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But their reappearance raises the question of what other Australian novels are currently and undeservedly out of print. For many years the old Angus and Robertson, as it was, performed a great service in bringing neglected novels back into print. Looking through my library of Australian fiction I was astonished to see how many writers I was introduced to by the much maligned Anguish & Robbery, as Hal Porter called it, writers I might very well never have read.
Eve Langley, for instance, was hardly a household name when A&R reprinted The Pea Pickers in 1966; it has taken several decades for interest in her life and work to be revived by Joy Thwaites and Lucy Frost. A&R also led the Australian revival of Christina Stead in the early sixties (assisted by Sun Books and later Virago), republishing Seven Poor Men of Sydney and For Love Alone.
Under the direction of Brian Johns, Penguin Books were also instrumental in reviving interest in the work of several fine writers, such as John Morrison. Indeed the writers they revived were usually more interesting than the new talents they promoted. They reprinted Dal Stivens' Jimmy Brockett, a rare example of an Australian political novel and vastly superior to Frank Hardy's more celebrated Power Without Glory. Ethel Anderson was another discovery for me, a writer of wonderful wit and elegance. I would never have heard of Criena Rohan if not for Penguin's reprinting of Down by the Dockside in 1984.
But look at the novels now that remain out of print. Shirley Hazzard has had a bad press in this country in recent years. Her ABC Boyer lectures were widely perceived as being out-of-touch with contemporary Australia, supercilious and patronising. If John Docker's review of her memoir of Graham Greene in last month's ABR is any guide, she hasn't changed. This is a pity because The Transit of Venus is a very fine novel, beautifully structured, haunting, as uncompromising in its view of the primacy of romantic love and integrity as the novel in whose path it treads, Stead's For Love Alone. In a survey conducted by ABR some years ago as to the ten best Australian novels since the war, I had it on my list. It was reprinted in 1996 but is now extremely hard to obtain. Hazzard also wrote some excellent earlier fiction including People in Glass Houses, a brilliant and hilarious satire on the United Nations.
It is very pleasing that an anthology of Kenneth Mackenzie's work should appear but why not reprint the novels in full? Mackenzie is a sadly neglected writer. It is ironic that he himself refused to take his fiction seriously, seeing it as merely as way of making money while he pursued his poetry. His four novels are all deeply interesting in different ways. The Young Desire It (1937) is one of the best of that curiously ubiquitous Australian phenomenon, the bildungsroman or rites-of-passage, coming-of-age novel. It is written with great sensitivity and assurance, touching delicately on homoerotic themes long before they became acceptable and even commonplace. Dead Men Rising (1951) anticipates and surpasses Tom Keneally's treatment of the Cowra break out by the Japanese during WWII, while The Refuge (1954), perhaps the most fascinating of Mackenzie's novels, is not only a deeply romantic love story but also one of the first and best treatments of the theme of displaced migrants coming to terms with Australian society. Its preoccupation with the genre of the crime mystery is a quality it has in common with perhaps Judah Waten's best but most neglected novel, Shares in Murder (1957). And again, all Waten's work is unavailable. In the case of many of the novels that might be understandable but Alien Son remains a classic collection of short, related stories.
But if that is not enough, what of our real literary heavyweights? In the case of Patrick White, the out of print novels include The Eye of the Storm, The Solid Mandala, The Twyborn Affair, A Fringe of Leaves, Riders in the Chariot, The Vivisector and The Aunt's Story -- virtually all his important novels. That this could happen within just a few years after his death and despite the publication of an award-winning biography of him is a strange commentary on our culture.
Similarly, in the case of our grande dame of literature, Christina Stead, the irony is compounded by the fact that much of her fiction remained unavailable for many years, even after the revival of her reputation. It took the heroism of Virago Press to introduce us to previously unknown, 'lesser' novels such as A Little Tea, A Little Chat, and The People with the Dogs and the even greater heroism of her friend and executor Ron Geering in making available previously unpublished work such as her novel I'm Dying Laughing and her collected stories and letters but now virtually all her work is again unavailable.
I don't know what can be done about this but if Text can reprint classics why can't other publishers? Maybe when readers come across favourites that are unavailable they can write to the publisher and complain. Newspaper and magazine editors could publish decent-sized reviews of books, as Jason Steger did of The Plains in The Age. University lecturers can scream blue murder when they set a novel on their syllabus, only to find that it is our of print -- as happens quite often. In this age of instant consumerism there are a few things worthy of survival.
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