AustLit

'This issue of the La Trobe Journal has a distinct biographical flavour and

includes articles on a range of notable individuals with a diversity of interests

and experience. It opens with Sandra McComb’s survey of the remarkable life

of the explorer and linguist Alfred Howitt, author of The Native Tribes of SouthEast

Australia (1904).' (Introduction)

'Marcus Clarke is rightly remembered as the author of one of the great Australian novels, His Natural Life (1874). Writing in 1898, historian Henry Gyles Turner and journalist Alexander Sutherland described Clarke as a ‘notable pioneer in the fiction fields of Australia, and one of the most promising littérateurs ever developed under exclusively Australian surroundings’. Although dying at 35, Clarke’s output was prodigious and, apart from his great novel, included numerous Australian bush tales, sketches and dramas, and satirical, humorous and critical works.' (Introduction)

'I first met him in the main street of Bourke. I was lonely, and somewhat

frightened and home sick, and he was alone pacing the footpath up one side

and down the other. I watched him for a while, he seemed different to all the

others, busy tradesmen or bush town loafer[s]: and after following the full

length of the square I met him as he turned to retrace his steps. I said ‘Good

day mate’ and he looked up suddenly and had in his face the look of one who

was embarrassed at being caught day dreaming. After a searching look at me,

he replied ‘Hello have you been shanghaied too?’ and chuckled softly. I guessed

that it was my untanned skin, heavy winter clothing, and light laced up boots,

that gave him his cue. After I had explained to him that I was looking for a job

and that I had little or no money he said [‘]There are a couple of us camped in

a place just across the billabong [,] there’s room for you if you care to come.[’] I

did care to go, and that was the friendship that lasted a life time – As we were

passing a grocery store I went in and bought some tinned food and half a loaf

of bread. I was half afraid that he would have disappeared, but as I came out he

was waiting. In front of an old fashioned looking pub he halted for a second,

and said casually, ‘Do you shicker[?]’ And when I replied in the negative, he

again chuckled softly and said ‘Nor do I.’ The house was the smallest to have

three rooms that I have ever seen, but it was well built, with stone and open

fireplace, firewood seemed to be a problem and as we entered a tall blonde

Norse or Swede was stoking the fire with a cows shinbone and dry cow dung. (Introduction)

'I was born in Sydney in 1985 and I grew up there with a vague sense of my German heritage and the silences around it. I knew my grandfather, Achim Muhlen-Schulte, had disappeared and I was aware of the mark his absence left on my family. I remember Anzac Days at school where I told my friends’ grandparents that my German grandfather had also served, and watching faces fall as they realised he did not fight for Australia. And I remember a scratchy, old, grey wool blanket amongst the family bed linen that I was told my grandfather had sent back from the war.' (Introduction)