AustLit

In this essay Wallace-Crabbe provides an extensive and positive portrait of Melbourne, the city in which he has lived and worked for more than 50 years.

'Architect Derham Groves reports on an exercise with his architectural students to design a Centre for Australian Crime Fiction in Melbourne, based on the sense of place in crime novels and stories by Australian writers they read. He also gives an overview of the life and work of some crime fiction writers.'

Campbell, Boake (Doris Kerr) and Rivers (Marjorie Clark) were Melbourne authors, setting their novels in that city. Although neglected these days, they were 'among the earliest pre-war Australian writers to fictionalise an urban environment, ignoring the bush as a theme, and preceeding most of their better known contemporaries in writing about the city' (36-37). 'The literary lives of Kerr, Campbell, and Clark have been under appreciated, but ... a reading of their novels and the milieu they worked in, provides a broader and richer history of women writers in Australia during the 1930s' (37).

A detailed biographical study of Joan Lindsay, with new insights to the background behind Lindsay's novel Picnic at Haning Rock.

A memoir of Barnes's friendship with Nettie Palmer and his meetings with her husband Vance.

An account of complex publication history of Nettie Palmer's Fourteen Years, which was published by Meanjin Press in 1948 (with a print run of 500 copies), with the Palmers themselves carrying all the publication costs and distribution.

Discusses Brisbane and Melbourne as cultural sites in the 1940s and 50s, and Collinson's life and literary activities in Melbourne in the 1950s until his return to England in 1964.

The article traces the novel's complex chain of production and printing processes for the early editions of Power without Glory. It sheds new light on an 'early underground copy' of the novel, the 'Fraser' copy, a four-volume edition named after the printer Fraser and recently donated to the State Library of Victoria. The copy was probably run off illicitly by staff at Fraser & Jenkinson, part of a network of Hardy supporters connected with the CPA, at a time when Hardy was charged with libel and had to stand trial. In its rudimentary form, the 'Fraser' copy 'provides testament to an extraordinary juncture of literature and politics in this country, a time when private imagination and public fear seemed momentarily united' (99).

'In the rich depository of the Peter Mathers Papers in the State library of Victoria, the author's literary and personal labours are extensively and disarmingly displayed' (101). Pierce traces Mather's life and his sometimes desperate attempts of finding employment or grants and making a living for himself and his family, and discusses his two novels, Trap and The Wort Papers.

Reprints and discusses the consequences of a recently discovered letter of introduction by Georgiana McCrae's stepmother to a relative of the Governor of Victoria, Sir Charles Hotham, and the precarious financial situation in which the McCraes found themselves in 1853-54.

Describes and discusses the theatrical aspects of two recently discovered scrapbooks of Neild.