AustLit

'Our placenta, a little planet, had veins like river tributaries covering its surface. Its ecosystem supported me with food and antibodies. It filtered out impurities, regulated my body temperature and allowed waste disposal. And it helped my mother, producing hormones that made her glow. We grew this temporary body organ together, sharing body tissue, so that I might become inter-dependent.' (Introduction)

'Clem Christesen, a founding editor in the great story of Australia’s literary journals, was still puzzling about the encounter in the 1990s. A man in Royal Australian Air Force officer uniform had approached him in a Brisbane park late in wartime 1944, and introduced himself as the English poet W. H. Auden, on secondment to Australia from his residence in New York—a secondment, need it be said, that no-one else had ever heard of. The officer went on to discourse confidently to him about Auden’s poetry and literature in general.' (Introduction)

'I used to daydream, over piles of manuscripts or while copy-editing an issue for what seemed the umpteenth time, that when at last I left Southerly I’d write a poem like Galway Kinnell’s “The Correspondence School Instructor Says Goodbye to his Poetry Students”' (Introduction)

'In February 2020 The Recent Past: Writing Australian Art 1958–2020, the first collection of writings by Daniel Thomas, edited by myself and Steven Miller, will be published by the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Thomas, now 88 years old, occupies a singular position in Australian letters, one of the greatest writers of Australian art history whose contribution has not been in writing the requisite heavy tome ondensing our rag-tag and often achronological cultural history, but in hundreds of reviews, articles, essays and catalogue entries, and several (modest) books. The peculiarity of his reputation is that where he is regarded—with great affection—as a colossus in our intellectual heritage by those “in the know,” he is little known by the generations of the 21st century, and, indeed, by the general public whom he has spent his life serving. Thomas’s life’s work is so inimical to our cultural and institutional assumptions that the body of it exists not so much within the writing itself—millions and millions of marvellous words— but within what we take as the natural inheritance of our shared knowledge. His is the moving hand of Australian art history: trying to describe it, to pin it down, is like trying to describe the construction of a perfect garment by examining its tucks and seams and hand-rolled hems—to explain it from the inside out.' (Introduction)

'In late 1914, twenty thousand mostly young Australian men ventured forth from the driest inhabited continent on earth to cross the ocean in a convoy spread over twenty-five kilometres in length and measuring twenty kilometres in width. The greatest mass exodus from the Antipodes which included a further ten thousand New Zealanders, this was the first and largest of many similar voyages over the next four years. The Australians might have considered themselves to be desert people. “The sand has his own / Wave and motion,” wrote S. Musgrove in “Australia Deserta” in the first issue of Southerly in 1939, “Rages the bed / Of the stony ocean” (14). Yet they preferred to identify as colonial sons returning to the motherland of pastoral England before heading to war. Of their own place, “They call her a young country but they lie,” wrote A. D. Hope in his much debated poem “Australia” which he began writing around the time of the publication of the inaugural issue—and to which he contributed an essay—“She is the last of lands, the emptiest, / ... the womb within is dry” (Hope).' 

 (Introduction)