The Complete Stories of Alan Marshall

by Alan Marshall

Alan Marshall has a place in the hearts of all Australians, for he wrote about his fellow country-people with a rare wit, humour, compassion and deep understanding. He spent his lifetime living among them in the bush and in the cities. He travelled throughout the countryside, recording them, yarning with them, entertaining them, loving them. No one since Henry Lawson knew and wrote about his countrypeople like Alan Marshall. Now, after his death, this remarkable book of stories stands as both a legacy and a tribute to Alan Marshall.

Genres: Fiction

512 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1977

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

(1) Alan^Marshall

Alan Marshall (2 May 1902, Noorat, Victoria — 21 January 1984, Melbourne) was an Australian writer, story teller and social documenter.

His best known book, I Can Jump Puddles (1955) is the first of a three-part autobiography. The other two books are This is the Grass (1962) and In Mine Own Heart (1963).

Alan Marshall wrote numerous short stories, mainly set in the bush. He also wrote newspaper columns and magazine articles. He travelled widely in Australia and overseas. He also collected and published Indigenous Australian stories and legends.

Reviews

[Lisa]

Alan Marshall AM, born on this day May 2nd in 1902, was an Australian writer, story teller, and humanist. He was also radical in his politics and (as I wrote in a brief bio of his life in my review of his 1949 novel How Beautiful Were Thy Feet) according to the Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB) many of his contributions to left-wing journals went unpaid.

So I was pleased to stumble on this ‘complete’ collection at the Mentone Public Library’s sale of its books as part of its transition to becoming the Kingston Writers’ Centre. Perhaps I might encounter some of his more radical writing?

The Complete Stories of Alan Marshall won the Colin Roderick Award in 1977. So, was he still radical in his ‘mellow years’?

Alas, this first edition of this collection doesn’t acknowledge the dates of publication of individual stories. They are grouped in sections named for the collections in which they appeared:

Tell us about the Turkey, Jo ( Angus & Robertson, 1946, 25 stories)
How’s Andy Going? (Cheshire, 1956, 14 stories)
Short Stories (Nelson, 1973, 6 stories)
Festival and Other Stories, (Wren, 1975, just one story) and
Hammers over the Anvil (Nelson, 1975, 21 stories)

There are also two other undated sections, named ‘These are My People’ and ‘People of the Dreamtime’, comprising four stories altogether. It would be interesting to know where and when these ones were first published. It’s possible that they came from another collection listed at Wikipedia as Aboriginal Myths (1972), co-written with Sreten Božić. Božić was a Serbian who came to Australia as a refugee when he fell foul of the communists in Yugoslavia. He published a long list of works as B. Wongar which were perceived to be of Aboriginal origin until controversy erupted about cultural appropriation. At the time the Marshall Complete Stories was published, this controversy about Božić had presumably not emerged.

Based on ‘The Aborigines Grave’ Marshall seems not to be guilty of appropriation. It’s a melancholy tale of an unnamed narrator coming across a grave uncovered by the wind.

The skeletons were of two adults and a child. They lay side by side, the child in the centre. Their heads faced the east, their arms were outflung as if they were tired and were resting there. I sat down beside them and lifted the skull of the child in my hands.

No barrier is as great as that between the living and the dead. All that I wanted to know I would never know — its names, why it had died so young, whether it had been happy.

Some Major Mitchell cockatoos flew by. They called as they passed, a sound the child must have known, too. I placed the skull back on the sand and went away, but after that I felt like an intruder around their grave. (p.173)

By contrast, the three ‘pourquoi tales’ appear to be retellings of Aboriginal creation/origin stories:

The Dog and the Kangaroo
The Eaglehawk and the Crow
The Winjarning Brothers.

These days, if such stories are retold by a writer who is not Indigenous, (which is unlikely), the stories would credit their source i.e. the land and the language and the name of the Aboriginal people who gave permission for the story to be told.

TO read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2026/05/02/t...

[Sphinx · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fine collection of Alan Marshall’s writings - they are hardly ‘stories’ as the title says. Most seem non-fiction memoir. Was Marshall frightened by the huge success of the wonderful I Can Jump Puddles to venture outside YA? The pick of the collection is Hammer Over The Anvil in which a young observer studies the townsfolk with a keen eye but the themes are mostly of no great import. Some might find them an interesting record of a time long gone.

[Felicity · Rating 3 out of 5]

Never having read the Classic, I Can Jump Puddles, I was keen to start this collection that has been sitting ignored, on my shelf for too long. Alan Marshall has an easy way with words and is recalling stories from his teenage years, mostly about adventures he had with his best mate Joe. Kids used to go out and have adventures back then. I know, even for me, if I wasn’t at school, I was always ‘outside’ doing kid stuff! These are definitely Australian flavoured stories, can you have a flavoured story? about ordinary Australian people from small rural towns, eccentrics, shearers, farmers and their families. Towards the end there’s one about ten ostriches coming to town! What a hoot!

[Victoria Ivanova · Rating 3 out of 5]

Типичен английски хумор, разигран във всекидневни ситуации.