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Australian Classics: 50 Great Writers and Their Celebrated Works
What are the classic works of Australian literature? And what can they tell us about Australians and the land they live in? Providing a selected overview of Australia's greatest literature, this title is an accessible companion to the literature and history of writing in Australia from the 19th century to the present.
352 pages, Paperback
First published November 1, 2007
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About the author
Jane Gleeson-White
12 books16 followersJane Gleeson-White is a writer, editor and speaker, and is well known for her work on literature, economics and the natural world. She is the author of the bestselling, internationally acclaimed Double Entry: How the merchants of Venice shaped the modern world (2011) and its sequel Six Capitals: The revolution capitalism has to have (2015). Her first two books are about literature: Classics (2005) and Australian Classics (2007).
Jane is a regular commentator on economics and sustainability, including for the Sundance Film Festival, United Nations and European Union. She has written for the Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Bloomberg, Wired, The Age, Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian, Meanjin, Overland, Wellbeing and Good Reading magazine. She is a former fiction editor of Overland literary journal and wrote a blog about books, bookishgirl.com.au, from 2010 to 2016. Jane has a PhD in creative writing, which included work on country in the novels of Alexis Wright and Kim Scott, and is currently working on a project about the emerging rights of nature movement in Australia.
Jane is a regular commentator on economics and sustainability, including for the Sundance Film Festival, United Nations and European Union. She has written for the Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Bloomberg, Wired, The Age, Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian, Meanjin, Overland, Wellbeing and Good Reading magazine. She is a former fiction editor of Overland literary journal and wrote a blog about books, bookishgirl.com.au, from 2010 to 2016. Jane has a PhD in creative writing, which included work on country in the novels of Alexis Wright and Kim Scott, and is currently working on a project about the emerging rights of nature movement in Australia.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
October 27, 2023
Extremely satisfying. Jane Gleeson-White's book is one of the best out there, and feels authentically broad in its taste.
Some other volumes on this subject get it ever so slightly wrong; Gleeson-White rises above them in that regard. First of all, her love of Australian history is evident - what other book recommends Christopher Brennan and John Shaw Neilsen and Lesbia Harford and Banjo?
Second, she avoids politics; indeed one cannot tell her politics at the end of the book more than one could at the beginning, and what a relief! While I enjoyed Carl Reinecke's recent Books That Made Us: The Companion to the ABC TV Series, it was exhausting to constantly be told that every book written before the year 2000 was imperialist, racist, sexist, and so on, with little context or, god forbid, recommendation. People who read aren't fools, and Gleeson-White clearly appreciates that readers can do that legwork for themselves, can interrogate a text sensibly to separate the historical context from the core, and decide for themselves if it remains relevant. She's here to present the writers and their texts, explaining why each work is celebrated and what remains of worth. She's not insensitive to Australia's history of injustice, and chronicles works by Oodgeroo Noonuccal, Eve Langley' s The Pea Pickers, Xavier Herbert's Capricornia and Robert Hughes' The Fatal Shore alongside other works that engaged with this injustice contemporarily. But that's not the core point, nor should it be.
Third and finally, I think this is the only book of its type that avoids the age-old trap of immediacy. That's not a judgement on the others, including my beloved Geoffrey Dutton, but there is always that final section of "books from the last 20 years" which bewilders people who discover the book a generation later. Inevitably some of the highlights are missing while some of the texts chosen have vanished so thoroughly into the abyss. Instead, this work (published in the late 2000s) stops at Tim Winton's 1991 novel Cloudstreet, that rare book that is unanimously deemed a classic, but also symbolically the end of an era, a novel that seemed so modern and all-encompassing in 1991 but also (from this vantage point) has a 20th century viewpoint to how it approaches race, gender, ability, and so on. It will be for future volumes to determine what the classics are from more recent years - and it will be for all readers to decide which of the classics herein remain, for them, stories that speak of, and to, Australia.
Joy.
Some other volumes on this subject get it ever so slightly wrong; Gleeson-White rises above them in that regard. First of all, her love of Australian history is evident - what other book recommends Christopher Brennan and John Shaw Neilsen and Lesbia Harford and Banjo?
Second, she avoids politics; indeed one cannot tell her politics at the end of the book more than one could at the beginning, and what a relief! While I enjoyed Carl Reinecke's recent Books That Made Us: The Companion to the ABC TV Series, it was exhausting to constantly be told that every book written before the year 2000 was imperialist, racist, sexist, and so on, with little context or, god forbid, recommendation. People who read aren't fools, and Gleeson-White clearly appreciates that readers can do that legwork for themselves, can interrogate a text sensibly to separate the historical context from the core, and decide for themselves if it remains relevant. She's here to present the writers and their texts, explaining why each work is celebrated and what remains of worth. She's not insensitive to Australia's history of injustice, and chronicles works by Oodgeroo Noonuccal, Eve Langley' s The Pea Pickers, Xavier Herbert's Capricornia and Robert Hughes' The Fatal Shore alongside other works that engaged with this injustice contemporarily. But that's not the core point, nor should it be.
Third and finally, I think this is the only book of its type that avoids the age-old trap of immediacy. That's not a judgement on the others, including my beloved Geoffrey Dutton, but there is always that final section of "books from the last 20 years" which bewilders people who discover the book a generation later. Inevitably some of the highlights are missing while some of the texts chosen have vanished so thoroughly into the abyss. Instead, this work (published in the late 2000s) stops at Tim Winton's 1991 novel Cloudstreet, that rare book that is unanimously deemed a classic, but also symbolically the end of an era, a novel that seemed so modern and all-encompassing in 1991 but also (from this vantage point) has a 20th century viewpoint to how it approaches race, gender, ability, and so on. It will be for future volumes to determine what the classics are from more recent years - and it will be for all readers to decide which of the classics herein remain, for them, stories that speak of, and to, Australia.
Joy.
December 3, 2019
A really wide choice of Australian classics by Gleeson-White, along with suggestions of favourites from guest selectors. These choices have made me read more widely, often things that I would not have thought of ... "Power without glory", not sure about that; "Voss", just brilliant. Hopefully, I will get around to reading most of these over time.
March 22, 2010
A good browsing book. A definite pick if you want to find more Australian authors. Looking forward to checking out The Man Who loved Children, The Pea-pickers, Voss and a bunch of other Aussie Classics.
February 6, 2013
I want this book!
May 17, 2016
Last 48pgs for #readathon
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews