AustLit

'Joseph Furphy's Such is Life (1903) opens simply and clearly enough with that memorable, sardonic initial declaration: 'Unemployed at last!’170 The complex reaction of the relief from work, while at the same time the prospect of poverty and hunger; the sense of liberation, while at the same time the hitter reflection that it is only through unemployment that working men and women can ever attain the state of leisure and relaxation available to the upper classes: all this is succinctly implied. There is a lot said but not said, a lot of social observation and
commentary on the economic situation.' (Introduction) 

'When Christina Stead's Seven Poor Men of Sydney appeared in 1934 the dominant themes of Australian writing were rural, the characteristic settings were the country, the bush and the outback. There had, of course, been poems and fiction written about the cities; it isn't the case that there were no urban materials. Henry Lawson had written powerfully about urban poverty in the series of stories set in 'Jones' Alley' in the 1890s and had begun his career with the powerful urban ballads 'Faces in the Street' and 'The Army of the Rear'. William Lane's The Workingman s Paradise (1892) had described urban conditions in Sydney in the 1890s. But the received impression is of a literature devoted to perpetuating the outback myth of Australia, even though the population was predominantly urban.216 Seven Poor Men of Sydney can be seen as a work confronting and challenging this outback myth.' (Introduction)