AustLit

'Charles Jury was a prominent figure in Adelaide’s literary world in the middle of the twentieth century but his ideas about poetry were established by the time he was a young adult.

'This paper looks at how Jury might have been a poet ‘of Adelaide’ in the sense of being shaped by the literary culture and institutions of the city in which he grew up. It draws on archival and other sources to bring to light some aspects of Jury’s personal life and early literary career that have not yet been revealed in public.' (Publication abstract)

'For many in Adelaide, the appointment in 1899 of Hallam Tennyson as governor of South Australia was a perfect ending for the nineteenth century. The city had long regarded its interest in literature as an important part of its identity, and, although Hallam might officially have been the representative of the British crown, he was received equally, or even more, as the heir of one of the great literary figures of the age. A poem published on the day of his arrival began, ‘Welcome, son of thy great father’. Similarly, a piece in the South Australian Register was unashamedly more interested in the new governor’s literary ancestry than in any qualities that he might, himself, possess: ‘Lord Tennyson, all hail you! South Australia gives you hearty greetings. As the son of the late illustrious Alfred Tennyson—a name of which the whole Empire is proud—and as a scholar and a gentleman, colonists welcome you. This essay traces the literary migration of one Tennyson and the literal migration of the other. It comes out of a larger study of literature in Adelaide, research that examines, among other things, Adelaide’s sense of itself as a city in which literature is highly valued. The reception of Alfred Tennyson during the second half of the nineteenth century is evidence of strong interest in Victorian literature; the welcome given to Hallam shows just how much Adelaide enjoyed seeing itself as a literary city.'

Source: Abstract.

'From the tentative beginnings of European settlement to today’s flourishing writing scene, Adelaide has always been a literary city. Novelists, poets and playwrights have lived here; readers have pored over books, sharing them and discussing them; literary celebrities have visited and sometimes stayed; writers have encouraged each other and fought with each other.

Adelaide is literary, too, in the sense of having been written about—sometimes with love, sometimes with scorn. Literature has been important not only to the city’s cultural life but to its identity, to the way it has been seen and, most importantly, to the way it has seen itself. Adelaide: a literary city broadens and deepens our understanding of Adelaide as a city of creativity and culture.' (Publisher's website)

'The Sentimental Bloke and Doreen are famous characters in Australian popular culture, but their creator deserves to be better known. C.J. Dennis transformed the larrikin from a street thug into a respectable image of Australian identity, and helped shape the Anzac legend.

Many people regarded Dennis himself as a sentimental bloke, but this book shows he was a much more complex and sometimes darker personality - not only examining his humorous and lovable side, but also his struggles with alcohol and depression, his political activism, his marriage and his financial dealings.

An Unsentimental Bloke traces Dennis's early years in rural South Australia, his work on a bohemian newspaper in Adelaide and move to Melbourne as a freelancer for the Bulletin, his period of political involvement, followed by enormous successes (he was more popular than Banjo Paterson or Henry Lawson ever were), spectacular fall, and re-emergence as an elder statesman of Australian letters.' (Publisher's website)