AustLit

'Mateship is so central to the traditional view of Australia that John Howard wanted it written into the preamble of the Constitution. But Brenda Niall asserts in Friends & Rivals, a fine account of four female writers, that “mateship is the antithesis of individualism. When women question or confront their destiny, cracks appear.” Half a beat behind The Bulletin writers — rhapsodising about mateship in “the real Australia” — there were several women who ignored it, worked their way around it and, in one case, challenged it directly.' (Introduction)

'Armed with more than half a century’s worth of knowledge, experience, the fermentation of ideas and approaches in literary history and criticism over that period, and her own formidable reputation as a scholar and teacher of Australian literature, Brenda Niall returns in her latest book to the territory of her earliest ones. In Seven Little Billabongs: The world of Ethel Turner and Mary Grant Bruce (1979), Niall broke new ground not just in writing a serious and scholarly full-length treatment of Australian children’s literature, but also in departing from the orthodox biographical tradition of focusing on a single figure.'  (Introduction)

'“We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves.” The eponymous protagonist of Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient imagines a mapping of self that traces the hidden and intimate and reveals how we are “marked by nature” and by the flames of connection. It’s not enough “just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books.”' (Introduction)