My perceptions as a man and a writer have been dominated by the sufferings of the common man in the three great depressions of our epoch: the first in the 1890s, the second in the 1930s, the third just beginning in l983.

I wrote about the first two in Power Without Glory; the second is reflected fictionally in Legends from Benson’s Valley, The Four-legged Lottery and other works; the third is the background for two books in progress: The Loser now will be later to Win (short stories) and The Obsession of Oscar Oswald (suspense novel set in 1984). Ever since I began writing in 1946 and helped form the Realist Writers Movement in Melbourne, I have taken this standpoint and endeavoured to fight for the literary ideas which arise from it. How important literary ideas are is revealed by the fact that in the 1970s when I (and most other writers of the left) surrendered the battlefield of ideas, formalism of a most obscurantist kind has come to dominate the suburban literary scene.

Even those literary works of mine not directly concerned with periods of depression: But the Dead are Many, The Outcasts of Foolgarah, and Who Shot George Kirkland are actuated by the political and literary stance I developed as a result of the 1930s depression. Even this very thought disqualifies me as a literary figure in the minds and lectures and writings of the academic literary establishment.

The Oxford History of Australian literature, on the basis of a few precious, élitist concepts, discussed Australian literature from the point of view of formalistic value judgements, praising the right-wing trend in Australian literature which began with Christopher Brennan and ended with Martin Boyd, and dismissed the left-wing trend which began with Henry Lawson and all the writers who have represented it like Katharine Susannah Prichard, Xavier Herbert, Vance Palmer, as journalists and propagandists. Contrast this with the earlier Penguin Guide to Australian Literature, which treated the two main trends objectively and views Australian literature as a dialectical process reflecting our life and times, and you will realise the extent to which formalism has come to dominate Australian literary theory.

Two generations of university students, of readers and writers, have been brainwashed so that literature has lost touch with the real issues of the real world and become the preserve of an élite. However, as the surrender of the left in the battle is ending, the realist trend seems to be staging a comeback. The period of economic and political crisis which lies ahead will hasten this development.

In a talk given at the New England University in 1965, ‘Environment and Ideology in Australian Literature’, I said, inter alia, that writers and critics should strive to have the war of ideas end in a synthesis of the two trends (that statement I stand by); and that the Depression of the 1930s had dominated the thinking in my generation too much and too long (I would recast the statement now: my experiences in that crisis will dominate me while I live and reverberate back to the 1890s and forward to the 1980s).

To leave the synthesis idea aside for the moment, my thinking and writing have always been conditioned by a belief that the capitalist system cannot, in the long term, fulfil the material much less the cultural and spiritual needs of the people. Even during the long boom 1945–75 I knew that it would end in a big bust, that the system was set up to enable the rich to rob the poor while warning them à la Ayn Rand that they must believe in the ‘value system’ of a free market, private enterprise, and the virtues of the selfishness of the rich or else they would lose their freedom to Big Brother à la George Orwell’s 1984 (look at the world and recognise the bullshit that Rand and Orwell wrote and how they brainwashed our contemporaries).

What the hell has all this got to do with literature? Well, capitalism is a class system and writers, like most other people, tend to take sides in the struggle of ideas which arise from class interests; at least they take up a literary stance influenced by that battle of ideas.

Australian literature, from its first flowering in the 1890s until the present day, has known such a war. The capitalist establishment asserts that literature is about words, symbols, poetic prose, and ‘man’s need to reconcile himself with God’ and dismisses realist works on the grounds that they are artistically inferior. But they dismiss such works even when they are of the highest literary quality. For example, no better prose has been written anywhere in Australian literature than in the best novels of Katharine Susannah Prichard like Working Bullocks and Coonarloo, yet most of the academic formalists would consign her work to the dustbin because of ‘the sacrifice of artistry to mundane detail’. Writing about Prichard, Herbert, and Palmer in the introduction to the Oxford Aust. Lit. book, the editor, Professor Dame Leonie Kramer, complains that (because of their concern for social issues) they arrive ‘at the quality of life and experience, if at all, indirectly’.

She then wrote:

the predominance of the mode of social realism in fiction (and the mode of social realism in fiction (and in much Australian drama) is not at all easy to account for. Its causes may lie deep in history, in a notion of equality, and in a sometimes naive faith in the underdog.

She deplores all this and she and her fellows devote most of the five hundred pages of the so-called history to an attempt to demolish social realism as a literary method. No matter how much symbolism or literary artifice is used, books of social purpose are invariably dismissed. The writers about the convict period, Price Warung and Marcus Clarke, are dismissed for failing to represent:

the truth of human experience, that we look for. The kind of truth Warung projects is compelled by a fiercely maintained stance of moral outrage, which to the suspicious may seem a thin justification for sensationalism. Like Frank Hardy and Xavier Herbert, his righteous indignation is more political than moral.

Kramer’s suspicions of social realism are shared by Adrian Mitchell to whose mincing mercy Australian fiction is handed over. My very existence seems to upset Mitchell: ‘for Frank Hardy and his Realist Writers coterie in Melbourne, the literature of the inner life is less important than a view of society … Hardy is hardly a novelist at all.’ Mitchell found it easy to dismiss Power Without Glory and made a determined attack on But the Dead Are Many. One would have thought that the latter novel, which freely uses symbolism and other literary devices beloved of the formalists and is actually constructed in the form of a fugue, might have held some appeal, but Mitchell managed to get at it on the basis of his dislike for communists. He writes that the novel ‘analyses the disappointments and disillusions of a few tired Australian communists’. Mitchell admits that I

experimented with several different stances, including that of the memorialist, in first person narrative (the blemished and ideal selves of John Morel and his alter ego and biographer Jack, together with an intrusive author who steps between John Morel and the reader from time to time), but forces his novel to imitate the structure of a fugue. The supervising pattern is so tight that the novel appears to exist for the fugue form, rather than to derive advantage from it. The contrapuntal action and the characters self-preoccupations fail to interest because in the first place the characters are themselves uninteresting.

Might I suggest that the reader looks at that last quote again? The novel is dismissed, all its literary devices passed over and the novel is forced to imitate the structure of the fugue; all, it seems, because Australian communists are tired and uninteresting.

Readers who have not read the novel will pardon me if I say that critics overseas held a very different view from Mitchell, they found the characters vital and saw the fugue form as essential to the content and structure of the work. Modesty forbids me to quote from any more than one of the overseas critics who universally praised the book. G.T. Driver of the London Guardian praised it without stint, said that it was the only novel that he had reviewed that year which he was sure would be read in ten years’ time and declared that But the Dead are Many lost nothing by comparison with Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook. High praise indeed! But, of course, if Doris were an Australian she would have received the same cavalier treatment from the Kramers and Mitchells of this world. What is more puzzling is the fact that Mitchell’s opinion of the novel runs counter to the high praise given in Australia by such distinguished critics as Brian Kiernan, T.J. McKenna, and Dr Clement Semmler.

If I seem to be angry (and I in fact feel as savage as a meat axe) it is for two reasons: the palpable influence of the academic cliques on what is read and written in Australia has done great harm to our literature; and I resent what they have done to me and other Australian writers of the social realist trend in front of today’s students and on future generations unless we fight back. Only if the battle lines are again drawn and the struggle of ideas fought through can Australian literature find its way back to the real world and the social realist writers of the past from Lawson to Prichard be restored to their true stature and influence.

The flight from reality in Australian literary theory is paralleled by the dominance of the theories of modernist abstraction in the field of painting. Memory Holloway, the Age art critic, declared that Mark Rothko’s greatest achievement as a painter was that he had excluded the real world and allowed colour alone to express all the emotions and meanings. The literary formalists want to exclude the real world from literature and study only words and symbols.

This retreat from the bitter realities of our time is a symptom of the decay of the capitalist system, of the desire of the bourgeoisie to deflect the people from the horrifying situation it has created in the world. Formalist ideas, both in literature and painting, pose as radical but they are merely a reflection of the radical right. The tone and content of this article, which is really a spontaneous outburst, would seem to indicate that a polarisation is taking place in the literary world. Let it be so because the lack of polarisation in the last two decades was due to a surrender of the left and has led Australian literature into a stagnant backwater.

My purpose, however, is intended to be constructive, even conciliatory, in the long term: only if this contradiction is resolved and synthesised can Australian literature continue to progress. All progress comes from contradiction and the synthesis of apparent opposites. I have attacked the critics of the formalist radical right, not the work of the writers of the trend which they support. The best writers of the formalist trend in Australian literature, from Christopher Brennan to Patrick White, have made great contributions to our literature (in White’s case to world literature), and we writers of the social realist trend have much to learn from them. We must ignore the academics and listen to each other, striving for the synthesis in form and content which will take us forward to the next stage.

The two main trends in Australian literature are not irreconcilable opposites but the working writers and the formalist academic critics are. The critics are part of the superstructure of capitalist society from which their ideas flow; we are not. For details of my concept of the need for a synthesis between the two main trends in Australian literature some readers might care to look up my essay ‘Environment and Ideology in Australian Literature’, which has been published in a book edited by Clement Semmler and Derrick Whitelock.

For myself, I will continue to take on the warriors of academia in the world of literary ideas and to write from the standpoint of the victims of the crisis which characterises our time.

Generally speaking, Australian writers get along very well together. I think we will get along even better if we debate the issues which arise starkly in The Oxford History of Australian Literature which seeks to exclude the social realist trend and makes synthesis impossible.

Of course, as Goethe said, theory is grey but green is the tree of life so, having delivered this blast, I will return to the real world as reflected in my contemporary novel The Obsession of Oscar Oswald. Beneath the strange and terrifying events portrayed in it runs an underground stream of pity, compassion, and moral indignation; so the critics of the radical right can get well stuffed – as far as Oscar Oswald and I are concerned.