NLA Publishing

Australia’s First Naturalists: Indigenous peoples’ contribution to early zoology by Penny Olsen and Lynette Russell

August 2019, no. 413

What does it mean to really know an ecosystem? To name all the plants and animals in a place and understand their interactions? To feel an embodied connection to Country? To see and hear in ways that confirm and extend that knowledge?

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Tense Little Lives: Uncollected prose of Ray Mathew edited by Thomas Shapcott

by Adrian Mitchell •

February 2008, no. 298

Adrian Mitchell reviews 'Tense Little Lives: Uncollected prose of Ray Mathew' by Thomas Shapcott (ed.)

If we keep hearing about our famous expatriates, the Greers and Jameses and Hugheses and the like, it is because they have made it their business to ensure we do. Gone but not forgotten. Others such as Randolph Stow or Alan Seymour were less busy at self-promotion. But Ray Mathew was a mere rumour. You saw his books here and there in the antiquarian bookshops, especially the short stories, A Bohemian Affair (1961), and the joint collection with Mena Abdullah, Time of the Peacock (1965). Some of his plays were eventually gathered into representative collections. Mathew himself seemed to disappear into thin air. Tom Shapcott’s project is to retrieve a writer he believes we should have paid more heed to.

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Letters Lifted into Poetry: Selected correspondence between David Campbell and Douglas Stewart 1946–1979 edited by Jonathan Persse

by John Thompson •

March 2007, no. 289

The writer Meg Stewart remembers, with affection and an abiding sense of privilege, growing up as witness to the friendship that flourished between two passionate Australian poets. One of these was her father, the New Zealand-born Douglas Stewart, for many years literary editor of the Bulletin. The other was the glamorous David Campbell, who served with distinction in the wartime RAAF and wrote his poetry while grazing his country acres on holdings around the Canberra region of New South Wales. Their friendship was sustained over thirty-five years, from just before the end of World War II until Campbell’s premature death in 1979. From the outset, Stewart especially had warmed to the Campbell charisma, always widely admired amongst both men and women, and amongst the young. In a letter to Norman Lindsay describing their first meeting, Stewart described Campbell as a ‘[m]ost likeable, vigorous bloke who believes that the artist & man-of-action are kinsmen’.

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Literary Authority

by Ivor Indyk •

November 1997, no. 196

If we look back into past times, we find innumerable names of authors once in high reputation, read perhaps by the beautiful, quoted by the witty, and commented upon by the grave; but of whom we now know only that they once existed.

Samuel Johnson

Sometimes the situation in Australia, with respect to writers, resembles that in early eighteenth-century England.

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