Immortal Democratic Moment

In 1985, at age twenty, I turned to the study of Australian literature, seeking a world that was not yet dead. I sought a horizon of hope, a milieu of greater generosity and charity, tolerance and flexibility. Three years later, in 1988, in the consummate gesture of the New Historicist school of criticism, Stephen Greenblatt said, “I began with a desire to speak with the dead”.1 Greenblatt sought to understand the past, to study how people of previous generations might have thought in their own terms. My interest in Australia was motivated by a similar freewheeling curiosity about a locale from which I was separated not by time but by space. I had no organic ties to Australia, had never been there and knew next to nothing about it. I knew where it was and that was about all. Yet Australia seemed an alluring alternative for a young American in despair over the corrosive and cruel effects that the policies of the Ronald Reagan administration were having on my country, turning it into a place where a sharp divide between economic winners and losers categorised everybody.

The same year, the Australian historian Stuart Macintyre published a book entitled Winners and Losers. It explored the theme of social justice in Australian history in an optimistic manner, as if, despite challenges and a history marred by hierarchy, there were more social justice to come.2 One hundred years earlier, in On the Genealogy of Morals, Friedrich Nietzsche had discussed the displacement, at some point in the ancient world, of the dichotomy of “good” and “bad” (a distinction based on opinion or taste) by “good and evil” (a dichotomy seen as metaphysical and unalterable). Malcolm Bull and Corey Robin have linked the rise of social inequality from the 1980s to a new Nietzscheanism.3 Nietzsche as a thinker is hard to pin down, but his sense of the good as “the noble, the superior, the powerful and the high-minded”, possessed by “the ones who felt themselves to be good”, implies the division of humanity into an elite overclass and an underclass.4 It might be argued that the 1980s saw a revision to Nietzsche, with a shift from good versus evil to winners versus losers. After about 1980, what one stood for mattered less than whether or not one was winning. The “ones who felt themselves to be good”, in Nietzsche’s words, felt so not because they believed their values were superior, but simply as a consequence of brute success.

At a time when, in America, there was a sharp and growing divide between economic winners and losers, Australia seemed an alluring alternative. The Australian difference I perceived was not so much the fact that a Labor government, led by Prime Minister Bob Hawke, was in power as that Australia seemed to have a more humane society and even literary culture. It seemed a place where living, not dead, values predominated.

My turn to Australian literature was not inspired by illusions of mateship or working-class solidarity. My impressions of Australia were gleaned not from any understanding of Australian society, either real or fanciful, but from my immersion in two of Australia’s most important writers. Patrick White was still living and was still a force. No one could see White as an optimistic writer in a naive sense, certainly not in political terms. As Peter Wolfe, the American author of one of the first books on White, put it, “No social historian he.”5 White’s books were either about visionary failures (Voss stranded in the desert, Waldo and Arthur Brown locked in mutually destructive kinship, the valorous madness of Theodora Goodman, the mock crucifixion of Himmelfarb) or qualified successes (Stan and Amy Parker with their Job-like endurance, Hurtle Duffield’s achievement of artistic clarity through, and despite, his tortuous pain, Ellen Roxburgh’s discovery of a deeper self amid catastrophic displacement and Elizabeth Hunter’s adamance even in the face of death). All these characters were quintessentially modernist losers who nonetheless won.

Yet by the 1980s, when (to use Lauren Berlant’s phrase) the “cruel optimism” that for most of the twentieth century had been a hallmark of the totalitarian left shifted over to the right, White’s complex sense of the moral integrity of failure (or qualified success) seemed reassuringly human.6 When White chose not to publish any work in 1988, in protest against the inaptness of Australia’s bicentennial celebrations while Indigenous Australians were still mistreated and marginalised, he seemed not the Jungian or Nietzschean that some critics argued, but someone in whose creative soul art and conscience could coexist, even if they did not exactly coincide.

White had won the Nobel Prize in 1973 and by the 1980s was as much a household name as any Australian writer. Yet he never wished to be a straightforward hero. In 2010, the poet Vivian Smith, who knew White, told me over lunch at Circular Quay that White had always been gracious and kind to him. The public orneriness White displayed in later years – his dropping of former friends and his prickliness about the reception of his work – was, said Smith, a perhaps necessary, if unpleasant, consequence of his late political and postmodern turn. To some 1980s tastes, White’s novels might have seemed like superannuated blockbusters, tethered to an immobile conception of “the mythic”. But the half-lifting of White’s authorial mask during his last decade, as well as his openness about his sexuality in The Twyborn Affair (1979) and Flaws in the Glass (1981), made the sage of Centennial Park, in all his ornery idiosyncrasy, someone not just honourable but exemplary.

The other major writer who introduced me to Australia was just beginning to make a worldwide impression. Les Murray – who, at that point, signed himself “Les A. Murray” – astonishes with his braiding of linguistic complexity and personal feeling; his sense of the world and of the word transcends naive lyricism, preening formalism, or avant-garde posturing. This very much set him apart from the zeitgeist of the time.

In the spring of 1986, American Poetry Review published a portfolio of poems by Murray, including “Physiognomy on the Savage Manning River”, Murray’s portrait of Isabella Mary Kelly, a sadistic landowner who “rode beside / her walking convicts three days through the wilderness / to have them flogged half-insane in proper form / at Port Macquarie and Raymond Terrace”. Kelly, in Murray’s portrayal, is cruel and haughty, telling the convict who “dragged her from swift floodwater / ‘You waste your gallantry / You are still due a lashing / Walk on, croppy’.”7 Writing from his home territory of Bunyah, on the mid-north coast of New South Wales, after spending his young adulthood in Sydney, Murray is unyielding in portraying the struggle of convicts and Highland immigrants as they try to make their way in a post-settlement Australia still willing itself into existence. But his Isabella Kelly is no stock villain. Murray is more interested in how Kelly, scarred either by being jilted back in Dublin or by some innate evil in her soul, is turned into a “useful legend”, a substratum of history, destined to be confused with Kate Kelly, sister of the outlaw Ned. It would have been easy for Murray to see the convicts as victims and Isabella Kelly as a mere symbol of what David Scott later called “colonial governmentality”.8 Murray avoids a dichotomy of winners and losers, preferring the drama of a shared, toughening history. He also avoids a metaphysic of good and evil, despite being a convinced Christian. Indeed, in two poems published shortly after “Physiognomy on the Savage Manning River”, “Easter 1984” and “Religion and Poetry”, Murray gave us a Christ who does not impose upon us, but whom we cannot resist, one whose divinity “would not stop being human”. Murray offers a vision of religion and of poetry as both “given and intermittent”, both present and absent, an oscillation vital for Murray, but which he understands not everyone invests with the same credence. Murray is a populist, opposed not only to the residual colonial establishment but also to the entitled, leftist “Ascendancy”. He asks his reader not only to think and to contemplate but also to know. If we have not read widely in history, anthropology and religion, we lose much of Murray’s implication. Yet Murray is not elitist. He believes that the vast majority of us can know. This makes him unusual in a time of widening inequality when, as the French economist Thomas Piketty observes:

Murray, whatever his politics, is egalitarian in spirit. He demonstrates a faith not just in the compassion of what he calls the “vernacular republic”, but also in its intellectual resourcefulness. He insists that knowledge and imagination can abide in what he terms, in his poem “1980 in a Street of Federation Houses”, an “immortal democratic moment”.

Murray insists that those who fail are not losers, that even those who treat others cruelly also suffer – his Isabella Kelly brings to mind the repressed spinster Miss Hare in Riders in the Chariot – and that a strictly economic measurement of humanity, which partitions us into those who succeed and those who do not, is truly, on a moral level, impoverishing.

From these two icons, White and Murray, I rapidly branched out. For whatever reason, Columbia University’s Butler Library had a strong collection of Australian material. This was not to support a teaching interest: Columbia offered no courses in Australian literature. In this respect it was very different from its downtown competitor, New York University, which boasted the senior American Australianist Herbert C. Jaffa, humanities library bibliographer George Thompson and guest faculty including Thomas Keneally and Peter Carey. Nonetheless, the Columbia library housed an impressive Australian collection, not only of books but also of serials. Journals I read regularly included Poetry Australia, under the editorship of Grace Perry, and Scripsi, the all-too-short-lived journal under the rambunctious editorship of Peter Craven and Michael Heyward that had a vision of Australia as at once distinct and cosmopolitan.

A Time of Indigo-Maroon

But the books were the heart of it. I read widely and ravenously and somewhat unsystematically. The library had many of the University of Queensland Press editions of the collected works of prominent Australian poets, so in the dark of the stacks I read David Rowbotham (whom I would later meet at his Brisbane home) and Thomas Shapcott (whom I would later meet and edit). Thomas Keneally was widely known and respected in the USA and on a drizzly Saturday in March 1986 I was reading his Confederates, fascinated, as I still am, by his uncanny ability to capture the American Civil War from “outside” and by his talent for depicting warfare with both drama and integrity. Little did I know that, on the same campus, a group of Australianists and one actual Australian – Brian Kiernan of the University of Sydney – was meeting with the intent of founding an American association of Australian studies. This was yet another example of the “missed appointments” that have plagued the American rendezvous with Australia. A couple of years later, however, I joined the organisation.10

The genesis of the American Association of Australasian Literary Studies (AAALS) occurred when Kiernan gave a paper on Patrick White at a Modern Language Association convention in the early 1980s. In the audience was Robert L. Ross, a Texas-based academic and founding editor of Antipodes. Ross suggested that he and Kiernan collaborate to form an organisation devoted to Australian literary study. Although a curiosity about the land and people of Australia was a major motivation, Ross was also interested in South Asian writing and more broadly in what was then termed “Commonwealth literature”. Although he was not theoretically inclined and his work did not have the same conceptual breadth attained by the work of John Thieme, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Homi K. Bhabha, Ross’ instincts, like those of comparable Australian figures such as Ken Stewart and Julian Croft, were more or less in line with what would later receive academic codification as “postcolonial” criticism.

I was also pleased to meet the visiting Australian scholars at those first few conferences. They included Bull Ashcroft, Livio Dobrez, Margaret Harris, Susan Lever and John McLaren. Ashcroft’s presence was especially notable as The Empire Writes Back (1989), which he co-authored with Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, was a leading text in postcolonial theory. Australians performed much of the theorising of the postcolonial in the Anglophone academy, even if Australia took a back seat to regions such as the Caribbean and South Asia, whose postcolonial struggles were more urgent and more recent. There was a marked contrast between these scholars’ work and the position of academics such as Stewart and Croft, who were associated with the more nationalist tendencies of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL), which had been founded in 1977. To me at the time, both those perspectives were breaths of fresh air.

Significantly, even while these scholars sought to promote and further to understand Australian classics, they were also open to more recent writing, especially by women. If there was one writer aside from White who united AAALS in its earliest days, it was Thea Astley, with Elizabeth Jolley not far behind. The women writers of the day were often “late bloomers” who entered the field of serious fiction writing in their forties or fifties (much like the first novelists of the eighteenth century, Defoe and Richardson). Writers such as Astley, Jolley, Jessica Anderson, Barbara Hanrahan, Olga Masters and Amy Witting were not the bright young things the culture industry favours. Much in the spirit of the Patrick White Award, which White endowed specifically to support under-recognised older artists, they contravened the market’s preference for youth and trendiness. Although feminism’s place in mainstream Australian literature was hardly uncontested – the 1980s saw many gender-based battles for voice and position – by the time I arrived on the scene a feminist perspective was manifest. Then there was the superb Aboriginal poet Colin Johnson (who also wrote under the name Mudrooroo), whom poetry editor Paul Kane included in the spring 1988 Antipodes, the first issue of the journal I read. In his lyric “Dalwurra” Johnson asks, hearkening back to an archetypal Dreaming, “Was there ever a time of indigo-maroon?”, and then answers his own question, speaking of Indigenous people “surviving, surviving in the time of indigo-maroon”.11 The Dreaming is there, not in the remote past; it is now, however compromised that “now” may be.

Australian literature seemed to constitute an ideal world, especially in contrast to the USA, which in the 1980s was already becoming what Thomas Piketty would later call a “hypermeritocratic society”. In this society, a few “winners” would dominate and even, in Piketty’s words, “succeed in convincing some of the losers” that this was justified.12 In contrast, Australia seemed more a land of possibility, of a latter-day “time of indigo-maroon” where people of all backgrounds could affirm a sense of belonging in the world.

This was, of course, an illusion, one of many illusions brought to the Australian continent from people outside of it, starting perhaps from settlement. Gerald Murnane was another writer I read in these early years. In his 1983 short story “Land Deal”, Murnane speaks, from an imagined Aboriginal perspective, of European settlement as “a dream, which must now end”.13 Although this dream hardly ended after the Mabo decision of 1992, that verdict’s epochal affirmation of Indigenous land rights, its jettisoning of the principle of terra nullius through which white occupation of the land had been justified, meant that justice for Indigenous Australians could no longer be ignored. When, in 1997, it was revealed that Colin Johnson had misunderstood his own ancestry and was not, in fact, of Aboriginal descent, this disclosure seemed but an element in the unravelling of a “pre-Mabo” moment that, however promising and honourable, was in the end a false synthesis because it did not fully foreground the Indigenous issue.14

My view of Australia was not as romantic as that propagated by the popular Anglo-Australian novelist Nevil Shute, whose On the Beach (1957) imagined Australia as the last place to avoid nuclear devastation, or his lesser-known and weirder In the Wet (1953), which envisioned Australia embracing the royal family after Britain had turned republican. But I was still, like Shute, hoping that Australia would resist a trend that was advancing, in the end inexorably, worldwide.

The Global Comes to Australia

This fallacious hope may even be seen as a structural principle, embedded in capitalism. In the USA and the UK, the monetarist economic policies of the ruling parties in the 1980s had pushed inflation very low, leaving American investors used to high bond yields to look elsewhere. In 1985, the First Australia Prime Income Fund was founded, with former prime minister Malcolm Fraser and a former governor of New South Wales, Sir Roden Cutler, among the directors. The fund promised international investors higher yields than were available in the USA, but was never in fact a financial success, as under the policies of Labor treasurer Paul Keating inflation was controlled in Australia too. Australia turned out not to be nearly so far removed from global trends as many thought.

In the late 1980s and the 1990s, Australian publishing houses such as McPhee Gribble and Angus & Robertson, and Australian branches of world houses that had maintained a resolute Australian presence, such as Penguin, were taken over or amalgamated with global conglomerates and were as a result no longer as interested in promoting a distinctive Australian voice. In the 1980s, the Australia Council had sponsored “familiarisation tours” to Australia for American academics and had supported New York publicists such as Selma Shapiro and Pearl Bowman, whose function was to promote not specific Australian writers but Australian writing generally. These initiatives were all gone from the scene by 2000, reflecting what many saw as a more general waning of a distinctively Australian publishing space. Mark Davis speaks of the “decline of the literary paradigm” in this period, a yielding to neoliberal logic. A few literary books might still be unexpected hits, but the publishing industry’s commitment to publishing serious literature had, in Davis’ view, attenuated.15 When I began as reviews editor of Antipodes in the mid-1990s, I worked with a number of Australian publishing houses that were responsive – Penguin, Angus & Robertson, University of Queensland Press, Magabala, Spinifex – and understood the purpose of a small, USA-based academic journal. By 2000, only University of Queensland Press, under the editorship of Rosie Fitzgibbon, remained as a reliable partner willing to send books to a small scholarly journal that often took over a year to get books reviewed. By 2000, Michael Wilding was warning of the impending disappearance of Australian publishing culture.16­

Larger political and cultural developments were also operative. The election of the conservative Coalition government under Prime Minister John Howard in 1996 coincided with a series of scandals that seemed to delegitimise multiculturalism and social critique. Among these was the furore over the prize-winning novel The Hand That Signed the Paper, purportedly by a young Ukrainian-Australian woman named Helen Demidenko, who was revealed to be, in fact, of English descent and named Helen Darville, and the allegation that the leftist Australian historian Manning Clark had accepted the Order of Lenin from the Soviet Union. These scandals were symptomatic of a turn in the cultural conversation away from the subversive. During the 1980s, cultural and critical theory had had a growing impact in Australian academia, as seen in the work of Graeme Turner, John Frow and Kay Schaffer. In the early 1990s, there had been a series of theoretically inclined books: Bob Hodge and Vijay Mishra’s Dark Side of the Dream (1992), Ross Gibson’s South of the West (1992) and the cultural anthropology of Stephen Muecke and Eric Michaels. These books were the culmination of an Australian interest in Continental critical theory and its potential Australian application that had been evident since the early 1980s.17 They augured a more philosophical turn for Australian literary studies, which, as Leigh Dale argued in The English Men, had been shaped by generations of British and Anglophile professors with an empirical, canonical outlook.18 This theoretical phase, however, was eclipsed by the conservative turn in Australian culture and by the backlash against theory worldwide. By the late 1990s the academic study of Australian literature was overshadowed by commentary by critics such as Peter Craven and Andrew Riemer, who wrote for newspaper literary supplements and presumed a belletristic, if stylish and accomplished, view of literature. Theirs was the approach to Australian literature that now reached the world via the internet.

The internet did wonderful things for Australia, connecting it to the rest of the world and finally making possible an intellectual union of the English-speaking peoples. What James Bennett called “the Anglosphere” reached its full potential in the 1990s and 2000s.19 In earlier eras, major writers and movements had erupted in Australia without even registering in the USA and literary contact between the two countries had depended on rogue alliances and chance affinities: Miles Franklin, Christina Stead and Shirley Hazzard made connections while living in the USA; Ben Huebsch at Viking in New York developed an enthusiasm for Patrick White; John Ashbery took an ironic delight in the poems of “Ern Malley”. With the advent of the internet, however, there could be a much more efficient exchange of literary culture. A book successful in Australia could now reasonably hope for publication, if not necessarily commercial success, not only in the USA and the UK but also worldwide in translation.

The fall of Soviet communism had much to do with this, dispelling as it did the last vestiges of that curiously Australian naive confidence in Soviet benignity. This confidence was very different from that of American fellow-traveller and proletarian writers, who were geographically much closer to the Soviet Union. Although Nevil Shute’s vision of an Australia isolated, if only temporarily, from a worldwide nuclear conflagration was a conceit, for Australian writers of the left in the mid-twentieth century the Soviet Union was so distant that it could be imagined as a fantasy land. This was true of writers such as Judah Waten, Jean Devanny, Katharine Susannah Prichard, Mary Gilmore and Manning Clark. As the recent work of Nicole Moore and Christina Spittel has demonstrated, Australian writing received enough of a reception in communist-ruled East Germany to buoy the hope of certain leftist writers of garnering public acclaim there.20 The fall of the Berlin Wall was the final blow to this long-atrophied dream. Henceforth, if Australian writers were to find an international readership, they would need to look to the West. Furthermore, the biggest obstacle for Australian literature on the world scene had been irrelevance: the fact that Australia seemed protected behind the curtain of global conflict. Although clearly in the American camp politically, Australia seemed too minor to be important in a Cold War divide between good and evil. But if the polarity was reframed as winners vs losers, gifted individual Australians might stand a chance. Their Australian identity need no longer define or hold back at least selected individual Australians who sought to bestride the world stage.

The 1990s saw the lapse of much of the postcolonial rhetoric of the 1980s, when Australian literature had frequently and fruitfully been compared with the literatures of other former British colonies in South Asia, Africa and the Caribbean. Journals such as New Literatures Review (originally New Literature Review) and Anna Rutherford’s Kunapipi had made these links explicitly. Far from the robust assertions of Australian autonomy made in the 1980s, the pertinence of the former coloniser re-emerged. Juan De Castro has argued that the late twentieth century saw a resurgence of Spain as the centre of the Spanish-speaking world, as a newly democratic and culturally revitalised Iberian Peninsula became the hub of all the former colonies.21 The internet aided this; the more information became dispersed and instantaneous, the more cultural capital accreted to the former coloniser.

The same was true with respect to Australia and Britain. Although by the late 1990s Australia had a conservative government, in Britain the ascendancy of Tony Blair’s “Cool Britannia” gave a tremendous boost to the prestige of Australia. The Western Australian poet and gadfly Hal Colebatch could write Blair’s Britain (1999) and not once reveal that he was Australian. Similarly, a British novelist, Louis de Bernières, could write Red Dog (2001), set in Western Australia, without seeming particularly appropriative. Frieda Hughes, in Wooroloo (1998), and Matthew Kneale, in English Passengers (2000), contributed to this new canon of British literature written about Australia (and were sometimes even assumed to be Australian by a world readership uninterested in fine distinctions).

In the 1990s and 2000s, Australian literature tended to reach international readers via Britain. American and other readers discovered Australian writing through prizes such as the Booker and through publications such as the Times Literary Supplement and Granta (which published a special Australian issue in 2000). Murray Bail’s Eucalyptus (1998) gave a sense of the Australian landscape, making the proliferation of different eucalyptus species a central plot device. Bail’s book, which combined a deep sense of Australia with a sense of fictive sophistication, was taken up with enthusiasm in the USA. But its most prominent American review, in the New York Times, was written by the noted British critic John Sutherland.22

Similarly, Les Murray attained his greatest fame in the USA after building a much bigger fan base in the UK. Murray’s verse epic Fredy Neptune appealed to late 1990s sensibilities; the travails of its eponymous hero accorded with the idea that the twentieth century had strayed onto the wrong path through the mid-century decades of war, totalitarianism and trauma, but now, in an age of restored capitalist prosperity, was being providentially healed.23 Similarly, Bail’s Eucalyptus could be seen as a riposte to the apocalyptic rhetoric that had reigned for most of the twentieth century: a “eucalypse” in which history ends with regeneration rather than catastrophe; an unexpectedly happy ending. (This sense that the twentieth century had been a cauldron of calamity and that the millennium could provide a healing respite was also evident in British works such as Ian McEwan’s 2002 novel Atonement.) Fredy Neptune, like Bail’s book, was reviewed for the New York Times by a British critic, the poet Ruth Padel. Every Australian text that reached the world seemed, metaphorically if not literally, to have to transfer through Heathrow Airport in order to arrive there.

Millennium and Crisis

In 2000, I took over the editorship of Antipodes from Robert Ross. At the time, Herbert Jaffa, by then long retired from New York University and a great source of counsel for so many younger scholars, telephoned me and said that his contacts in Australia had told him Australian writers no longer felt the need for a specialised magazine of Australian literature. Now that Australians felt that the broadest reaches of world exposure – Granta, the New Yorker, the Times Literary Supplement – were open to them, Jaffa explained, Antipodes seemed small-fry and parochial. Jaffa had served in World War II in Australia and New Guinea, and his Australian contacts were his contemporaries – they were not the sort of voices that a conformist media might privilege, swaggering young upstarts hoping to make it big on the world scene. These were sober and weathered veterans, including many senior or retired academics, not likely to be lured by the latest fad. If they said Australia was going global, you could be confident that it was.

This “global” turn, of course, largely involved Australian writers embracing the West and affirming Australia’s place within it. While the work of writers such as Alex Miller, Nicholas Jose and John Mateer approached Asia, most Australian writers were still writing within European traditions. The era of Australian isolation was definitely over. Yet there was a danger that, as Antigone Kefala put it, the “inflated presentation” of these years, characterised by the hegemony of an “infinitely seductive” English, would lead to a “closed in” system that would not allow for “wider cultural truths”.24

This raised the question: just what was the value of Antipodes? In 2001, having taken over the editorship, I visited Australia for the first time. I was reassured by academics I respected that the journal was still relevant, which it hopefully continues to be. As of 2015, I have made six extended trips to Australia, visiting every capital city except Adelaide and Hobart and seeing a good deal of regional New South Wales, Queensland and Western Australia. Visiting Australia did not in itself significantly change my thinking about Australian literature. But it did, necessarily and immeasurably, deepen my experience of reading Australian writing. Moreover, the Tampa crisis of August 2001 made me acutely aware of the refugee issues that were to dominate Australia’s sense of itself for the next generation.

In that same year, 9/11 shattered the global consensus that had emerged during the 1990s. At first, the common experience of terrorism and its convulsive aftermath seemed to unite Australia and the USA. Novels such as Andrew McGahan’s Underground (2006) and Richard Flanagan’s The Unknown Terrorist (2006) registered an Australian response to 9/11. But 9/11 and the war in Iraq ended up diminishing the sense of an Anglophone utopia that had been a feature of the previous decade. The political right brandished the idea of an Anglophone coalition for militaristic purposes, but Emily Apter has argued that the American literary world became more interested in translation during this period, in an attempt to understand a world that suddenly seemed catastrophic.25

Nonetheless, Australia now had a definite place in world literature. This was witnessed in transnational novels by Australian writers, such as Kirsten Tranter’s The Legacy (2010), which takes place in both Sydney and New York leading up to and just after 9/11. It was also evident in books by non-Australians featuring Australian characters and themes. The American novelist Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children (2006) included an Australian character, Ludovic Seeley, a pilgrim to New York in a postmodern utopia, a latter-day version of Christina Stead’s picaresque travellers. Both books captured a sense that Australia was at the outer edge of the world and yet very much a part of it.

In a society based on what Piketty calls “the hierarchy of labor and human capital”, cultural products and their reception often seem to offer “a hymn to a just inequality”.26 The reception of Australian literature in the Anglophone North in the 1990s and 2000s mirrored this: it was all about picking winners and scorning or ignoring losers. Although both Les Murray and Murray Bail eminently deserved their fame, other writers of equivalent stature, such as Gerald Murnane, Helen Garner, Robert Adamson and Jennifer Maiden, were published internationally only by small presses or not at all. This fixation on picking winners was an example of what Piketty calls a “meritocratic hope”, which masks the reality of inequality. Andrew Leigh, writing on Piketty in the June 2014 issue of the Monthly, observed, “When I speak with audiences about inequality, I sense that Australian values like egalitarianism, mateship and the fair go are still strongly held.”27 If Australia continues to become more unequal – as Piketty’s capital theory suggests it might – then it will become increasingly difficult to hang on to these values.

This crisis in Australian values was paralleled by a crisis in the public image of Australian literary studies. If academic literary study always has an asymmetrical relation to literature actually being produced, a crisis in one usually betokens at least an unease in the other. In December 2006, Rosemary Neill, writing for the Australian, dramatically announced that Australian literary studies in the academy were dead or at least in extreme peril.28 Neill did not necessarily blame academics, but other media did. Generally, the right seemed to blame the left, accusing it of diverting literary study into identity politics. Anthony Hassall blamed the rise of cultural studies: “As cultural studies increased its parasitic stranglehold on the host discipline of literature, departments of English disappeared into schools of English and cultural studies and then into larger, more diverse and even less meaningful conglomerates”.29 Andrew Bolt, a conservative commentator, went further and blamed certain authors for the state of “Australian literature” as a whole, writing, “When our top literature prize can these days be won by works such as Shirley Hazzard’s The Great Fire and Andrew McGahan’s The White Earth, it’s clear the books just are not good enough.”30 Bolt’s odd pairing of examples – a transnational book by a seventy-five-year-old expatriate and a novel deeply concerned with Indigenous land rights by a forty-year-old author – proved that opprobrium could be flung far and wide. A more dispassionate observer, however, might conclude that the apparent death of Australian literary study in the early 2000s was a result of global economic forces and their magnetic draw of cultural energies towards the world’s financial centres. By 2015, both the Australian literary scene and Australian publishing seemed livelier, but they still had to contend for visibility in a global arena that privileged those who already had fame, power and status.

Today’s Australia

Yet one might argue that Australia had changed for the better between 1985 and 2015 and all because of greater international connections: dining, wine, clothing, shopping are all improved, as is the general cultural vitality and intellectual climate. Furthermore, Australian culture is more visible globally than ever before. It would seem churlish to whinge about apparently minor asymmetries in this generally beneficial situation. Australians often reproach themselves for “tall poppy syndrome”, and the related problem of what A. A. Phillips diagnosed as the “cultural cringe”: the national habit of assuming that culture produced “overseas” must be better than that coming out of Australia.31 The global success of certain Australian writers might seem to offer an opportunity to redirect Australian self-scrutiny in the direction of amour-propre.

What this vindication of Australian amour-propre misses is that Australia has changed for the better but the world has changed, too. If these Australian cultural exports had arrived in America in the period before 1980, during the era of what Lane Kenworthy has termed “American social democracy”,32 so far to the good. But they did not; instead, the tall poppy syndrome was weakened at a time when “winning” no longer entailed mere recognition and acceptance, but had become a corollary of what Piketty calls “the indefinite increase of the inequality of wealth”.33

How Mabo Changed Australian Literature

During the same period, Australia has paradoxically seen the most consequential changes in the political consciousness of Indigenous peoples. After the Mabo decision and the revelation of the Stolen Generations – the Aboriginal children taken away from their families in the mid-twentieth century in order to assimilate them into white society – Indigenous issues had surged to the forefront in an unprecedented way.34 As John Frow puts it, Mabo and its aftermath drew attention to “quite incommensurate structures of value and historicity”, ones which engaged both modernisation and counter-modernisation and thus did not direct or predicate time in only one way.35 After Mabo, scholars were even freer to explore multiple European temporalities in Australia, as was seen in Louise D’Arcens and Stephanie Trigg’s work on Australian discourses of the European Middle Ages as at once a temporal alternative to progressive optimism and a potential displacement of Indigenous deep time.36

Before Mabo, the prevailing left-of-centre mentality thought that Aboriginality could be seamlessly attached to a more open, humane Australia and in this its hopes were too shallow. As Ian MacLean has argued, a laudable tendency for white artists to identify with the Australian land also led to less benign appropriative impulses towards Aboriginal culture. This impulse could be seen in the Jindyworobak movement, in the poetry of Judith Wright, and in Les Murray’s The Buladelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle.37 After Mabo, it was clear that Aboriginal identity was not there for whites to appropriate. In addition, the dismantling of the White Australia Policy in the 1960s and 1970s, and the subsequent development of a polity that was multilingual, egalitarian and pluralistic (although still predominantly European) had made Australia more diverse.38

Today’s Australia is a crossroads for people from all over the world. Moreover, Australia today is approaching the racial diversity of countries that lifted immigration restrictions earlier, such as Canada and the USA.39 Was hyper-capitalism the price required in order to achieve racial justice? If so, was it one we should be prepared to pay? Here, I would differ from Walter Benn Michaels’ analysis of recent American literature in The Shape of the Signifier, in that from my perspective cultural diversity is not, as Michaels argues, simply an illusion proffered by a protean and transmogrifying capitalism, but an ideal genuinely to be honoured.40 Racial justice, if it had occurred, would justify any extreme of capitalism or inequality. But is there racial justice in Australia today, in the aftermath of the 2007 Northern Territory intervention and the prevalence of anti-Aboriginal rhetoric in political campaigning, popular journalism and talkback radio? And what is the likelihood of racial justice in a world where only money and social status are valued? In Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria (2006), the glaring rapacity of a mining company pushes the crisis in the Indigenous community to the surface, where it is visible; the mining company’s greed both precipitates the crisis and offers a possible redemption from it. Neoliberalism may pay lip-service to diversity, but it often deepens the social inequality that is racism’s legacy.

Nonetheless, and despite the push and pull of party politics, on racial issues Australia has generally presented an increasingly inclusive face to the world. But the broader world is not an unchanging monolith, and it has its own dynamics. The most sophisticated portrayals of contemporary Australia register these complexities. Gail Jones’ Five Bells (2011) depicts reparation and provisional healing for victims of trauma from Ireland and China. Jones wrote about the Aboriginal Stolen Generations in Sorry (2007) and alludes to them in Five Bells by the presence of the Indigenous didgeridoo player in Circular Quay. Present-day Australia becomes a refuge from the tumult in the larger world, a place for what Patrick Morgan called “getting away from it all”.41 The Irish Troubles, the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the other religious and cultural backgrounds of Jones’ various itinerants are understood both as coherent cultural legacies and as contingencies inflected by specific political events.42 Jones acknowledges both the luminosity of individual consciousness and the inescapability of political events.

Contemporary Australian Literature: A World Not Yet Dead does not mean to urge an elegiac perspective on contemporary Australia. One can believe that the changes in recent decades have all been to the good and still arguably find something rewarding in this book. But a prerequisite for this reward requires understanding that the world has changed in the past forty years: that the contemporary is different from the past. Periodisation is of course problematic. As David Scott’s work on colonial governmentality indicates, Australia may not yet be postcolonial, notwithstanding its glib classification as such by English departments since the early 1990s. Frow addresses this revaluation of reductive historicism when he says that the “historicity of texts is not a matter of the singular moment of their relation to a history that precedes them, because that moment is in turn endowed with meaning in a succession of later moments, as well as in the lateral movement of texts across cultural boundaries”.43 Moreover, periodisation in literature is only important as far as the field of writers, texts and readers constitutes it and/or reacts against it. Periods have no particular ontological reality; they are discursive constructs. Furthermore, one cannot neatly pin down the present; any attempt to do so risks what Les Murray, in “Four Gaelic Poems”, called the “connoisseurship of outsets” – trying to know what today’s Australia is before it has finished happening.44 Nevertheless, this book will address Australian literature at a certain time, and is addressed to as general an audience as possible given the inevitably specialised nature of the subject. Three terms that will be used in the argument require definition. They are neoliberalism, late modernity and Australian literature.

Neoliberalism

Although “neoliberalism” is increasingly used in the mainstream media – John Lanchester used it in the New Yorker in 2014 without feeling he had to define the term, and the magazine’s scrupulous editors let him do so – it is still not quite a household word.45 Part of the issue is that the word “liberal” in the USA, and at times in other countries, means “left-wing”, whereas neoliberalism is (to resort to the analogy whose tedium was exposed by Les Murray in “The Vol Sprung from Heraldry”), if anything, right-wing. Even “liberalism” in the nineteenth-century sense, with what Harold Laski described as its “concentration upon the powers and possibilities of the free entrepreneur”, has an aura of freedom and progress, of looking forward to liberation.46 Neoliberalism, by contrast, has tended to emphasise a residual sense of sovereignty, dismissing much of the twentieth century as an unfortunate detour.

Neoliberalism is defined by David Harvey as:

Harvey sees the beginnings of neoliberalism in the aggressive free-market policies pursued by the illegitimate and authoritarian Pinochet regime in Chile after the 1973 coup that brought it to power. But Harvey defines the years 1978–80 as a “revolutionary turning point” in the advance of this doctrine, with the all-important turning of China towards economic liberalisation under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping and the rise of pro-free-market politicians such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the USA and the UK.48 There is a general recognition that these years marked a turning point; Christian Caryl, in 2013, saw the year 1979 as “the birth of the 21st Century”, while George Packer’s The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America saw this unwinding as stemming from the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.49

Neoliberalism is often associated with transparency and democracy, as opposed to the authoritarian regimes of the right or left that it replaced in Latin America and Eastern Europe. Yet neoliberalism has also taken root in countries such as Singapore and Dubai, polities that have been reluctant to implement full democracy in the Western sense. The USA, with its traditional inclination towards deregulation and low taxation, may well be the fons et origo of neoliberalism. But, as Peter Josef Mühlbauer points out, the term is not widely used in the USA, where the word “libertarianism”, which is associated with far less governmental authority than neoliberalism, is more often used.50

Notably, Piketty himself never uses “neoliberalism”, although he speaks at times of “liberalisation”. What Piketty does offer, however, is a vision of this liberalisation that is not intellectually descended from Marxism, as Harvey’s is. Furthermore, although Piketty, a rigorous, quantitative economist, supplies statistical proof that Harvey does not, he understands that the impact of recent changes has not been only economic but also moral, redefining what humanity seeks and how we see ourselves.51 Like Piketty, I am interested in questions of ethics and agency as well as economics.

Rob Nixon describes “neoliberal ideology” as one that “erodes national sovereignty, and turns answerability into a bewildering transnational maze”. In such a maze, it becomes impossible to look to a single nation for sanctuary, as I did to Australia in the 1980s.52 Neoliberalism for Nixon leads to “occluded relationships” and to a “slow violence”, which operates indirectly and often unobservably (as in the case of environmental degradation, or the diminution of middle-class wages).53 It is through “slow violence” that neoliberalism – ostensibly emphasising merit, transparency and technology – evokes what Jacques Derrida called the “occulto-mystic” idea of authority that operates alongside a “maximum intensification of a transformation in progress”.54 Neoliberalism, in promising us freedom from the rigid constraints of statist late modernity, ends up reducing humanity to an object of incalculable force.

Key to this paradox is how neoliberalism sees itself as liberating and populist, benefitting everyone by unleashing the dynamic power of capital. In the early 1990s, the American academic Jerome C. Christensen spoke of a “corporate populism” in neoliberal culture, which has only accelerated since.55 Behind much denunciation of neoliberalism is a Marxist animus against capitalism as such; as a result, the term neoliberalism is sometimes applied to what is in fact liberalism more generally. In this book I do not equate neoliberalism with more inclusive forms of capitalism; what is needed is a more targeted critique of neoliberalism, focusing on the way its financialisation of reality has led to a reduction of subjectivity and a desiccation of interior life.

In Australia, the term “economic rationalism” is often used to describe what elsewhere is called “neoliberalism”. This phrase was associated most strongly with the Howard government, although it had been used even in the Hawke–Keating era; in 1991, Michael Pusey published Economic Rationalism in Canberra: A Nation Building State Changes Its Mind.56 By the mid-1990s, the phrase “economic rationalism” was common parlance in Australia. Although the University of Queensland economist John Quiggin used the term “neoliberalism” as early as 1999, it did not catch on in Australia the way “economic rationalism” did.57 Although some might suppose “neoliberalism” is simply the American or international equivalent of “economic rationalism”, “economic rationalism” operates strictly in the realm of public policy whereas neoliberalism, as Harvey suggests, offers a more broad-reaching worldview. Neoliberalism is the “pure reason” to the “practical reason” of economic rationalism, more theoretical and fundamental. Neoliberalism thus has a greater presence than economic rationalism in the sphere of culture and imagination to which this book is dedicated. It seeks to define humanity in a new way.

The poet Fiona Hile grasps this when she asks:

 

The novels of Elliot Perlman also evoke the new neoliberal mankind, a humanity drained of any motive but profit-seeking. In Three Dollars (1998), Seven Types of Ambiguity (2003) and The Street Sweeper (2011), Perlman is not interested in economic rationalism merely as an influence on policy and party politics; he is concerned with how humanity is now defined. Other Australian writers to depict neoliberalism are David Malouf, in his short-story collection Every Move You Make (2007) and his nonfiction treatise The Happy Life (2011), and Malcolm Knox, in his novels since Summerland (2000). J. M. Coetzee – once South African, now Australian – fiercely denounces neoliberalism by name, or at least his close-to-autobiographical persona does, in Diary of a Bad Year (2007), as I will discuss in Chapter 5. But my argument goes beyond such explicit depictions of neoliberal economics to talk about how the mentality of the age has inflected the Australian novelistic imagination.

Neoliberalism is also a term of temporality, what Mikhail Bakhtin called a chronotope, as much as it is a term of political economy. Neoliberalism asserts that a) there was once a time when a more collective view of society predominated; and b) a more pro-market view has now superseded it. Although Harvey focuses more on the state apparatuses that support neoliberalism than on those who have been directly or indirectly victimised by it, my focus goes beyond this. Both internationally and in Australia, writers such as Martha C. Nussbaum, Raimond Gaita and Robert Manne have argued that literature must necessarily speak of the bypassed and the overlooked, the scorned and the dismissed. Literary criticism, despite being bound at times to its intellectual high horse, must as well.

Another term often used alongside “neoliberalism” is “globalisation”. The phrase is problematic for a few reasons. First, “the global” existed long before 1980: people before 1980 were not parochial homebodies. Neoliberalism did not usher in the global: there was a modernist globalism, a romantic globalism, certainly an Enlightenment globalism. Even Stalinism, as the Australian-born Slavic scholar Katerina Clark has pointed out, had cosmopolitan aspirations.59 The very idea of the various Socialist Internationals (the social-democratic Second, the Stalinist Third and the Trotskyite Fourth) made clear the global dimensions of Marxism as an ideology, which twenty-first-century free-market capitalism mimics.

Globalisation in the twenty-first-century sense has elicited a range of responses. Arjun Appadurai takes an optimistic view: while he admits the potential of globalisation to elevate those who are already privileged, he argues that it can also lead to “knowledge transfer and social mobilisation”.60 Giovanni Arrighi, meanwhile, offers a lacerating critique: he sees globalisation as basically another word for imperialism and notes the convergence of the idea of there being “one indivisible, global economy” with “the revival of neoutilitarian doctrines of the minimalist state”.61 Lisa Rofel, though not endorsing neoliberalism, sees it as “an on-going experimental project that began in the global south”, but nonetheless defines neoliberalism as a uniform plan to “produce a new human nature”.62

“A new human nature”: neoliberalism’s definition of success is also temporal. A success under neoliberalism is not someone who simply makes a lot of money, but someone who is in touch with the times. A loser – as seen in the novels of Christos Tsiolkas – may or may not be poor, but he will almost always, like Don Quixote in early modernity, be out of touch with the times.

There are those who view neoliberalism in positive terms, who value, as Aihwa Ong puts it, neoliberalism’s propensity to “induce self-animation and self-government so that citizens can optimise choices, efficiency and competitiveness”.63 Others, however, believe neoliberalism mandates a crass materialism, “making the market a model for all modern freedoms”, as Pauline Johnson writes.64 Some critics argue that this threatens, in the words of Hans Christoph Schmitt am Busch, “the material and moral wellbeing of a large number of citizens”.65 The most menacing of these threats is a reductive division of the world into winners and losers that crushes any idea of what the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl called the Lebenswelt, the life-world, as relentlessly as did earlier materialisms such as Stalinism.

Geordie Williamson links the erosion of Australian literature as a category to the “individual competition” and “atomisation of traditional groupings” of neoliberalism, a word Williamson, unlike Piketty, uses.66 Williamson is one of the few commentators to juxtapose neoliberalism with Australian literature. His frequent use of the term as a characterisation of the current climate shows how concentrating on neoliberalism is more radical and useful than emphasising the end of postcolonialism, which has become too preoccupied by the arrival of Australian literature on the world scene. As David Scott has noted, “a teleological historicity of transition from the evils of colonialism to the promised virtue of the sovereign nation” is now “exhausted” and “played out” and needs to be “suspended” in favour of recognition of more tragic conditions. Until this tragic awareness occurs, the teleological optimism of postcolonialism cannot admit the turbulence of the inequality that neoliberalism has caused.67

For the French critic and polemicist Viviane Forrester, inattention to the consequences of neoliberalism is, notably, part of the neoliberal ideology: “achieving general indifference is more a victory for the system than gaining partial support”.68 Tom Whyman has spoken of a “cupcake fascism”: the contemporary popularity of cupcakes for adults, he argues, represents an “infantilisation” that forestalls a “critical and thus transformative stance towards one’s environment” and so keeps one from being a “fully cognitive adult”.69 In this atmosphere, the workings of neoliberalism pass beneath the notice of the distracted consumer. In the same subterranean way, the institutions in which writers and intellectuals typically dwell have been almost invisibly infiltrated by neoliberal assumptions. As was noted by Simon Marginson and Mark Considine in The Enterprise University (2000), the contemporary university has been susceptible to these rationalising pressures.70 But academia has always been the last best hope of any opposition to neoliberalism, more so than the futile activism of demonstrations. As Les Murray puts it, “Nothing a mob does is clean”. Demonstrations are rarely as effective as academic critiques such as Harvey’s or Piketty’s.71 The academic enterprise of “Australian literature”, by having its own logic within the matrix of universities, refereed journals and grants proposals, can counter market pressures.

Late Modernity

This book uses the term “late modernity” to denote that which came before neoliberalism. Eras are not sealed tight, and some major figures in Australian literature – for instance the poets Bruce Dawe and Barry Hill – continued to manifest a serene vision that was more or less late-modern even while the world as a whole careered helter-skelter towards neoliberalism.

“Late modernity” can be used in a different sense: to denote a late form either of modernism as an artistic mode – as in Tyrus Miller’s book on the subject – or of the modern in an industrial sense.72 But here I use it above all to mean what came before neoliberalism in society. The settings of Elizabeth Harrower’s fiction, for example, are late-modern because they take place (in the 1950s and 1960s) just before neoliberalism and are distinct from it. There is of course no decisive temporal boundary. The late-modern did not suddenly stop in 1980 and the shift from late-modern to neoliberalism did not take place at the same time, or in the same way, in every country. Much like the psychiatrist Jean Piaget’s four stages of child development, in which the various stages do not necessarily occur at the exact same age in every child, but always occur in sequence, late modernity came before neoliberalism and was replaced by it.73 In this book I describe Christina Stead’s fiction as modern and Harrower’s and White’s as late-modern, not simply because they wrote in the years between 1930 and 1980 – the period generally identified with high and late modernity – but because they afforded a definition of humankind that neoliberalism has altered. I will say more about this, and about late modernity more generally, in Chapters 2 and 3.

Australian Literature

Many presume that, today, great Australian writers do not need to be distinctly or vocally Australian; in some quarters, a collective Australian identity has become an embarrassment. As Herbert Jaffa noted to me circa 2000, the notion of “Australian literature” as a category has been destabilised under neoliberalism because individual Australian writers are now expected to be successful under their own steam. Williamson connects the vogue for transnationalism in Australian literary study with the perceived crisis of Australian literature that was often lamented in journalistic circles in the early 2000s. Classic Australian texts were out of print, there were few academic chairs in Australian literature within Australia, and “the transnational researches increasingly undertaken in the academy” arguably squeezed out Australian writing.74

Transnationalism, however, might no longer see Sydney as the periphery and New York or London as the metropolis; it would recognise Sydney as a significant metropolis alongside New York and London, and alongside Mumbai and Singapore for that matter. One is reminded of this knowing passage from Ada Cambridge’s memoir of a century ago, Thirty Years in Australia (1903), in which she describes her experience as the wife of an English clergyman who embarks for Australia:

What would have seemed parochial had Cambridge stayed in England became an object of nostalgia once she was in Australia, as though she felt she was missing out on something at “home”. Transnationalism does not just mean having a passport tattered from frequent use; it also entails, as Vilashini Cooppan argues in Worlds Within, an emotional sensibility.76 It can prompt a feeling of melancholy as well as of victory, and, as the passage from Cambridge shows, conjure a longing for roads not taken.

 

To define “Australian literature” requires reading Australian books and then deciding either what is best or what is most interesting. Neoliberalism, however, demands a different type of sorting: it wants winners, not in the old canonical sense of “Great Books” (as championed by Harold Bloom), but in the sense of “successful” books, as measured in cultural capital. If, as Piketty puts it, “wealth and merit” can be “totally unrelated”, and if, as Colleen Lye, Kent Puckett and C. D. Blanton have argued, cultural capital has undergone “financialisation” in the neoliberal era, so that critical acclaim can be leveraged in ways that at once monetise and inflate it, success in the twenty-first century is neither transparent nor innocent.77 Allegedly “meritorious” individual works rise to the top, but questions about the arbitrariness of this process inevitably recur, while the idea of a national literature is left behind.

Understanding a national literature requires reading not only what Williamson calls “writers … whose works still glow brightly today” but also those “gone in the grate”.78 Indeed, I would argue there is a third category crucial to the constitution of a national literature: writers who are worthy, if not world class. When, in 1986, I began to read the University of Queensland Press editions of Shapcott and Rowbotham, I was conscious that, although their work was good, they were probably not important to world literature in the way Les Murray and Patrick White were. As Harold Bloom puts it, “There is never enough time for reading”, and in reading these authors I was giving up the chance to read others and to deepen my knowledge in important areas.79 But I was also aware that Rowbotham and Shapcott were accomplished, insightful poets with technical command and moral integrity, and that if I read them, even at the cost of not reading some world classics, I would not be making a wasteful choice. One of the advantages of the plurality of Australian literature is that one gets to proclaim one’s idiosyncracies of taste, and to affirm the importance of that literature which is more significant than what Sianne Ngai called “the merely interesting”, even if it is not necessarily “world class” in Williamson’s sense.80

That Australian literature is not just one thing but many also makes tracking its progress much harder, but there is one certainty: Australian literature cannot offer a sanctuary from the questions of the era. This book will consider whether Australian writers whose work made some sort of world news between 2010 and 2015 can offer a new sense of life, one that defies deadening attempts to divide people into winners and losers. Although I am an American who is among other things a scholar of Australian literature, and although much of my sense of the global reverberation of Australian literature is anchored in an American context, I do not see this project as “an American take on Australian literature”. One can be an Australianist literary scholar from anywhere in the world. The national adjective applies to the body of literature or to a national horizon of reading, not necessarily to the critical apparatus used to study it. This book is definitely from a non-Australian perspective, but only incidentally from a specifically American one.

Although many comparisons will be made with American authors, British, Latin American and French comparisons will also frequently be drawn. Any idiosyncrasies in this account likely pertain less to my nationality than to my own interests as a critic. Australian literature as a category will also be stretched to include one New Zealand writer, Eleanor Catton, whose work and world reception raise many of the same questions with respect to form, genre and the world market as that of her Australian contemporaries. Catton made news worldwide by winning the 2013 Man Booker Prize and by explicitly critiquing neoliberalism and its ravages in the antipodes. At times, there will be digressions on writers from other places and times, intended to place today’s Australian writers in the widest possible literary context – as the quality of their work demands.

Exploring the Contemporary

This book will consider recent Australian fiction and poetry, but also go one or two generations back, to the midpoint of the twentieth century. As the Australian-born art theorist Terry Smith has suggested, the “superficial contemporariness” often favoured by the contemporary art world is far less rewarding than what he calls “a more measured layered take on our contemporaneity”.81 Previously Smith has spoken about the Fordist paradigm in twentieth-century economics, stating that the assembly-line mass production in Henry Ford’s automobile factories had only a “short life” in its pure form, but persisted through the balance of the century as a “symbolic paradigm”.82 The period I am calling late modernity has much in common with what Smith (inspired, of course, by Antonio Gramsci) terms Fordism, and neoliberalism shares features with what is sometimes called post-Fordism or post-Keynesian, when the socioeconomic framework of late modernity began to crack, to be replaced by a rhetoric of individual initiative, innovation and freedom – all of which, in their own way, end up being at least as restrictive as the Fordist paradigm. Although neoliberalism arrived after late modernity, there is no clear chronological break, and the two modes can exist side-by-side, just as, in fourteenth-century Italy, a resident of Florence might be at once medieval and renaissance; as revealed in the stories of Boccaccio, she might travel to the countryside and see jousts, or roam the city and witness the mercantile and artistic activity of an urban commune.83 Philip Jones speaks indeed of a “medieval renascence” that circumambulated the conventionally defined Italian renaissance. One could similarly speak of a “late-modern neoliberalism”, as the two modes sometimes appear at the same time.84 This book goes as far back as the 1940s and 1950s in its purview because this era comprises the necessary antecedents of our own, and because critiques of the dominant paradigms of those decades by writers such as Stead and Harrower foreshadow many of our current aspirations. Moreover, even very recently composed Australian novels, such as Alex Miller’s Coal Creek (2013) and Steven Carroll’s Glenroy novels, explore this era in ways that are not simply “historical”.

This book is an excursion into various aspects of this layered contemporaneity. It is not an attempt at a broad literary-historical overview of the period, unlike Ken Gelder and Paul Salzman’s trenchant After the Celebration, nor does it seek to rescue Australian literature as an aesthetic category, as Williamson’s coruscating The Burning Library does.85 I make no attempt to proclaim a fixed canon of Australian literature, and many excellent writers will be mentioned only in passing. My focus is on the extent to which Australian literature might be able to make the world after neoliberalism one that is not yet dead: a world in which people can matter on their own terms and care for others, where they are not relentlessly subjugated to dehumanising market forces, and where commodification is not the only route to significance. In such a world, nature itself would not be undermined and exhausted, and boundaries of class, gender and race would be more fluid. This book, however, is chiefly concerned with the division between social winners and losers in contemporary Australian fiction and the question of who wins and loses by this division.