Welcome to the electronic edition of Adelaide: a literary city. The book opens with the bookmark panel and you will see the contents page. Click on this anytime to return to the contents. You can also add your own bookmarks. Each chapter heading in the contents table is clickable and will take you direct to the chapter. Return using the contents link in the bookmarks. The whole document is fully searchable. Enjoy. Adelaide: a literary city This book is available as a free fully-searchable PDF from www.adelaide.edu.au/press Adelaide: a literary city edited by Philip Butterss Discipline of English and Creative Writing School of Humanities The University of Adelaide Published in Adelaide by University of Adelaide Press The University of Adelaide Level 1, 254 North Terrace South Australia 5005 [email protected] www.adelaide.edu.au/press The University of Adelaide Press publishes externally refereed scholarly books by staff of the University of Adelaide. It aims to maximise access to the University’s best research by publishing works through the internet as free downloads and for sale as high quality printed volumes. © 2013 The Authors This work, with the exception of the poem, New York Nowhere: Meditations and Celebrations, Neurology Ward, The New York Hospital by Geoffrey Dutton, is licenced under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) License. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by- nc-nd/4.0 or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA. This licence allows for the copying, distribution, display and performance of this work for non-commercial purposes providing the work is clearly attributed to the copyright holder. Address all inquiries to the Director at the above address. New York Nowhere: Meditations and Celebrations, Neurology Ward, The New York Hospital by Geoffrey Dutton is reproduced by arrangement with the Licensor, The Geoffrey Dutton Estate, c/- Curtis Brown (Aust) Pty Ltd. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without prior written permission. For the full Cataloguing-in-Publication data please contact the National Library of Australia: [email protected] ISBN (paperback) 978-1-922064-63-9 ISBN (ebook) 978-1-922064-64-6 Project editor: Patrick Allington Book design: Zoë Stokes Cover design: Emma Spoehr Cover image: Mark Grivell Paperback printed by Griffin Press, South Australia Contents Acknowledgements vii List of Contributors ix Adelaide as Literary City: Introduction 1 Philip Butterss 1 Acts of Writing 19 Kerryn Goldsworthy 2 A Colonial Wordsmith: George Isaacs in Adelaide, 39 1860-1870 Anne Black 3 Scots and Scottish Literature in Literary Adelaide 57 Graham Tulloch 4 ‘An entertaining young genius’: C.J. Dennis and 77 Adelaide Philip Butterss 5 Adelaide Around 1935: Stories of Herself When Young 95 Susan Sheridan 6 Adelaide and the Country: the Literary Dimension 111 Jill Roe 7 ‘Fearful Affinity’: Jindyworobak Primitivism 125 Peter Kirkpatrick 8 The Athens of the South 147 Alison Broinowski 9 Max Harris: a Phenomenal Adelaide Literary Figure 163 Betty Snowden 10 Geoffrey Dutton: Little Adelaide and New York Nowhere 183 Nicholas Jose New York Nowhere: Meditations and Celebrations, 199 Neurology Ward, The New York Hospital Geoffrey Dutton 11 A Coffee With Ken: Ken Bolton’s Adelaide 239 Jill Jones 12 ‘A Dozy City’: Adelaide in J.M. Coetzee’s Slow Man and 253 Amy T. Matthews’s End of the Night Girl Gillian Dooley Acknowledgements I would like to express my special gratitude to a number of people who have helped with this book. Firstly, thanks to all the team at University of Adelaide Press, in particular, to Patrick Allington, for his enthusiasm about the project, for his rigorous editing, and for his excellent advice, but also thanks for the invaluable input from John Emerson, Zoë Stokes and Julia Keller. I'd like to thank Sarah Tooth and Malcolm Walker from the SA Writers' Centre for their suggestions. I'm very grateful to History SA, and, particularly, Margaret Anderson, for generously supporting my research on literary Adelaide. I am delighted to be able to include Geoffrey Dutton's long poem 'New York Nowhere', and would like to thank Robin Lucas, the Geoffrey Dutton Estate (c/- Curtis Brown (Aust) Pty Ltd) for generously providing permission for this republication. Finally, I'd like to acknowledge, with much gratitude, the considerable hard work and good grace on the part of all the contributors to this volume. List of Contributors Anne Black is a postgraduate student in the Discipline of English and Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide, where she is writing a thesis on the life and work of George Isaacs. She hopes that the result will find a publisher and that Isaacs will be accorded greater recognition for his contribution to South Australian literature. Alison Broinowski was an Australian diplomat until 1996. Her last overseas assignment was at the Australian Mission to the UN in New York. Her PhD is in Asian Studies at ANU. She has written or edited 11 books on Australia's interface with Asia and with the United Nations, three of the latest being About Face: Asian Accounts of Australia (2003), Howard's War (2003) and Allied and Addicted (2007). She is a Visiting Fellow at ANU and is a research associate at Macquarie University. In 2013 she stood for the Senate in NSW for the WikiLeaks Party. Philip Butterss teaches Australian literature and film at the University of Adelaide. Over the past 25 years he has written widely on Australian cultural history. His recently completed biography of C.J. Dennis will be published by Wakefield Press. He is currently working on a history of literary Adelaide. Gillian Dooley is Special Collections Librarian and Honorary Senior Research Fellow in Humanities at Flinders University. Her publications include V.S. Naipaul, Man and Writer and J.M. Coetzee and the Power of Narrative, and essays on writers ranging from Jane Austen to Iris Murdoch. x Adelaide: a literary city She is a regular book reviewer for Australian Book Review and founding editor of two journals, Transnational Literature and Writers in Conversation. Kerryn Goldsworthy was born and educated in South Australia and then lectured in literature at the University of Melbourne for 17 years before moving home to Adelaide, where she has lived and worked as a freelance writer and critic since 1998. She is the author of three books: a collection of short stories, a book of literary criticism, and, most recently, Adelaide (2011) in the NewSouth Books 'Cities' series. She was a member of the editorial team that produced The Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature (2009), and won the 2013 Pascall Prize for Critical Writing, earning the title Australian Critic of the Year. Jill Jones has published seven full-length books, most recently Ash is Here, So are Stars (Walleah Press 2012). A new book, The Beautiful Anxiety, is due from Puncher and Wattmann in 2014. She won the Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize 2003 for Screens Jets Heaven: New & Selected Poems and the Mary Gilmore Award 1993 for The Mask and the Jagged Star. Her work has featured in a number of recent anthologies including the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature and The Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry. She is a member of the J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice, the University of Adelaide, and teaches there in the Discipline of English and Creative Writing. Nicholas Jose is a novelist, essayist and playwright, whose thirteen books include the novels Paper Nautilus, Avenue of Eternal Peace (shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award), The Custodians (shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize) and Original Face; two short story collections; a volume of essays, Chinese Whispers; and the memoir Black Sheep. He is general editor of the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature (also published as The Literature of Australia). He was Visiting Chair of Australian Studies at Harvard University 2009-2010 and taught there again in 2011. He is Professor of English and Creative Writing in the School of Humanities at the University of Adelaide, Adjunct Professor Adelaide: a literary city xi with the Writing and Society Research Centre at the University of Western Sydney, and Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. Peter Kirkpatrick is a senior lecturer in Australian Literature in the Department of English at the University of Sydney, and is the author of The Sea Coast of Bohemia: Literary Life in Sydney's Roaring Twenties (2nd edn API Network, 2007). He has co-edited, with Fran De Groen, Serious Frolic: Essays on Australian Humour (University of Queensland Press, 2009) and, with Robert Dixon, Republics of Letters: Literary Communities in Australia (Sydney University Press, 2012). Jill Roe AO is Professor Emerita in Modern History at Macquarie University, Sydney, where she was recently awarded a D. Litt as a higher research degree for her work on Australian writer Miles Franklin. Her publications in Australian social and cultural history include numerous entries in the Australian Dictionary of Biography. She has also been a contributor to the Wakefield Companion to South Australian History. She is currently working on aspects of the history of Eyre Peninsula, where she was born and spent her first fourteen years. Susan Sheridan is Professor Emerita in Humanities at Flinders University and a member of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. She has published widely on women's writing, feminist cultural studies and Australian cultural history.