The Literature of Australia
Edited by Nicholas Jose
WW Norton £35, 1,464 pages
FT Bookshop price: £28

Anthologies are contentious things – and it’s not just a question of who’s in or out. It’s about what that weighty slab of print is used for. As the basis of a university literature course an anthology is a depressing item. Its existence may be excused by the fact that publishers have allowed key works to go out of print. But when bite-sized chunks of novels, and fragmentary selections of poets’ work, stand in for depth of reading, appealing both to students’ pockets (only one book to buy!) and to institutional cheese-paring of academic teaching, the study of literature is in a bad way. As an extract is to a complete novel, so a shard of pottery is to a vase.

This complaint, however, is levelled at universities and publishers – not against this thoroughly splendid anthology of Australian literature. Burrowing into this volume for a week has been as good as a trip to Australia, without the jet lag. There are letters, diaries, fiction, poetry, petitions, essays, drama and songs, from 1788 to the present. I’ve rediscovered old favourites and been introduced to new ones and have gained fresh perspectives on them all.

A contextualising historical thread runs through The Literature of Australia: from the first Fleeters’ descriptions of Sydney Cove, to the Yirrkala people’s 1962 petition about the concession of their lands to a mining company, the factual sheds light on the imaginary. More democratic and more catholic than Norton’s English Literature edition, this book sets out with greater ambitions than the average anthology. It came out of a collaboration between Macquarie University and International Pen Sydney, and was, in editor Nick Jose’s words, “a reaction to a sense of crisis, real or imagined, in the standing of Australian literature”. A generation of children, students and fledgling writers seemed to have grown up ignorant of their country’s literary heritage.

This anthology makes it clear what a marvellous heritage that is. The greats shine through: Patrick White, Christina Stead, Joseph Furphy, Miles Franklin, James McAuley, Xavier Herbert (whose work I didn’t know and was riveted by), Elizabeth Jolley, Helen Garner, David Malouf, Shirley Hazzard, Frank Moorhouse, Thomas Keneally, Peter Carey, Les Murray, Gwen Harwood.

And there are myriad other stars in this sky. Eleanor Dark, for example, whose work is out of print, and whose The Timeless Land (1941) explores the first settlement with vivid sympathy. Or Aboriginal author Alexis Wright, whose novel Carpentaria hooks me over to the Amazon “Buy Now” button with a scant two pages. Or the sardonic early anonymous poem, “A Swan River Eclogue” (“How cheering, instead of a cottage/ In rain-dripping tents to reside;/ To eat an opossum in pottage,/ Or feast on a kangaroo’s hide!”). I could go on: 307 writers are represented; few are duds. And each author is given a good, detailed biographical introduction.

In a collection which places such an emphasis on history, I would have liked to see one of Governor Phillip’s optimistic but frustrated reports on his fledgling colony; or to hear from John Hunter, whose precise descriptions of Aboriginal canoes and spears are as beautiful as his sketches of Australian birds. The reappearance of the First Fleeters in so much later literature gives the writings of those first two years a unique status; that, and the difficulty of obtaining the originals in print, made me wish for more here.

Room for more, of course, can only be made by winnowing. At the book’s London launch, Clive James objected that it was too heavily freighted with Aboriginal writing. I did not find it so. Certainly a proportion of the Aboriginal writing does not set out to qualify as “literature”, since it consists of letters and petitions to white authority figures. These powerful extracts toll through the book like a bell; reminding the reader of the cost that has been paid, by the Indigenous people, for the immigrant Europeans’ right to thrive and develop such a luxury as a literary tradition. So we hear from Narritjin Maymuru, writing to the director of Aboriginal welfare for the Northern Territory, in 1963: “Mr Gise who looking after for all the Aborigines in the NT. We want to help us belong to this country Yirrkala, please Mr Gise? Because ... those maining people will be chasing us to other places, we don’t like that.”

In his introduction, Jose uses the image of the Australian landscape seen from a plane as a metaphor for the country’s literature: “Just as the landscape unfolds its meaning in patterns formed through time across marvellous and changing terrain, so Australian literature, as a mosaic of individual utterances, reveals a larger picture.” This anthology represents that huge range, encompassing as it does stories bubbling up from experience of exploration and hardship; of outsiders of all kinds – convicts, emigrants, asylum seekers, outlaws and those who have been removed from their own lands within Australia; of colloquial first-person voices who play games with us, or reveal themselves with shocking honesty; and of humour, irony, myth, wonder and realism, which is rarely the “dun-coloured” type of which Patrick White complained. Here is a literature and a tradition brimming with vital life.

Jane Rogers is the editor of ‘Good Fiction Guide’ (Oxford University Press)