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Thomas Shapcott
Thomas Shapcott is an Australian poet, novelist, playwright, editor, librettist, short story writer and teacher. He has received numerous rewards and accolades for his work, and in 1989 was appointed an Officer (AO) of the Order of Australia.
One of the defining features of recent years in Australian ‘literature’ (as I suppose we must call it), in tandem with a perceived growth in the quantity of fiction and poetry by women, titles reflecting the ethnic diversity of origin in more and more writers, and a growth industry in Aboriginal studies, has been the remarkable increase in sophistication of approach to biography. Perhaps more ... (read more)
These stories are well written and rather depressing. That makes them, I guess, rather representative of what one might call the current state of short-story writing by urban males. One thinks immediately of recent collections by Garry Disher and Nick Earls. There seem to be a few basic starting off points, the most notable being in the delineation of defensiveness and insecurities that give the m ... (read more)
A first novel written with fine-honed discretion and linking three generations of very ordinary Australians, this book has a satisfying sense of the continuities and disjunctions within families.
The story is rich in small, telling details and wonderfully laconic verbal exchanges (if that is not too heady a word) between couple whose feeling towards each other have been long eroded by habit. Yet ... (read more)
Attending a poetry festival is not normally considered a life-threatening event (not even if you are prone to deep vein thrombosis from constant sitting) but when I told my family I was going to Struga, I was greeted by worried looks and expressions of deep concern. Struga is in the Republic of Macedonia. Just days before, Macedonian hotheads had set fire to a mosque in Prilip (not that far from S ... (read more)
I approached this collection of essays with some sense of anticipation, thinking ‘Do David Williamson, Beatrice Faust, Jamie Grant, Frank Moorhouse, Les Murray, and Christopher Pearson have something in common? If so, what?’
When I read Peter Coleman’s introduction with its language of battle lines and militarist imagery, I was certainly aware of an Us vs Them program, with the demon as Pol ... (read more)
Before the age of thirty, Randolph Stow had published five novels and a prize-winning collection of poetry. In Australia, only Kenneth Mackenzie, another Sandgroper, had made a similar youthful impact. Mackenzie’s first book, The Young Desire It, was published in 1937, though I believe drafted some time before that. Stow’s The Haunted Land (1956) was written when he was only seventeen. When an ... (read more)
The poems of Ern Malley must be on the way to becoming the most reprinted collection of twentieth-century Australian poetry. As Max Harris says in his essay, one of the pivots of this book:
More than forty years on, after his death from Graves’ disease and his burial at Rookwood Cemetery in 1944, after twelve editions of his collected poetry in the intervening years, Ern Malley is alive and w ... (read more)
For the previous Commonwealth Writers’ Week associated with the Commonwealth Games at Edmonton, a large if not necessarily lively anthology of writing from all countries of the Commonwealth was produced. Brisbane produced a twelve page ‘Guide to Participants’ which showed that only eighteen of the sixty-three listed participants were not Australian or Australian born. Not all of the eighteen ... (read more)
Underneath everything we touch is the smellOf something too obvious to expressAnd yet we say there is nothing, nothing at all.
We have learned to live with a multitude of smells,They simply do not bother us, they are everydayAnd part of the natural world we have inherited.
There is nothing more obvious than the smell of living,It is like movement, and, like movement, it is everywhere.Like sweat ... (read more)