AustLit

Niall discusses the literary careers of Australian writer Ethel Turner and Canadian writer L. M. Montgomery with attention to how, as contemporaries, their experiences often paralleled one another. She argues that Turner revolutionized Australian children's literature by bringing 'the action indoors and show[ing] that suburban Australia could be at least as interesting as the outback' (175). As Niall points out 'traditionally, Australian writers have concerned themselves with the city or the bush; there is very little representation of small town communities or closely settled farming districts' (178-179). Up until the 1960s there was very little development of novels that celebrate regionalism and Niall cites Colin Thiele's The Sun on the Stubble as 'perhaps the best example of an emerging regional tradition' (179). While Montgomery's recurring motif was 'the orphan's search for a home', Turner's novels often centred on the struggle of an individual or family 'with poverty or a father's tyranny as the source of conflict' (178), and featured independent and resourceful heroines who often had to choose between 'a career as a writer or artist and marriage and motherhood' (176).