AustLit

'While the Mary Poppins stories have been affectionately received as literature for children since they were first published in 1934, their Australian-born P. L. Travers maintained that she never intended this to be the case. Rather the stories reveal fairy tale as it pertains to those who have lost their childhood: "Grown-ups" (Travers Complete Collection 96) who wish to reconnect with the organically live experience of the child. This act of revisiting and revising one's childhood for the purpose of catharsis is a familiar one and a verifiable tool for the many writers wishing to both expunge haunting memories and at the same time reconnect with a world of unfettered insight and impulse. Confusing the boundaries between memory and fantasy, writers continue to reinvent scenes from their childhoods that enter the collective imagination and become popular legends. The magical worlds of Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan's Never Land and Mary Poppins's Fairyland epitomise and inaugurate this reworking of childhood fantasies.' (Introduction)

' We are first introduced to the character of Professor Ronald Challis in Shane Martin's detective fiction Twelve Girls in the Garden (1957) as he walks idly beside the River Thames, which "on this particular evening" the third person narration informs us, "was the of Turner rather than Whistler" (3). As Challis strolls from Pimlico to Chelsea, he muses on the circumstances that have recently led him from an archaeological dig in Greece to London. For "no reason at all" he then begins to think about past friends and he dwelling they once inhabited in Tite Street (4). (It was in this street in Chelsea, and in the same house once owned by James McNeill Whistler, that the Australian artist Colin Colahan and his wife Ursua lived during World War Two. Twelve Girls in the Garden is dedicated to them both "for fun.") (Introduction)

'In August 1961, Gwen Harwood smuggled two acrostic sonnets into the Bulletin under the name Walter Lehmann. The first, 'Eloisa to Abelard', spelled out 'So Long Bulletin,' and the second, 'Aberlard to Eloisa',  'Fuck all Editors.'  The presence of the acrostics, and the identity of their author was soon discovered, and for a few days, the hoax was front-page news. In Brisbane, Truth announced the 'Great Poem Hoax : Experts Fooled by Naughty Sonnets' while in Hobart the same newspaper proclaimed : 'Tas Housewife in Hoax of Year.' Meanwhile an outraged Bulletin expressed its disdain for Harwood's 'sad jest,' remarking snippily that 'a genuine literary hoax would have had some point to it' (3). For Harwood herself, things were 'rather nasty really' for a few weeks (Idle Talk 49), but soon enough, the so-caled Bulletin hoax faded quietly from public view. since then it has sometimes been referenced as an amusing snippet of Australian literary history - usually in relation to the Ern Malley affair.But unlike that earlier hoax, which Ken Ruthven has dubbed Australia's primal scene of literary forgery' (31). Harwood's hoax has rarely been seen as having any real literary or cultural significance.' (Introduction)

'My parents immigrated to Australia in 1964 when I was six years old. Within a year of arriving, they had bought land up river from Hobart and across the river from what is now Mona. The area was referred to then as Old beach Road. It always seemed odd that the district itself was nameless but for the kilometres of road that wound through it. The locality was flanked by the sublime parabolic foothills of Mt Direction and the shores of the Derwent River at its broadest sweep.' (Introduction)