The Aborigines had developed sophisticated art forms over 200,000 years, but when the British arrived they brought very few artists with them who weren’t in chains. Those who did reach these shores had difficulty adapting the daub to our gum trees and vistas or the musical notation to the sounds of antipodean. As a consequence we had a hundred years of oak tree paintings and Irish reels.

The writers, however, due to the nature of their craft, were able to adapt more readily. The most important influence was from the reaction of the people to their new land. After the initial dread came a stealthy feeling of freedom and promise. Most of the population were out on the road establishing remote settlements and the talk around the bush track camp fires was all about this strange country. The yams that developed quickly became the first flourish of nationalistic literature.

People ever since have had a close link with short fiction. Despite our cities, most Australians have a country cousin. Fewer of us still have country grandparents, but only fifty or sixty years ago most had some kind of solid family link with the bush. The Bush Christmas was commonplace. In this atmosphere, we were still close to the cultural heritage of yarns: opera and ballet were not our strong suit in those days. We are now more urbanised and have our opera simulcasts with Sonia Humphreys, and this of course has made us real people!

Burgeoning sophisticates we may be and can say tagliatelle with authority, but this hasn’t deterred thousands of people from having the confidence to express their attitudes to life in stories, and as a result editors of fiction magazines read thousands of stories each year.

Interviewers will ask you with an expectant squint, ‘Ah, yes, but how many of them are any good?’ The answer is that only a small percentage will get published, twice as many as that deserve publication, but of the rest most are good. They all tell stories about people and situations. Some are written in coy language, others in dense, convoluted prose, but basically they express attitudes to our life and are generally literate and enjoyable.

Occasionally you get the gent who wants to air his experience of many sexual positions, particularly the more violent, selfish, and absurdly impossible kind. Take the one with the entire farmyard, the postman, and the pasture harrows for instance … Also the Martha Gardner stories of best ways to make sponges rise and stains disappear are a bit trying, but then again my floor has never looked so clean and my condiments have never been so tidy.

Generally, the writers are serious about their work and display heartening artistry. The short story is a people’s art form. It is inexpensive and requires the basic skills already in the possession of most people, but like all other art forms the outstanding work is produced by the small percentage who have the virus of art deep in the marrow: that special disease that makes their words rise like the eerie call of the curlew or fall like a ten pound hammer on an anvil.

In the past our art has focused on this particular country. Apart from Marshall, Prichard, Herbert, and a handful of others, our art was about white invaders. The blacks were literally invisible. Ironically, if the Australian continent has a potentially distinctive voice it is in the strange rhythms and symbolic beauty that black storytellers have mastered. The musical quality of black stories can make a unique contribution to our literature, and if white writers care to read and listen, and if Aboriginal writers are encouraged to incorporate that same beauty of language tone in their stories of contemporary black and white life, the literature of the next hundred years will be incredibly exciting. More importantly, however, it will be a valid statement on modern humanity.

Support for short stories fell away after the war because people became earnest about laminex, enslaved by the power mower, and obsessed by the three-in-one console.

The same gurus who have produced death certificates for the short story have also pronounced the book an archaic artefact. But books will survive because, apart from a respected friend, they are the next best companion of ideas. I’ve met a few such living companions in my life, but Sholokhov, White, Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, Greene, Steinbeck, Faulkner, Grass, Brennan (Christopher), Lawson, Hopkins (G.M.), Salinger, and Park (Ruth) are a small number of the people unknown to me whose ideas I have cherished.

I’m not against technology, I’ve got an electric jug and we get along fine, but I believe that books and ideas are uniquely compatible. I’m not a Flat Earther by any means, but books are revered objects not because of their antiquity and their dusty leather bindings, but because I believe they are the best available way of transferring ideas in our society. Only ideas, good ideas, can prevent us from improving ourselves to extinction.

I began these notes by talking about the development of Australian literature. That is important when the island’s past is considered, but there are no islands left in the world anymore – we’re all in the same boat at last.

Unfortunately, we seem determined to brawl over the survival rations.

During the last trip in the long boat, Australians will continue to comment artistically upon life and many of these commentators will use the short story. Books, stories, and the electric jug are here to stay.

There can’t be much more you need to know about life and art so I’ll get out of your way now.

At the time of this review, Bruce Pascoe was editor of Australian Short Stories.