Australian Scholarly Publishing

Barcroft Boake is remembered as one of the lesser lights in the school of Bush poets publishing in the Sydney Bulletin in the late nineteenth century. Two facts are probably known to most people who have heard of him: that he wrote a gloomy but impressive and memorable poem, much anthologised, called ‘Where the Dead Men Lie’, and that he hanged himself with his stock-whip when young. (Some, mindful of Keats, might guess he was twenty-six when he died, and they would be right.)

Australian publishers rarely risk bringing out collections of short fiction from writers who haven’t already made their names with novels. Neither of these writers is unknown, of course: Adriana Ellis has long been admired for the comic insights and the spare power of her fiction, her previous collection Cleared Moments Clear Spaces having appeared with FACP in 1990; while Anthony Lynch enjoys an increasingly strong reputation as a poet, fiction writer, literary editor and publisher. The shame is that these collections, piquant in their stylish brevity, reverberative far beyond their modest slimness, have not attracted the notice they deserve.

There is a term used in archaeology to describe the process of collecting material from the top of the ground as opposed to digging or excavating for it. It’s called ‘surface collection’. I learnt this recently when I read a new book by that name on archaeology and heritage in South-East Asia by the Sydney-based archaeologist Denis Byrne. It was a useful concept to have in mind as I read Writing Heritage: The Depiction of Indigenous Heritage in European–Australian Writings, which overflows with vignettes and descriptions about men (and it was mostly men) who spent their time scouring the Australian landscape’s surface for things made by indigenous people.

Literary criticism is a rara avis in Australia’s publishing world, perhaps only to be hoped for under an imprint such as Australian Scholarly Publishing. Yet a search of its recent publications shows that among nineteen titles this is the only instance – and one facilitated by a Melbourne University publishing grant. Rightly so, for Cassandra L. Atherton’s is academic writing in the best sense of that abused adjective: argumentative, lucid, grounded in extensive research, sustained by a lively intelligence and harnessed to a bright idea. None of which means that I agree with everything she says, but then one function of good theoretical discourse is to provoke disagreement.

Besides being a bookseller, publisher and literary agent, Henry Hyde Champion (1859–1929) – the subject of this fascinating biography – was also, at various stages, an army officer, a journalist, and a socialist organiser. Born in England to a wealthy family with aristocratic roots, Champion turned his back on a conventional upper-class life after witnessing the appalling poverty of London’s East End. He embarked on what was to become a lifetime of activism on behalf of the poor and the working classes. Champion was a pioneer socialist of late nineteenth-century England and in this capacity, had dealings with such luminaries as George Bernard Shaw and the union leader John Burns. He was a key participant in the London Dock Strike of 1889, which was to prove a watershed for the labour movement, and was an early promoter of the eight-hour day.

Jack Lang was born to a poor watchmaker’s family in Sydney in 1876. He was twice premier of NSW and founder of two breakaway Labor parties. Lang lives on in the popular imagination as that hapless figure at the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge in 1932, upstaged when the sword-wielding Captain de Groot of the right-wing New Guard rode in and slashed Lang’s official opening ribbon. De Groot’s ribbon-slashing wins passing notice in Frank Cain’s story of Jack Lang. Very little else in Lang’s life does. His youthful encounters with socialism during the 1890s Depression, his marriage to Hilda Bredt – daughter of feminist–socialist Bertha Bredt – or his success as a real estate agent in Auburn are not important in this story, for Cain places Lang firmly within a framework of economic and constitutional history.

‘There is no Australian city other than Melbourne which could have produced Keith Dunstan,’ writes Barry Humphries in his foreword to this collection. Indeed, Dunstan, journalist and writer, has long been a Melbourne institution, particularly remembered for his daily column in the Sun News-Pictorial, ‘A Place in the Sun’. While working as a journalist, he was also busy as a writer of popular history: among his many works is that splendid trilogy, Wowsers (1968), Knockers (1972) and Ratbags (1979), the juxtaposition of those titles telling us so much about the character of Australian culture.