Aviva Tuffield

Many readers – though apparently not enough to have saved them – will mourn the recent demise of Black Inc.’s annual Best Australian anthologies of essays, stories, and poems (which first appeared in 1998, 1999, and 2003, respectively). The last of these, however, has won something of a reprieve in Best Summer Stories ...

What makes a good short story? Zoe Dattner and Louise Swinn, editors of the fifth Sleepers Almanac, say there is no objective measure of quality; that everyone likes something different; and that they simply choose what appeals. As I sit down with their funky-looking volume, I don’t want to believe it. If that is the case, there is no place for literary critics, no real justification for academic literary study, and the premise for an editor’s judgement is shaky. Why should what they like matter particularly?

Anyone who has read Simone Lazaroo’s novel The Australian Fiancé (2000) will find many echoes in her latest work, The Travel Writer. That earlier book follows a young Eurasian woman, who had been kept by the Japanese as a comfort woman during the war, while she is being courted by a wealthy Australian. He lures her back to Broome with the promise of marriage, but the relationship collapses under the twin burdens of Australian racism and her traumatic past, which comes back to haunt her in devastating ways.

Sit down to read this book: it may give you a severe case of déjà vu. At the Typeface is an anthology of articles originally published in the Victorian Society of Editors’ newsletter between 1970 and early 2001 (since then the newsletters have been appearing online at www.socedvic.org). And, no surprises, the issues that trouble editors today have a long provenance: editors are underpaid and undervalued; marketing departments have more sway than editorial ones; publishers keep costs down by a reliance on freelancers; neophyte editors find it difficult to gain practical experience when there are few in-house positions.

Perhaps it’s the Zeitgeist, but Brenda Walker is the third Australian woman this year, after Geraldine Brooks in March and Delia Falconer in The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers, to fix her imaginative sights on men’s experiences of war and its aftermath. Walker’s book, however, directs as much attention to the home front and to the women left behind.

A few years ago, it seemed that anyone with a personal or family story to tell – even first-time authors – wrote a memoir rather than distilling those experiences into fiction. Think of Kate Shayler’s The Long Way Home (2001) or Sonia Orchard’s Something More Wonderful (2003). Many claimed this was because, at a moment when Australian memoir was resurgent, publishers were not supporting first-time novelists. But the tide may be turning. Recently, a number of autobiographical novels by new writers have appeared, well promoted and capturing the public’s attention, including Sophie Cunningham’s Geography (2004) and now Larissa Behrendt’s Home.