AustLit

'World War I hovered as a faint shadow in the background of my childhood. Unlike my school friends whose fathers had served in WWII, my father had been in WWI. Every year our family went to the city to watch our father march in the ANZAC parade before returning home while he caught up with his wartime compatriots. Armistice Day (now Remembrance Day) was also a day for solemn reflection. A lot of my father’s spare time was occupied by activities related to his membership of the Returned Sailors, Soldiers and Airman’s Imperial League (renamed Returned Services League). In the period after both wars the Victorian RSL provided support for injured veterans and the widows and children of those killed as well as a place for returned service personnel to meet with others who had shared the horrific experience of war. He also regularly attended meetings of the Thirteenth Light Horse Association.' (Introduction)

Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, Australian literature was generally limited to the nationalist poetry and stories of writers like Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson, and approved by the nationalist project of The Bulletin magazine. This is important not only for the way it underpins our understanding of Australian cultural discourses in general, but for the ways in which these inform literary value. Decades ago, Susan Sheridan argued that these cultural discourses depend on other (often gendered) binary oppositions, such as ‘outside (the bush or the city) vs inside (the domestic, the home)’, ‘Australian nationalist vs British colonial vigour’, and ‘action vs emotion’.1 What this means is that writers like Ada Cambridge and Rosa Praed ‘were denigrated as “Anglo-Australian,” “lady-novelists” whose cosmopolitan romances were considered derivative, commercial, frivolous and irrelevant to the new national literary tradition’.2 This dominant mode of thinking still influences the patterns of literary theory and criticism in the study of Australian literature today, so that these preoccupations with identity in Australian culture are necessarily coming full circle. While it is true that the 1970s and 1980s saw dominant attention being paid to feminist revisionism, uncovering ‘lost’ women and reinstating them into a literary canon, if Claiming Space for Australian Women’s Writing is any indication, this project seems to have emerged again as one of eminent importance.'  (Introduction)