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y separately published work icon The Battlers single work   novel  
Issue Details: First known date: 1941... 1941 The Battlers
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'The flowers flared up from the ground unconquerable. The unrepentant gaiety of the weed, the burning blues and crimsons, set the hills glowing.

''It's a plant that's struck it lucky,' the Stray said thoughtfully. 'It hasn't got no right, but it's there.'

'The Battlers is the story of Snow, a drifter and wanderer, the waiflike Dancy the Stray, from the slums of Sydney, and the other outcasts who accompany them as they travel the country roads looking for work. Like the weed Patterson's Curse, they 'haven't got no right', but they are there. Based on her own experiences of life on the roads in the 1930s, Tennant tells the story of the motley crowd of travellers with compassion and humour. First published in 1941, The Battlers was awarded the Gold Medal of the Australian Literature Society and shared the S. H. Prior Memorial Prize. More than seventy years later, the book's message of survival against the odds is as relevant today as it was then. ' (Publication summary)

Adaptations

form y separately published work icon The Battlers Peter Yeldham , ( dir. George Ogilvie ) Adelaide Australia : South Australian Film Corporation Seven Network , 1994 Z946537 1994 series - publisher film/TV The 'battlers' are the itinerants left living a hand-to-mouth existence on the back roads of rural Australia after the Great Depression. The Battlers is also the love story of Snow and Dancy, which becomes a celebration of the human spirit against a backdrop of hardship and survival.

Notes

  • Epigraph: To the "Battlers"/I wonder where they are now?/They will never read this, never know it is written./Somewhere a dirty crew of vagabonds,/Blasphemous, generous, cunning and friendly,/Travels the track; and wherever it takes them,/Part of me follows.

  • Kylie Tennant talks about writing The Battlers on the Australian Screen website http://aso.gov.au/titles/documentaries/kylie-tennant/clip2/ (Sighted 28/04/10). This is an excerpt from 'Kylie Tennant'.

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

Notes:
Adapted for the 1996 audio cassette 'The Battlers' published by Bolinda Audio Books. Narrated by Jacklyn Kelleher.
Alternative title: Les trimadeurs
Language: French
    • Paris,
      c
      France,
      c
      Western Europe, Europe,
      :
      Plon ,
      1955 .
      Extent: 374p.

Other Formats

  • Braille.
  • Sound recording.
  • Large print.

Works about this Work

‘Outside the Circle of One’s Own Experience’ : George Orwell, Kylie Tennant and the Politics of Poverty during the Yellow Book Period Ella Mudie , 2021 single work criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , vol. 21 no. 1 2021;

'Never directly associated with nor influenced by one another, the British author George Orwell and the Australian novelist Kylie Tennant are nonetheless two contemporaneous writers for whom the issue of poverty proved an enduring preoccupation in both work and life. Both sought lived experience of Depression era hardship that was, in turn, translated into ambiguous works of fiction and non-fiction. During a formative period in both writers’ careers, Orwell and Tennant were published in England by the influential and progressive left-wing house of Victor Gollancz. This essay examines the representation of poverty in Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) and The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), the latter of which was distributed through Gollancz’s Left Book Club during the peak of the ‘Yellow Book’ period, and in Tennant’s fictional portrait of inner-city working-class life, Foveaux (1939), through the lens of their association with Gollancz.  It argues that the urgent moral imperative to solve the global crisis of poverty represents an important basis for understanding the turn to documentary realism by Orwell and Tennant at that time. While publication by Gollancz helped to establish international reputations for Orwell and Tennant as writers of social conscience, this essay also considers the extent to which the growing scrutiny afforded to the participant-observer mode complicates their contemporary reception.'  (Publication abstract)

The Federation of Letters : A Faild Partnership in Australian Literary and Political History Brian Matthews , 2013 single work criticism
— Appears in: The Tapestry of the Creative Word in Anglophone Literatures 2013; (p. 265-272)
Leaving the Party : Dorothy Hewett, Literary Politics and the Long 1960s Fiona Morrison , 2012 single work criticism
— Appears in: Southerly , vol. 72 no. 1 2012; (p. 36-50)

'What political, cultural and rhetorical changes occurred between the publication of Dorothy Hewett's nostalgic essay on Kylie Tenant in Westerly in late 1960 (Hewett, "How Beautiful Upon the Mountains") and her strikingly negative literary obituary of Katherine Susannah Prichard in Overland in late 1969 (Hewett, "Excess of Love: The Irrecon - cilable in Katharine Susannah Prichard")? The first of these essays offered a forthright series of criticisms about Tenant's interest in stylistic experimentation and the decline of her rather more interesting socialist realism. The second essay delivered an equally forthright assessment of Prichard, Hewett's much-loved fellow West Australian woman writer and Communist, strongly condemning her deforming and persistent allegiance to the Communist Party in Australia and the Soviet Union and the socialist realist aesthetics mandated by them. Separated by only nine years, these two pieces of non-fiction present the contradictory literary and political positions that book-end Hewett's turbulent and productive Cold War 1960s, and indicate the nature and importance of the repudiation of Prichard as a springboard for Hewett's writing in the 1970s. Approached chronologically, Hewett's essays of the 1960s demonstrate the imbrication of politics and literary aesthetics in her work. Initially reproducing the partisan contours of the relationship between politics and literature familiar from the Left cultural debates of the 1930s, Hewett finds increasingly different answers for this debate's foundational questions about the function of art, the role of the socially engaged artist, the importance of realism and what to do or think about modernism.' (Author's abstract)

Australian Literature in a World of Books : A Transnational History of Kylie Tennant's The Battlers Roger Osborne , 2009 single work criticism
— Appears in: Resourceful Reading : The New Empiricism, eResearch and Australian Literary Culture 2009; (p. 105-118)
'Drawing on the large collection of papers held at the National Library of Australia, this chapter explores the first editions of Kylie Tennant's The Battlers in New York, London and Sydney during the 1940s.' (106)
Spotlight Shines on Rebel with Causes Diane Stubbings , 2006 single work column
— Appears in: The Canberra Times , 24 June 2006; (p. 13)
[Review] The Battlers 1941 single work review
— Appears in: The North Queensland Register , 14 June 1941; (p. 28)

— Review of The Battlers Kylie Tennant , 1941 single work novel
[Review] The Battlers Alison Gifford , 1994 single work review
— Appears in: Fiction Focus : New Titles for Teenagers , vol. 8 no. 1 1994; (p. 33)

— Review of The Battlers Kylie Tennant , 1941 single work novel
[Review] The Battlers 1941 single work review
— Appears in: The New Yorker , 9 August 1941; (p. 58)

— Review of The Battlers Kylie Tennant , 1941 single work novel
[Review] The Battlers 1941 single work review
— Appears in: Springfield Republican , 17 August 1941; (p. 7)

— Review of The Battlers Kylie Tennant , 1941 single work novel
[Review] The Battlers 1941 single work review
— Appears in: The Times Literary Supplement , 4 January 1941; (p. 5)

— Review of The Battlers Kylie Tennant , 1941 single work novel
Spotlight Shines on Rebel with Causes Diane Stubbings , 2006 single work column
— Appears in: The Canberra Times , 24 June 2006; (p. 13)
Can You Better This Book List? 1945 single work column
— Appears in: Book News , August no. [1] 1945; (p. 3)
Kylie Tennant's Way with Words J. S. Ryan , 1988 single work criticism
— Appears in: Notes & Furphies , April no. 20 1988; (p. 24-26)
Australian Literature in a World of Books : A Transnational History of Kylie Tennant's The Battlers Roger Osborne , 2009 single work criticism
— Appears in: Resourceful Reading : The New Empiricism, eResearch and Australian Literary Culture 2009; (p. 105-118)
'Drawing on the large collection of papers held at the National Library of Australia, this chapter explores the first editions of Kylie Tennant's The Battlers in New York, London and Sydney during the 1940s.' (106)
Leaving the Party : Dorothy Hewett, Literary Politics and the Long 1960s Fiona Morrison , 2012 single work criticism
— Appears in: Southerly , vol. 72 no. 1 2012; (p. 36-50)

'What political, cultural and rhetorical changes occurred between the publication of Dorothy Hewett's nostalgic essay on Kylie Tenant in Westerly in late 1960 (Hewett, "How Beautiful Upon the Mountains") and her strikingly negative literary obituary of Katherine Susannah Prichard in Overland in late 1969 (Hewett, "Excess of Love: The Irrecon - cilable in Katharine Susannah Prichard")? The first of these essays offered a forthright series of criticisms about Tenant's interest in stylistic experimentation and the decline of her rather more interesting socialist realism. The second essay delivered an equally forthright assessment of Prichard, Hewett's much-loved fellow West Australian woman writer and Communist, strongly condemning her deforming and persistent allegiance to the Communist Party in Australia and the Soviet Union and the socialist realist aesthetics mandated by them. Separated by only nine years, these two pieces of non-fiction present the contradictory literary and political positions that book-end Hewett's turbulent and productive Cold War 1960s, and indicate the nature and importance of the repudiation of Prichard as a springboard for Hewett's writing in the 1970s. Approached chronologically, Hewett's essays of the 1960s demonstrate the imbrication of politics and literary aesthetics in her work. Initially reproducing the partisan contours of the relationship between politics and literature familiar from the Left cultural debates of the 1930s, Hewett finds increasingly different answers for this debate's foundational questions about the function of art, the role of the socially engaged artist, the importance of realism and what to do or think about modernism.' (Author's abstract)

Last amended 27 Oct 2020 09:02:14
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