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Elizabeth Webby

The Giraffe's Uncle by Les Robinson & My Love Must Wait by Ernestine Hill

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December 2002-January 2003, no. 247
Elizabeth Webby reviews 'The Giraffe's Uncle' by Les Robinson, 'My Love Must Wait' by Ernestine Hill, 'The Sundowners' by Jon Cleary and 'The Treatment and The Cure' by Peter Kocan

As HarperCollins continues to release this welcome series of Australian reissues, it’s especially pleasing to see them including less well-known, even long-forgotten, titles. While I had read none of these latest offerings, I did at least know something about three of the authors. Les Robinson, however, was almost a complete mystery. ‘Almost’ because I had a vague memory of one of his stories being included in an anthology I once lectured on. Obviously, it did not impress me enough to seek out more of his work. Nor would it have been easy to find, since, unlike the other three titles, The Giraffe’s Uncle had never been reissued since its first printing, in 1933, by the Macquarie Head Press, a firm now as forgotten as the books it published.

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Patrick White's Papers

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December 2010–January 2011, no. 327

It’s not often that literature makes the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald, but on 3 November 2006 the lead story was a report by David Marr about the National Library of Australia’s purchase of a collection of Patrick White’s papers, previously thought destroyed. Other media, both in Australia and internationally, picked up the story. The T ...

Revisiting Xavier Herbert’s Capricornia

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May 2009, no. 311

Baz Luhrmann’s epic film Australia may not have won any Oscars or attracted hordes of overseas tourists, but it has had at least one positive outcome. HarperCollins reissued Xavier Herbert’s equally epic Capricornia (1938), one of many acknowledged influences on the film, another being Herbert’s even longer novel, Poor Fellow My Country (1975). While visiting New Zealand recently, I was delighted to see the handsome new edition of one of Australia’s greatest novels prominently displayed in bookshops.

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Robbery Under Arms by Rolf Boldrewood, edited by Paul Eggert and Elizabeth Webby

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April 2007, no. 290
Rick Hosking reviews 'Robbery Under Arms' by Rolf Boldrewood, edited by Paul Eggert and Elizabeth Webby

Rolf Boldrewood’s Robbery Under Arms is the ninth volume to be published by the Academy Editions of Australian Literature project. Edited by Paul Eggert and Elizabeth Webby, the handsome volume is a major addition to this growing library of classics of Australian writing. It will undoubtedly become the definitive critical edition of Robbery Under Arms; the comprehensive scholarship that accompanies this book will illuminate our teaching and thinking about Boldrewood’s classic in the twenty-first century.

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Fabulating Beauty: Perspectives on the fiction of Peter Carey edited by Andreas Gaile

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April 2006, no. 280
Elizabeth Webby reviews 'Fabulating Beauty: Perspectives on the fiction of Peter Carey' edited by Andreas Gaile

In the last essay in this collection, Robert Macfarlane touches on the main reasons why Peter Carey’s novels ‘have proved so very attractive to academic exegetes’, in their combination of the postmodern and the postcolonial. Just how attractive is demonstrated in the sixty-page bibliography, which is sure to be one of the most used parts of Fabulating Beauty, especially by overseas readers without access to the invaluable AustLit. Editor Andreas Gaile, a young German academic, notes in his introduction that Carey is now ‘the most widely commented-on living Australian author’. While Patrick White is currently well ahead, with more than twice as many critical items published on his work, Carey is catching up fast. Visit any bookshop, whether in Melbourne, London, or New York, and you will of course find many more titles by Carey than by White. If, as Simon During has argued, White was the perfect novelist for those wishing to argue for the academic significance of Australian literature in the 1950s and 1960s, then Carey has just as obviously caught the dominant theoretical currents of the past thirty years. While Tim Winton may sell just as well and, if ‘favourite book’ polls are any guide, be more loved, no one has yet published a major critical study of his work.

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Ever Yours, C.H. Spence: Catherine Helen Spence’s an autobiography (1825–1910), diary (1894) and some correspondence (1894–1910) edited by Susan Magarey

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February 2006, no. 278
Elizabeth Webby reviews ‘Ever Yours, C.H. Spence: Catherine Helen Spence’s an autobiography (1825–1910), diary (1894) and some correspondence (1894–1910)’ edited by Susan Magarey

As Nicholas Jose observed in the November 2005 issue of ABR, the face of South Australian novelist Catherine Spence, currently featured on our $5 note, circulates much more widely than any of her books. Like those of several other nineteenth-century Australian women writers, Spence’s novels were revived in the 1980s but are now once again out of print. So this new edition of her autobiography, extensively annotated and accompanied by letters and a diary never before published, is especially welcome.

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‘Classic’ Reissues

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July 2001, no. 232

A few weeks ago, I attended the session on ‘What is an Australian Classic?’ during the Sydney Writers’ Festival. My own definition of what makes a classic is a simple one: a book from the past that retains significance, that still entertains and enlightens us, even though we may respond to it in quite different ways from its initial readers. In some cases, of course, classics were not so highly regarded on first publication. Even Gerard Windsor, at the festival, had to concede that Joyce’s Ulysses was a classic; it was of course banned in Australia, and elsewhere, for many years. And one of the eight titles in the first series of A&R Classics, Come in Spinner ($21.95pb, 0 207 19756 3), also received a very mixed reception, as one of its authors, Florence James, remembers in the introduction she wrote in 1988 for the first printing of the unedited version of the novel. In 1951, the Sydney Daily Telegraph called Come in Spinner ‘a muckraking novel fit for the literary dustbin’, even though it had earlier won the newspaper’s own novel competition!

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John Hanrahan reviews 'A.D. Hope' by Kevin Hart, 'James McAuley' by Lyn McCredden, 'Peter Porter' by Peter Steele, 'Reconnoitres' edited by Margaret Harris & Elizabeth Webby, 'Annals of Australian Literature' edited by Joy Hooton & Harry Heseltine

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December 1992, no. 147

Oxford University Press has begun a welcome series called Australian Writers. Two further titles, Imre Salusinszky on Gerald Murnane and Ivor Indyk on David Malouf, will appear in March 1993, and eleven more books are in preparation. Though I find the first three uneven in quality, they make a very promising start to a series. In some ways they resemble Oliver and Boyd’s excellent series, Writers and Critics, even being of about the same length. However this new series is less elementary, more demanding of the reader. It is, predictably, far sparser in critical evaluation, concentrating on hermeneutics, and biographical information is as rare as a wombat waltz.

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Pen Portraits: Women writers and journalists in nineteenth century Australia by Patricia Clarke

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December 1988, no. 107
Elizabeth Webby reviews 'Pen Portraits: Women writers and journalists in nineteenth century Australia' by Patricia Clarke

About ten years ago, I was asked to give a talk to a Sydney group of Australian writers. (Actually, they asked Leonie Kramer, but she was busy.) I decided to talk on ‘Some unknown Australian women writers of the nineteenth century’ in ‘the hope of interesting some of them in researching the lives and careers of their predecessors.

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