give me a home among the gumtrees

Moving right along from the previous post on Sonya Hartnett, it is possible to situate Craven’s review of Hartnett’s book in the context of a salvage operation when one considers it in the light of Andrew McCann’s blistering attack in Overland on the eucalypt aesthetic of well-published Australian writers such as Malouf, Carey, Bail and even Patrick White.
Reprinted in the same paper a few weeks ago, McCann has this to say ( and plenty more) about the state of Australian fiction:

…the various forms of intertextuality, magical realism and fabulism that we find in the work of Carey are often more important than any enduring interest in the political-historical issues Carey’s novels otherwise raise, issues that might ultimately compel us to question the aesthetic tradition in which he writes. This tendency is full-blown in Murray Bail’s Eucalyptus, a novel that opens as a critique of “dun-coloured” realism and that promises to engage with the ideological baggage of cultural nationalism, but that finally settles for the seductions of storytelling and a predictable claim on the reader’s desire for textual pleasure that is bound up with a tokenistic sort of cosmopolitanism. Similarly the mysticism of David Malouf, indebted to Patrick White’s modernist transcendentalism, returns us to the spiritual and the lyrical as the bedrocks of a literary aesthetic that has apparently survived its entanglement with colonial ideology. The overwhelming tendency is to supplement one pattern of limitation (realism) with a series of gentle and unthreatening upgrades designed to consolidate the ‘literary’ character of a text without running the risk of alienating readers: “art’s reconciling glow enfolding the world”, as Adorno, full of an irony bordering on disgust, put it.

And some good points to make about the dispersal of literary texts to the public – he speaks of vertical models, Kracauer and other tasty titbits. The article has helped stir and shake me a little. And I’m pleased to have returned to Overland today to find it online.