AustLit

Lauren Williiams was ten years old when the poets of the 'Generation of '681 were forming their networks through poetry readings, the creation of small magazines, a takeover of the important Poetry Magazine, and entry into the mainstream by way of appearance in Poetry Australia and older established literary magazines. Robert Adamson and John Tranter in Sydney, Richard Tipping in South Australia, and Kris Hemensley and Robert Kenny in Melbourne characteristically printed their own work and that of their friends in such magazines as New Poetry (the transformed, American poetry-inflected successor to the Poetry Society of Australia's Poetry Magazine), Free Grass, Transit, Mok, Our Glass, Auk, and Flagstones. These male-initiated (and male-dominated) publications were unlike the more staid, university-connected literary magazines of the period: Meanjin, Overland, Southerly, and Westerly. They expressed a dissident response to the still generally English-oriented and nativist Australian traditions distinguished by emulation of long-revered or contemporary English verse, composition of ambitious versified epics of discovery, and lingering ballad and realist verse that reflected what would now be called post-colonial Australian poetry. Many of the 'new' Australian poets also wrote in ignorance of conventional Australian modes: younger Australians were starting to look further than England for models, at a time when American popular culture was invading Australian homes and American reactions to the Vietnam War were mirrored by Australians' divided loyalties to their American allies.' (Introduction)