890s and both were innovators, writing against the heavier, more plot-driven stories of their time. Lawson as Australian national icon should not be allowed to obscure the achievements of Lawson the writer.

It is particularly pleasing to see such a handsome new edition of Franklin’s My Brilliant Career appearing one hundred years after its first publication. Henry Lawson played a major role in getting Franklin’s novel published, as I have discussed in the introduction to this edition. Lawson had to take the manuscript to London because it had twice been rejected by Angus & Robertson. Franklin’s remains a marvellously lively book that one can read time and again with renewed enjoyment. Sybylla’s dilemma – the baby or the book; the man or the career – is, alas, still relevant today.

That same dilemma – how, as a woman, to handle one’s conflicting desires to be famous and to be loved – is also central to Eve Langley’s The Pea-pickers. I’m especially excited to have both it and Kylie Tennant’s Ride on Stranger back in print. Both are great examples of the female picaresque, though Langley’s Steve roams around the Gippsland bush, while Tennant’s Shannon picks her way through the wilds of Sydney. For both heroines, the greatest dangers come from the males they encounter along the way. This is also true for the women in Come in Spinner, another of the great novels of Sydney.

Both Ride on Stranger and Come in Spinner have been successfully adapted for television, which may indeed be another marker of a classic novel. We have just seen a new television version of George Johnston’s My Brother Jack. A novel that has been adapted for another medium more than once must surely be a classic! (Indeed, the study of different adaptations provides excellent insights into changing readings of a novel over time.) It’s ideal, therefore, to have the two other novels in Johnston’s trilogy available here in one volume for the many readers who are sure to wish to follow David Meredith’s story to its end, once they have been introduced to him via the box.

The final two novels, Mudrooroo’s Wild Cat Falling and Tom Keneally’s The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, deal with an issue that remains a crucial one for contemporary Australia: relations between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians. Keneally has said, and it is obvious why he has said this, that he would not write this novel in the same way today, that he would instead use a white perspective. Nevertheless, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith remains a highly significant novel, an excellent teaching text, and a compelling reminder of dreadful events in a not so distant past that many would prefer to forget.

There has been recent controversy over Mudrooroo and questioning of his identity, though I get annoyed with those who discuss Mudrooroo in the same breath as Leon Carmen or Helen Darville. That his was not a false identity deliberately assumed for literary gain is made obvious by Mary Durack’s preface to the 1965 first edition of Wild Cat Falling, reprinted here. Everyone thought that Colin Johnson (as he was then known) was Aboriginal, he was treated as Aboriginal and had lived the life of boys’ homes, of gaol, and of rejection by white society, as described in his first novel. Of course, it is important, as with My Brilliant Career, not just to read Wild Cat Falling autobiographically. Questions over Mudrooroo’s identity may now, perhaps, lead to different, more sophisticated, readings of this novel: as one of the first Australian texts to show the influence of French Existentialism, for example, rather than as the first Aboriginal novel.

It is particularly pleasing to see such a major investment in the reprinting of classic Australian novels at a time when the survival of Australian literature, and even of books and reading, is being debated. The book, and the habit of reading, have inevitably suffered from the development of many new media and forms of storytelling during the past century. Few young people today spend as much time reading as did members of my generation. Even I, on long flights from London to Sydney, now find I spend more time watching movies than reading. But there are many other times when only a book will do! I am confident that the book will survive, and that we still need to teach people, at our schools and universities, to be both better writers and better readers. We need to teach them to read more complex and varied texts, from the past as well as the present, and to be aware of the many ways in which such texts can and have been read.

Globalisation, together with post-colonialism, has raised doubts about the continuing relevance of national literatures as well as fears that local writers will find it more difficult to get published. On the contrary, it seems that Australian writers are now finding it easier to get distributed and published overseas. It was a pleasure, recently, to see attractive editions of novels by new Australian writers in London bookshops.

Cut-backs in university funding and resulting reductions in staff and courses have also led to worries about the survival of Australian literature as a university subject. But we still have as many keen students as ever thanks to the increasing internationalisation of Australian universities, with many foreign students, whether coming just for a semester or a whole degree program, wishing to study Australian literature.

One real concern, however, has been the difficulty in obtaining older books, leading to courses having to focus on contemporary texts. It seemed that we were going back to the early 1970s, when it was impossible to know from one year to the next what would be in print. So I, and I am sure all my colleagues, are grateful to HarperCollins, both locally and internationally, for their support of Australian literature in the production of this wonderful series of A&R Classics.