Beverley Farmer, Helen Garner, Serge Liberman, Morris Lurie, David Malouf, Frank Moorhouse, Michael Wilding, Gerard Windsor, and Tim Winton are among the established writers who have published short story collections within the last year or so. New and/or less well-known short story writers are bringing out collections along with the big names. So far this year I’ve come across two most impressive first collections – George Papaellinas’s Ikons and John Clanchy’s Lie of the Land. Both are valuable additions to the genre we tend to regard as particularly well-suited to encapsulating the Australian experience, the genre described by one enthusiastic commentator as ‘the most historically significant literary form of our national culture’.

In the past, anthologists have aimed for selections that demonstrate a cultural coherence, a perspective which reveals developments in thematic concerns and formal experiments. Harry Heseltine, in his exemplary Penguin Book of Australian Short Stories, argued as long ago as 1976 that the critical orthodoxy which declared Henry Lawson the founder of ‘all that is imaginatively important’ in the Australian short story failed to account for either Patrick White or Hal Porter. He argued instead for a tradition which valued absolute fidelity to experienced reality and began his collection not with Lawson but with ‘Price Warung’. Heseltine’s selection, admirable in many respects, not least for its cogently argued introduction, enjoyed canonical respectability until Kerryn Goldsworthy’s Australian Short Stories appeared in 1983.

Goldsworthy set out to demonstrate that Australia’s writers, ‘both male and female, have always been equally concerned with female experience’. She includes stories by Henry Handel Richardson, Christina Stead and Ethel Anderson, all of whom were omitted from the Heseltine anthology. Her selection, admirably well-balanced, reveals the male-dominated Lawson-Furphy tradition to be founded more on editorial preference and critical orthodoxy than on overriding preoccupations in the literature. She drew our attention to our neglect of major women writers and of stories which could not easily be accommodated into our male-oriented social mythology. Her anthology provided a corrective to the widely held view that the Australian short story was characterised by a ‘dun-coloured realism’, that it concentrated on mythologising the bush and the code of mateship.

Against such a background the time could scarcely be more appropriate for the release of a new, historically based anthology which reassesses our short story tradition in the light of recent developments and which reveals points of similarity and divergence in the concerns of our writers over the years.

What a pity, then, that the anthology compiled by Laurie Hergenhan is disappointingly unadventurous, reprinting what now seem like tired’ old stories from the usual band of writers. Unlike wine or cheese, many of these stories have not improved with age.

The rationale of the collection, as I understand it, is to publish ‘representative’ stories from ‘writers who have made an important contribution to the form as practised in Australia’. There is nothing new in this vague claim, nor is there anything new or surprising in Hergenhan’s choices either of writers or of the stories which represent them.

What is disappointing is that the robust health and abundant vitality exhibited by the short story today is not reflected in the anthologist’s critical revaluation of the past. Instead, his choices are conservative and conventional, not to say bland. Many of the stories are all too familiar from earlier anthologies, such as Marjorie Barnard’s ‘The Persimmon Tree’, apparently the only story which can be thought to represent her since it is the only Barnard story ever anthologised.

Vance Palmer, discreetly dropped from the Goldsworthy collection, is firmly restored with a spirited, if unconvincing, defence. Palmer’s presence among the bank of pre-1950s writers confirms the impression of sturdy competence of the social realists rather than any ‘important contribution to the form’.

But the editor’s task in scouring a much-beaten track was unenviable and, not surprisingly, unrewarding. Hergenhan is much more interesting, even provocative, when he chooses from our current crop of writers. Here, at last, are some surprises. Prizewinning writers – Elizabeth Jolley, Olga Masters, Morris Lurie, and Beverley Farmer – are there, but so too are Fay Zwicky and Barry Hill, both writers whose formidable talents deserve wider recognition. The later stories show a degree of wit and sophistication sadly lacking in the pre- Patrick White stories.

Of course, the anthologist’s task is formidable. He cannot possibly please all his readers. Even so, it does not seem unreasonable to expect a scholar as much at home in the territory as Hergenhan to have proceeded with a well-considered view pursued with purpose and decision. Instead, he argues that ‘premature attempts to find an Australian tradition in the short story have not surprisingly been limiting, if not distorting’.

If Hergenhan’s anthology is ultra-cautious in, its approach to the task, Dori Anderson’s Transgressions, intended as a companion volume to Frank Moorhouse’s The State of the Art, represents its polar extreme of tendentiousness, wilful provocation and defiance. He is as determined to provoke argument as Hergenhan seems anxious to avoid one. Anderson is interested in the experimental and the innovative, is disinclined to define what he means by ‘story’ or to erect boundaries which mark formal differences. Hence, he suggests that it might be ‘more satisfactory to regard some of the contributions to this volume as “text’’, or as “writing”’. He sets out with the object, among others, of transgressing the reader’s expectations in every possible way. In the process he distorts and stretches the word and the idea of what is ‘transgressive’ in order to produce a volume of short prose pieces that will be ‘contestatory’ in form, structure and style and subversive of fashionable ideologies.

In a sense this collection too is a gathering of stories that are ‘representative’. Anderson considers that they ‘display something of the current concerns and obsessions in Australian society’. At the same time the pieces are often linguistically unconventional as the writers break away from traditional styles and subjects. The range extends from Gerard Windsor’s chilling monologue ‘Reasons for Going into Gynaecology’ to John Clarke’s nonsensical ‘Farnarkeling: A Typical Report’. In between are all kinds of experiments with language sequences which convey meaning though this may not be the meaning commonly found in a story. Much of this is light-hearted, even gameful. For example, Jean Bedford’s ‘Campaign’ and the piece which follows it, Rosemary Cresswell’s ‘Epithalamium’, together form a discontinuous narrative of the kind we have learnt to associate with Frank Moorhouse or Ethel Anderson. Before Transgressions we would not have expected to find a relationship existing between two independent stories by separate authors where characters and situations are shared.

There is as well some fine ironic counterpointing in the juxtaposition of the pieces, a sense that the editor has enjoyed the arrangement of the material as much as choosing it. All this means that there are more delights in store for the discerning reader than is immediately apparent on a quick browse. As well, like any good anthology, it invites dipping into.