No more critically acute or challenging collection of essays on the subject has been published than Ken Stewart’s modestly titled Investigations in Australian Literature. Yet the author’s personality is not similarly subdued. The Stewart known in person to many readers of ABR emerges unselfconsciously: erudite but undogmatic, rueful and witty, a touch dishevelled, one of the most beguiling and persuasive of teachers about Australia and its literature. We are fortunate that – through the agency of the admirable Shoestring Press – this volume exists to demonstrate the coherence, conceptual clarity, and spirit of delight that imbues Stewart’s criticism of much that has been written here, at least to the middle of the century.

He begins with an earnest characterisation of himself as a bemused, youthful stumbler across the field of Australian literature, one who confessed to ‘an almost paranoiac sensation that something had been going on that I should have been told about’. As a student of naturalism in the 1960s, Stewart began to ask himself where was the account of ‘a colonial literature and its cultural context’? Moving to Henry Handel Richardson, he wondered why no-one had tried to place her father (Dr Walter Richardmn, in part the model for Richard Mahony) in such a context. After all, as he writes later, in the 1870s ‘In the Melbourne of unfinished palaces, Or Richardson was a figure of some public eminence’. Where, then, was the analysis of a society ‘equipped with an intelligentsia, literati, critics, poets, novelists, controversies, conflicts, theatre, music’?