AustLit

'My friends in England are puzzled. Again. They look at Australia as they would stare sorrowfully at a teenage relative, off the rails...'

'We arrive in the world screaming, smeared in blood and shit. Small animals, abject and abraded by things. The inch between animation and termination is a few days warmth. And life is chiefly sleep anyway: a blur, a craving, then oblivion again. Our divinity is Ananke: necessity.' (Abstract)

'I'm reading Patrick White's play 'A Cheery Soul', first published in Four Plays by Patrick White in 1965 and first staged at the Union Theatre, University of Melbourne, in 1963. It is built around a misogynist construct, the difficult woman, here the aged Miss Docker, a woman who is difficult to like, difficult to be around and makes difficulties for others. She is also, ironically, cheerful and good, the cheery soul of the title, and oblivious to the disparagement but not the condescension of others. This is apparent early in the play when the respectable Mrs Custance, who is moved to perform an act of kindness towards the less fortunate, invites the homeless Miss Docker to move into their 'little glassed-in veranda room'. Mrs Custance refers to her as 'a dedicated soul' but tends to agree when Mr Custance, a man with a 'Nietzschean moustache', likens it to 'the soul of a bulldozer'; others such as the Vicar denounce her 'militant virtue'.' (Abstract)

Some of the finest works of Australian fiction were written by women who had left the country long before, yet whose memories of it were the strongest inspiration. Aged eighteen, Henry Handel Richardson left Australia in 1888 to study music at Leipzig. Her trilogy 'The Fortunes of Richard Mahony' (published in one volume in 1930) was written and researched in London, save for a two-month visit to 'Australia in 1912. Christina Stead, whose childhood was spent at Watsons Bay in Sydney before the Great War, dreamed passionately of a world elsewhere. Savings from teaching and office work enabled her to take ship for London in 1928. Hers would be one of the most fabled expatriate careers in Australian literature. While her novels remained unpublished here until the 1960s, she forged a reputation in Britain and the United States, before coming back in 1974 to a strange place that was in some ways still home. Her novel For Love Alone (1944) draws to rich effect on her young adult years of struggle in Sydney and then in London, as it tells the story of the indomitable Teresa Hawkins.' (Abstract)

'I tell him, My name is Ghost. And at that very moment a kookaburra laughs. I find myself thinking that no-one owns the laugh of a kookaburra, not even the kookaburra. It's not copyright. And kookaburras have only been over here, here in the West, for a hundred or so years. People from t'other side often don't realise that, thinking their way is the normal way. Maybe lyrebirds can mimic a kookaburra's call where they come from. Wouldn't know - have to look it up. I can see from the blood in his cheeks, his scrunched eyes, the mild tremor taking hold of his limbs, that he thinks I am laughing at him. I'm not. I am simply saying, My name is Ghost...' (Abstract)

'The shape of the city is hazy. From above, Sydney looks like somebody spilled ink on a map, let the rivulets run and shrugged when the mess began to dry, saying 'fine, that can be Sydney'. The way it actually happened wasn't so different. The city was first a prison, not a place. Roads were built with no logic or forethought. The city sprang up hastily, and it was too hot and too hard ever to go back and try to make sense of it. The roads are thin and winding. They adhere to no grid. The tree roots splinter the bitumen. Sensible-seeming routes peter out into dead ends and one-way streets.' (Abstract)