Collected Stories

by Olga Masters

In the brief four years between the publication of her first volume of short stories and her death in 1986, Olga Masters was celebrated as one of Australia's most powerful and original writers. She won a National Book council award and was shortlisted for another, and was published in the united States, France and Italy. She wrote two novels and three collections of short stories, the third published posthumously. Gathered now in one volume are all the stories from The Home Girls and A Long Time Dying and those she had completed for The Rose Fancier, tough, honest stories that portray rural and suburban life with compassion and unsparing observation.

516 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

Olga Masters née Lawler (28 May 1919 – 27 September 1986) was an Australian journalist, novelist and short story writer.

Masters wrote as a journalist for most of her life, and supplemented the family income by writing for local newspapers in the towns she lived in with her husband. On their return to Sydney, she wrote for papers such as The Manly Daily and The Sydney Morning Herald.

While she wanted to write fiction from an early age, she was not published as a writer of fiction until the late 1970s. During this decade she wrote several radio plays, receiving many rejections, but on 29 April 1977, her radio play The Penny Ha-penny Stamp was broadcast. However with the publication of her short story, Call me Pinkie, in The Sydney Morning Herald in 1978, she moved from writing drama to prose fiction. Between 1979 and 1980, she won nine awards for her short stories. She wrote fiction full-time from 1982, after the publication of The Home Girls.

Due to her late start and her relatively early death, Masters' published output is small but her impact was disproportionate in that her style and writings about writing inspired many others to take up the craft.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olga_Mas...)

Reviews

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

Set any time between the 1890s and the 1970s – but mostly in the 1930s – this collection of short stories describes the daily minutiae of families and friends in a bygone Australia, when people had what appear today to be the antiquated attitudes of small country towns: men had never done their own laundry, some folks were openly bigoted towards other religions or the indigenous population, and the worst thing that could happen was the shame of being caught breaking the social norms. At some level, I liked the stories. Masters uses hunour and pathos well, and she has a good grasp of the short form. Yet some of the stories are very tedious, dealing with the trivialities of gossip, or characters whose behavior is irritating and ignorant, or seem to have almost no plot at all. I am not eager to live in the tiny town of Cobargo, where many of the Depression-era stories are set. It was a long, slow slog through this 500-page volume and I probably would have enjoyed it more if there was less of it.

[Sooz · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this in year eleven for Literature, and this was when I first discovered the simple magic of Olga Masters. She resurfaced several times along the path of further study in English Literature: because she is quite a master in her field. Worth reading. Not all stories are brilliant, but there's enough in this collection for everyone. It has a very distinct sense of place, the Australian bush is omnipresent in her work, which is something that draws me to it. I recommend reading: Home Girls, The Snake and Bad Tom, A Long Time Dying, and The Mission Priest.

[Jackie · Rating 2 out of 5]

2 1/2

[Melinda · Rating 5 out of 5]

The short story: The Snake and Bad Tom describes so perfectly the plight of the family scape goat.