The Oxford Book of Australian Essays

The essay form encompasses both the private and the public aspects of human life, and to some extent breaks down the barriers between the two. It has been an important site upon which questions of Australia's identity, history and culture have been debated and defined. The essay in Australian has also been a source of entertainment and edification, and, for its authors, a mechanism of self-discovery. To date there has been no historical anthology of Australian essays. Imre Salusinszky, having examined hundreds of monographs, magazines and newspapers, has collected sixty-one essays published since the first white settlement in Australia. In his forthright and stimulating introduction he contends that the 1950s and 1960s - often regarded as a stultifying period in Australia's cultural life - were the heyday of the essay, instancing the work of Manning Clark, Vincent Buckley, Arthur Phillips, ALister Kershaw and Frank Knopfelmacher. He remarks on changing trends in the more expressive and uninhibited 1970s, and goes on to dispute recent talk of a renaissance in the essay, regretting the lack of incentives for the intelligentsia to write for a popular readership. The essays are arranged chronologically and include such seminal works as Helen Garner's The Fate of the first stone' and Robert Dessaix'sNice Work If You Can Get It'. Other contributors include Charmian Clift, Germaine Greer, Clive James, David Malouf, Les Murray, Pierre Ryckmans, and Patrick White.