The Penguin Century of Australian Short Stories

By Carmel Bird Ed, Ringwood: Penguin, 2000, 848 pages, paperback, $25.00. Reviewed by Van Ikin in the September 2001 issue.

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Carmel Bird describes this collection as a visit to 'a place you might call the Australian psyche' (p xiii), an excursion into 'time and meaning' (p xiv). Her justification for that claim is that 'fiction is one powerful source of a country's truths, a deep pool of images and preoccupations, of moralities and attitudes which mirror and enact the history of the people and the place' (p xiv). The book uses one hundred authors to represent one hundred years'between Federation and the new Millennium' (p xiii), 'from Tom Collinswho died in 1912 to Raimondo Cortese who was born in 1968' (p xiv).

This multiplicity of ways of describing the book illustrates the diversity and pluralism that is its strength. In Bird's terms, the 'Australian psyche' is 'a creatureof many, many faces' (p xiii). It has more faces than can be glimpsed within the book, but readers already familiar with some of those eclipsed faces will be easily encouraged to remember them. For example, Bird represents Henry Lawson by 'The Loaded Dog', a story which might be thought to eclipse Lawson's sterner socio-political face, but the story's underlying violence can act as a reminder of Lawson'sother work. Similarly, Patrick White's 'Being Kind to Titina' seemed to represent White without capturing the confronting audacity of so much of his writing, but in the story's final lines that eclipsed face also comes to the fore:

As I leaned out of the window, and held up my throat to receive the knife, nothing happened. Only my Aunt Thalia continued playing Schumann, and I realised that my extended throat was itself as stiff as a sword. (p 223)

Many readers will be particularly interested in the way this collection maps the most recent decades of Australian writing, for this is where it charts 'where we are now'. Pluralist inclusivity is the guiding principle, not least because sixty-four of the one hundred stories are from the 1980s or 1990s (thirty-two from each decade). Of course, such raw statistics can lie, and they do: for example, Frank Hardy joins the '80s writers because he is represented by his 1980 story, 'My Father and the Jews', and Dorothy Hewett is represented by 'Nullarbor Honeymoon'from 1996. A better guide to the representation of the last twenty years is perhaps the concern with riddle and paradox (Murray Bail, Peter Carey, Beverley Farmer) and the commitment to bringing out of eclipse the many, many faces of women and their lives. There is also a pervading (if underlying) concern with the reification of significance, as in Brenda Walker's image of an Egyptian mummy in the Louvre in 'Like an Egyptian':

One wrapped hand is uncurled for us to see and the other closes on itself, withholding its darkness from the Parisian day. (pp 597-8)

There is little representation of Australian science fiction, even though this field has developed richly in the last twenty years of the century under review. Michael Wilding's 'The Man of Slow Feeling' is certainly good science fiction, and writers like Peter Carey and James Bradley are included, but the collection would have been more inclusively representative if it had included an item by (say) Terry Dowling or Lucy Sussex or Rosaleen Love. The stories appear in chronological order (following the date of first publication) and Bird also provides a'Biographical Timeline' (listing the birth-datesof authors), a 'Publication Timeline' (recording the year of first publication foreach item) and an alphabetical 'Notes onthe Authors' (which to me seemed somewhat uneven in its distribution of information, listing many of David Malouf's prizes but only one of Terry Lane's 'seven books').

Citation

• Van Ikin. 'Review: The Penguin Century of Australian Short Stories by Carmel Bird ed' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), September 2001. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 10 September 2010].

Back Cover Blurb

• This landmark collection brings together the best Australian short stories written in the 20th century. From early bush life, through the Depression and the World War II, to the fast lane of urban contemporary existence, Australian short-story writers have explored and reflected our national identity and experience. The Penguin Century of Australian Stories represents, in one handsome volume, our finest writers in all their modes - Henry Lawson, Steele Rudd, Christina Stead, Patrick White, Peter Carey, Brenda Walker, James Bradley, Olga Masters, Amy Witting, Robert Dessaix and many, many more. The themes in these stories, selected by Carmel Bird, mirror the concerns of our past and our present, creating a map of the short story in Australia. Celebrating 100 of our most gifted authors, this book will enlighten and entertain for many years to come, providing readers of the 21st century with a distinctive, inspiring treasury of Australian fiction.

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