To begin with, Goodwin has obviously been constrained by a word limit so that the book will fit into the Macmillan History of Literature Series. He has been constrained too by the need to direct his history toward the young adult readers who will doubtless make up the bulk of his audience and who will want only essential information presented in easily digestible form. No one will dispute that he has had a fair amount of territory to cover as well as the necessity to aim for reasonable comprehensiveness. That he has achieved these aims in a way that will ruffle few feathers is no mean feat, one which, I suspect, will have given him more than a few anxious moments along the way.

Given the constraints I’ve listed above, it is not surprising that Goodwin has focussed his attention on the twentieth century. The first hundred years are covered in thirty-two pages; another twenty-two and we have dealt with the Bulletin, Lawson, Baynton, Paterson, Furphy, Franklin, Brennan and ‘some writers for children’. The material is divided chronologically into eleven chapters and, within them, into five or six sections. For example, Chapter 11, titled ‘The Uniqueness of Australian writing’, is subdivided into sections on aboriginal writers, writers of non-English-speaking background, newly emerging writers and publishing outlets. This compartmentalising of history, while it has its virtues, has the weakness here that it results in a rather scrappy and disjointed effect suggesting an inconclusiveness. which is more apparent than real in this firmly guided tour through the monuments of Australian Literature.

For the most admirable quality of this book is that the author’s firm views are forthrightly expressed, agree with them or not as you will. He writes of Frank Dalby Davison’s The White Thorntree as ‘immensely long’ and ‘a boringly clinical treatment of many kinds of sexual inhibition and practice in carefully inoffensive language’. Of Judith Wright’s later poems, he writes that it is the ones about ‘growing old and about childhood that she writes best, though even these poems are often vitiated by incursion into flabby, undisciplined free verse’. It is this willingness to chance his arm or, to be more precise, his pen, that lifts Ken Goodwin’s history above the level of school textbook where inoffensive blandness is all.

At the same time, it would be misleading to imply that he is in any sense combative. The style is assured rather than assertive and most of his judgements are to be inferred from the relative amount of space he allots to a writer (K.S. Pritchard six pages, Vance Palmer two pages; Morris Lurie rates one paragraph to Barry Oakley’s page and a-half). On the other hand, granted that restrictions of space have made it impossible for all our writers of any consequence to rate a mention, there are nevertheless some surprising omissions. For example, David Rowbotham is in, Andrew Taylor is out. Alan Gould, Mark O’Connor, Paul Radley and Nigel Krauth are in, while Gerard Windsor and Tom Hungerford are out. Sumner Locke-Elliott is briefly mentioned for his play Rusty Bugles but his novels, including Water Under the Bridge and Careful, He Might Hear You, are not, probably because he continues to live in New York. Is he too regarded as an ‘expatriate’ writer as Clement Semmler described Christina Stead in Penguin’s The Literature of Australia (1964), which Goodwin’s book goes some way towards replacing? Olga Masters, Beverley Fanner and Helen Garner are in, but neither Jessica Anderson nor Ethel Anderson rates a mention. Nor do Peter Goldsworthy or Peter Kocan or Judith Rodriguez or Jean Belford or Barry Hill or …! But it is only to be expected that a literary historian should be unpredictable in his assessment of the truly contemporaneous.

What is less easy to understand is the book’s strict concentrating on the texts. Social, economic and political contexts are more or less ignored and biographical information is slight. There is no sense that any of the works discussed were written at times significant to the history of Australia or the world, or that any of the authors discussed were influenced either in style or subject matter by forces external to themselves. From this point of view, the book departs from the premise of the General Editor of the series, Norman Jeffares; it is not concerned to ‘develop a sense of chronology, of action and reaction, and of the varying relationships between writers and society’. Instead, the mode is descriptive, boiled down to potted plots and potted statements of theme, a technique which can sometimes mislead where it does not oversimplify.

Returning to the idea that space afforded is an index of importance, very little space is given to drama as against the space afforded other literary forms. Aboriginal writers and aborigines are given thirty or more references in the index, while migrant (ethnic) writers receive five. There is as well some evidence of haste. Judah Waten’s Scenes of Revolutionary Life (1982) is here called Scenes of Conflict, perhaps confused with his earlier Time of Conflict (1961). Randolph Stow is regarded as belonging to ‘the generation of the 1960s’ although A Haunted Life was published in 1956, The Bystander in 1957 and To the Islands in 1958.

The appearance of this book is timely with the general thrust towards increasing the Australian content of courses in educational institutions, with the continuing success of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature at home, and with the ever-widening spread of interest in Australian literature overseas: Is it possible that we are approaching the time when Australian Literature has become an acknowledged area for study in our secondary schools in the same way as Australian History; which has been a recognised school subject for years?