I borrowed two collections of Australian short stories from the UNSW Library ages ago. Despite the decrepitude of their pages (presumably not acid-free), they were both reasonably recent. I didn't read either in their entirety, partly because I'd read some before, sometimes because I didn't like the sound of story, othertimes because I remain scarred by high school (Peter Goldsworthy in particular).
Firstly, Relations: Australian Short Stories, edited by Carmel Bird, was published in 1991. Memorable:
- John Morrison, The Hold Up: stuck on a train in suburban Melbourne (the Box Hill line) a long time ago.
- Judah Waten, Mother: a well-told account of a Russian Jewish family's migration to Australia.
- Marjorie Bernard, Habit: cute old-time romance between a city man and a country girl who runs a guest house with her sister.
- David Malouf, The Empty Lunch-tin: a signature gentle exploration of poverty from the perspective of the well-intentioned comfortably-off, presumably a first-hand experience.
- Patrick White, Willy-Wagtails by Moonlight: a slice of middle-class life of the sort that David Williamson used to capture.
- Thea Astley, Write me son, write me: middle-class sprog joins a commune and sponges off the olds.
- Jessica Anderson, The Late Sunlight: an aged Hungarian countess slumming it in Sydney meets a young humanities scholar.
Secondly, The Australian Short Story, edited by Laurie Hergenhen, published in 1986 (my copy republished in 2002).
- Thea Astley, Home is where the heart is: aboriginal dispossession, cops and soft-hearted / hard headed whites.
- Archie Weller, Pension Day: an aboriginal elder ends up as a homeless drunk in Perth, a long way from home.
- David Malouf, Night Training: abusing green soldiers is a time-honoured tradition in all armies. I wonder if he has direct experience of this somehow.
- Alan Marshall, Trees can speak: a mobility-impaired man makes friends with a hermit miner.
- T. A. G. Hungerford, Green Grow the Rushes: a country long-distance romance, climaxing (of sorts) in Hong Kong.
- Patrick White, Down in the Dump: another closely-observed account of middle-class mores, pretensions, affectations and so forth. The structure of White's writing here is fascinating, economical and oblique, but light enough to be humorous.
