CategoryReviews of Australian Literature

I’m sad to say this is another fine book that I’m confident that no one I know will read. I bought it through Amazon because the author recently won the Stella Prize ($50,000 prize open to Australian women writers) for another of her books. This 2004 book struck me as being a good way to begin to read her work and that turned out to be a fortuitous decision. This was a terrific book...

I am a fan of this Australian writer: her Five Bells, set lovingly in Sydney, and Sixty Lights, a wide-ranging, beautifully written book, were outstanding. This one has the same name as a short story by Vladimir Nabokov and is set in Berlin where he lived from 1922 to 1937. I am confident that I missed much in this book because if I have read anything by Nabokov other than Lolita, I...

A book that attempts to deconstruct an artist is not going to be straightforward. Occasionally one has insights into the interplay between the individual and the art he creates. In this case the artist is born into a family that has fallen by gambling and other misfortunes such that Frank Harland is sent to live with his aunt and uncle when his mother dies. In that house haunted by the death of a...

This book of fiction centers on an actual Australian character I first encountered in The Secret Son by Jenny Ackland: a man named E.W. Cole known for the E.W. Cole Book Arcade in Melbourne. He was born in 1832 in England, migrated to Australia in 1852 and worked on the goldfields. He began selling books in a stall in 1865 and opened the Arcade in 1883 which eventually grew to have one of...

I'm sad to read a book knowing it will be one of my favorites for the year that no one I know is likely to read. I saw a review of it on ANZ LitLovers and was happy to find that it is available for Kindle readers. The only other way I could find to get it is from an online seller called Fishpond based in Australia that claims to have free shipping anywhere in the world at a reasonable...

I did love Madeleine St. John's only novel set in Australia, The Women in Black, a sweet book. St. John met that amazing set of Australian writers, Bruce Beresford, Clive James, Germaine Greer, and Robert Hughes at Sydney University. She wrote that book, her first, at age 52 while living in London. This one was written in 1996, a year before she was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize...

Evie Wyld’s first book After the Fire, a Still Small Voice, has descriptions nearly as searing as her second, the Miles Franklin award-winning All the Birds, Singing. The two story lines are about two men, a generation apart. The story of Frank, which occurs in the present is the dominant story and begins with him leaving Canberra for a shack his grandparents had owned outside a small...

The author of this winner of the Stella Prize for 2015 was inspired by stories of the Melbourne art world in the 1930s and 1940s, a time when traditionalists were denouncing modern art and Australian artists were seeking to make "Australian art," rather than seeking European acceptance. Other than a few historical figures, Robert Menzies, for one, the book creates fictional characters...