Mary Lord

Mary Lord reviews 'Ballades of Old Bohemia: An anthology of Louis Esson', edited by Hugh Anderson

October 1980, no. 25 • 09 September 2022

This volume will come as a surprise to those who think of Esson simply as the father of Australian drama, the man who set out with the avowed aim of building up a national school of Australian drama, the author of the ironically titled classic, The Time Is Not Yet Ripe. Esson was not merely a talented playwright, but a prolific freelance writer and journalist as well as a dedicated nationalist and ... (read more)

Mary Lord on 'Celebrating Olga Masters'

August 1988, no. 103 • 01 August 1988

Somewhere between seventy and eighty enthusiasts attended a conference at the University of Wollongong on 10–12 July to celebrate the work of Olga Masters, the award-winning novelist and short story writer who died in 1986. It was not the usual academic conference by anyone’s standards although, as might be expected, some academic papers were given. Interesting and provocative as these were, t ... (read more)

Mary Lord reviews 'China Men' by Maxine Hong Kingston, 'Mutuwhenua: The moon sleeps' by Patricia Grace, 'Fortress' by Gabrielle Lord, and 'Female Friends' by Fay Weldon

April 1982, no. 39 • 08 June 2021

I’m well overdue with this article, and I suspect John McLaren is never going to speak to me again. Trouble is, I’m on a frenetic reading jag and its mainly McLaren’s fault. On the Thursday of Writers’ Week, he beguiled me into the bookshop near the Writers’ Tent and in no time at all I emerged buckling at the knees under the weight of a carton of books written by many of the writers I ... (read more)

Mary Lord reviews 'A History of Australian Literature' by Ken Goodwin

September 1986, no. 84 • 01 September 1986

The more I think about it the more I am convinced that Ken Goodwin must have found this a brute of a book to write. Not that difficulties are apparent in the writing. Far from it. It is simply that, in looking at it from a reviewer’s point of view, I am increasingly aware of the constraints under that the author must have suffered while managing to produce a book which the general reader and the ... (read more)

Mary Lord reviews 'The Australian Short Story Before Lawson' edited by Cecil Hadgraft

August 1986, no. 83 • 01 August 1986

It is surely one of the most widely believed tenets of Australia’s literary history that the short story has a special significance achieved with its rise to popularity in the 1890s under the patronage of the Bulletin and in the hands of a master craftsman like Henry Lawson. Orthodoxy has it that Australian literature was born in the 1890s: that is, it shucked off its colonial cast and developed ... (read more)

Mary Lord reviews 'Transgressions: Australian writing now' edited by Don Anderson and 'The Australian Short Story: An anthology from the 1890s to the 1980s' edited by Laurie Hergenhan

May 1986, no. 80 • 01 May 1986

I have a theory that every second Australian is a closet short story writer. And this is a conservative estimate. According to my theory, the so-called ‘booms’ in the history of the Australian short story in the 1890s and 1950s merely reflected fashions in the book and magazine publishing businesses, not the relentless scratching away in exercise books or thumping of battered typewriters which ... (read more)

Mary Lord reviews 'The Golden Age of Australian Opera' by Harold Love

June 1982, no. 41 • 01 June 1982

For those who think that opera in Australia only began to get off the ground this book will come as something of a shock. There was a time, over a hundred years ago, when enthusiastic audiences drawn from across the social spectrum supported ‘regular seasons of the world’s best musical theatre’ by a resident, commercial opera company which played in all the major capital cities. W.S. Lyster ... (read more)

Mary Lord reviews 'Australian Melodrama' by Eric Irvin

June 1982, no. 41 • 01 June 1982

It seems that going to the theatre has always been a popular activity with Australians. Popular theatre during the period covered by this book (1834–1914) staged a remarkable variety of Australian plays: operettas, melodramas, burlesques, sensation plays, and extravaganzas. On Our Selection, the first play to be called ‘Australian through and through’, opened to an audience of more than a th ... (read more)

Mary Lord reviews 'Across the Sea Wall' by C.J. Koch

December 1982–January 1983, no. 47 • 01 December 1982

This is not a reissue of a novel almost twenty years old, nor is it quite a new novel: it is a heavily revised version of an early work by the author of the prize-winning novel Year of Living Dangerously. Across the Sea Wall was written before C.J. Koch was thirty. In a prefatory note to the new version he writes: ‘If such novels of youth are worth republishing, they are worth revising ... The c ... (read more)

Mary Lord reviews 'Scenes of Revolutionary Life' by Judah Waten

November 1982, no. 46 • 01 November 1982

At seventy-one Judah Waten is not just another old soldier who refuses to fade away. Nor is he a man who keeps writing books out of habit. He is a born storyteller who writes when he has something to tell us. And the more he writes, the more powerful and persuasive his fictions become. Scenes of Revolutionary Life is a brilliant achievement; the work of a man at the peak of his power. Subtle, ric ... (read more)