There are a hundred ways of putting together any anthology, most of which are going to annoy somebody. In the case of that much sought-after beast, Australian literature, editors have a fair chance of turning into the quarry. It is not so long since J.I.M. Stewart said, from his chair of English in Adelaide, that there wasn’t any Australian literature so he was going to lecture on D.H. Lawrence’s Kangaroo instead.

That was in the 1940s, before Patrick White came back to Australia and wrote some of the greater novels in English since the heyday of James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence; before White read, and allowed himself to be influenced by, The Fortunes of Richard Mahony. It was before Robert Lowell described Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children as a ‘black diamond’ of a book, and Randall Jarrell wrote his famous introduction. It was before A.A. Phillips wrote his ‘Cultural Cringe’ essay and Clem Christesen got going with Meanjin. It was even before James McAuley and Harold Stewart, with ‘Ern Malley’, took the mickey out of Max Harris and the ‘Angry Penguin’ moment. It was around this time that the young Frank Kermode fell into the hands of McAuley and A.D. Hope. Forty years later, he said that Australian poetry was at that point more interesting than English poetry. (More interesting than late T.S. Eliot or early Auden? It was a gallant remark.)