For the present, it is the first part of this statement that I would like to consider because it seems to make a nonsense of the anthology under review, entitled as it is The Australian Short Story Before Lawson. Predictably, Hadgraft avers that no notable contribution to the short story was made in Australia before Lawson, yet he manages to select twenty-one stories from eighteen authors for our interest and, presumably, enjoyment. I suppose it all depends on what is meant by ‘notable’ or what is meant by ‘Australian’ in the phrase ‘Australian short story’. While no master of the form emerged in Australia before Lawson, the judgement that there are few or no stories written in Australia of any consequence before Lawson is, at the present stage of our knowledge, an article of faith and not of established fact.

The truth is that surprisingly little research has been conducted into the short story in nineteenth century Australia. It may be that potential researchers have. been discouraged by the weight of material to be waded through, most if not all of it undoubtedly mediocre. But it is· more likely that students have been discouraged by the conviction that investigation would be pointless.

The origin of this belief is not easy to trace but probably stems from a remark made by Nettie Palmer in her Modern Australian Literature 1900–1923 (1924) that Lawson ‘seems to have led the way to the real short story in Australia’. Ardent nationalist and champion of Australian literature that she was, she was elevating Lawson above his peers and predecessors because of his realistic style, his avoidance of melodramatic effects and his invention of the laconic bushman narrator. It is unlikely she meant future commentators to throw the baby out with the bathwater but that seems to be precisely what has happened. Today, a handful of Lawson’s contemporaries, including the still-undervalued Barbara Baynton, are admitted into the canon of ‘real short story’ writers – Edward Dyson, ‘Price Warung’ and ‘Steele Rudd’, for example. But of John Lang, Marcus Clarke, Rosa Praed, Francis Adams or Ernest Favenc, to name a few, we hear nothing.

These short story writers are revived, along with others, in Hadgraft’s anthology which offers the most extensive and readily available selection of nineteenth-century Australian short fiction. It seems unlikely that there will be another like it. The major public libraries have acted, in order to prevent wear and tear on books published pre-1901, to ban photocopying from them. While this restriction does not unduly bother those who can work quietly away in libraries, it makes the task of the prospective anthologist impossible. She/he can, of course, transcribe by hand from the printed book to provide copy for the printer (though some libraries unwittingly make even this task doubly difficult by banning the use of pens for the purpose) but transcribing whether by pen or pencil is not only absurdly. laborious, it is guaranteed to result in troublesome transcription errors. Under these circumstances, the compilation of enough material to fill a book-sized anthology will be too time-consuming and tedious a task to attract even the most dedicated editor.

All the more reason why we should be grateful to Cecil Hadgraft for producing the present collection, which aims not so much to select the best stories as to present examples ‘which illustrated contemporary concerns and literary style’. Most but not all of the authors one would expect to find represented are there but, as only those who published collections have been consulted, writers who published in newspapers and magazines – like, for example, Thomas Richards, who must be regarded as a pioneer of the short story in Australia – have been overlooked. There is little doubt that a scouring of nineteenth century periodicals would uncover a mass of material to be evaluated by literary historians.

It was not uncommon for newspapers and magazines, especially those which had some literary pretention, to publish stories and sketches from time to time and, while it is likely that no speck of gold will be found amongst all that dross, I for one will feel freer to generalise about the nineteenth-century Australian short story when the field has been exhaustively searched.

Hadgraft’s selection, while it varies in quality, contains quite a few stories that are most enjoyable to read in spite of their old-fashioned narrative modes. They deal with distinctively Australian experience though the protagonists are generally not given uniquely Australian characteristics. The development of Australian stereotypes was encouraged by the Bulletin and stamps not only the work of Lawson but also of Edward Dyson and most especially of ‘Steele Rudd’ whose Dad and Dave country bumpkin characters enjoyed exceptional popularity particularly in the cities until the 1950s.

While no anthologist can please everyone, there are some people who will wish that Ernest Favenc had been represented by ‘The Parson’s Black Boy’ instead of the lesser known ‘Malchook’s Doom’; Tasma’s ‘An Old-Time Episode in Tasmania’ is far less satisfying a tale than her justly celebrated ‘Monsieur Caloche’; and the omission of the most famous of all pre-Lawson stories, Lang’s ‘The Ghost Upon the Rail’ (the source of the legend of Fisher’s Ghost) is regrettable.

Hadgraft prefaces his selection with a substantial (fifty-six-page) essay which discusses the more important short fiction writers and the most popular kinds of story written, e.g., moral tales, ‘lost child’ stories and so on. The essay is concerned to describe and to evaluate, to established canon, even a tradition:

All [Favenc’s stories] however melodramatic or brutal, have the quality of readability, all have vigour and movement, even the poorest are better than most of their predecessors; but even the best are not the equal of many to come.

The preface is the most detailed account we have of the nineteenth century short story in Australia. Hadgraft discusses all of the known major and most of the minor practitioners of the form, dividing the period into three chronological divisions, 1830–60, 1860–80 and 1880–93, for convenience. The discussion often contains useful plot summaries, which may tempt some readers into closer acquaintance with the writers, and snippets of useful information, for example, the awesome fact (even by today’s standards) that about forty collections or anthologies of short stories by Australian writers were published in the seven-year period between 1887 and 1894. Obviously, the short story enjoyed at least as great a popularity then as it does now, which makes it all the more surprising that their quality is assessed as ranging from the indifferent to the mediocre.

On a different level this hints at the sheer volume of primary material Hadgraft has sifted through to provide us with this representative sampling. The book stands as a testament to his labours and, I hope, a temptation to further research.