Australian Fiction

While the imminent demise of the Australian novel continues to be predicted in the pages of the nation’s broadsheets, a curious thing is happening: two Australian publishing houses are creating new fiction lists. Australian Scholarly Publishing will present its fiction titles under the imprint Thompson Walker, and the University of Western Australia Press has come up with a New Writing series to showcase work from the postgraduate creative writing programmes of Australian universities.

If you can say immediately what you think a novel is ‘about’, then the chances are that it may not be a very good novel. Fiction as a genre gives writers and readers imaginative room to move, to work on a vertical axis of layers of meaning as well as along the horizontal forward movement of narrative development ...

How much do you care about sheep? I mean really care about sheep. Because The Ballad of Desmond Kale is up to its woolly neck in them. It’s an unusual and inspired variation on the classic Australian colonial novel of hunters for fortune, for identity and for redemption. The historical record is filled with accounts of early settlers grappling with the hostile and unpleasant environment. The battle to tame the distinctly un-European landscape has been a recurring theme in Australian literature ever since. As a consequence, the physical landscape has been mythologised. Here, the rhetoric goes, we might find ourselves. The bush and the outback are awarded a spiritual quality. If we can understand this, be at one with the space that was formerly so hostile to us, then maybe we can understand what it means to be Australian.

This book made me laugh, especially during the love scenes. I doubt this was the author’s intention. Short, gnarled, gritty Italian cop meets posh British beanpole and they spend the first half of the book being crisply offhand, the last part sounding like canoodling dorks. Katie Hepburn and Spencer Tracey it isn’t – but it should be. Whenever they meet, I have an indelible image of the cop looking laconically at her belt buckle. He is Carmine; she, would you believe, is Desdemona.

Kate Grenville is a brave woman. For some years now, the representation of Aboriginal people by white writers has been hedged about by a thicket of post­colonial anxieties, profoundly problematic and important but too often manifested as hostile, holier-than-thou critique, indulging, at its most inept ..

John Clanchy’s fictional concerns are with the large things: desire, pain, guilt, innocence, infidelity, sexuality, madness and the cost of making great art. In various guises, the spectre of Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh haunts many of the stories: he appears in a biographical portrait, in the recurring echoes of his first name, in a discussion of the use of colour in his pictures and in several reworkings of his mental illness.

Spirit Wrestlers takes its title from ‘Doukhobors’, the name adopted by a strict religious sect that originated in Russia and that was harshly repressed both by the tsarist state and the church. The Society of Friends, attracted by the Doukhobors’ pacifist beliefs and by their prayer meetings, which reject liturgy ...

Why are there so few new and exciting voices in Australian fiction? Why do Australian novels so consistently fail to capture the imagination of the reading public? What was the last Australian book you really liked? Where is the next generation of Australian authors going to come from? Who are three Australian writers under the age of thirty or forty?