novelists-from-australia

"In 2012, the Chinese sociologist Sūn Lìpíng (b. 1955) suggested the PRC [People's Republic of China] faced four possible paths. One was return to Mao-style egalitarian populism, reducing inequality and corruption but risking the violence and irrationality of the Mao era. Another was to deepen the reforms – further privatizing the economy regardless of increased inequality. The third was to maintain the status quo. The fourth was to pursue reform while applying notions of fairness, justice, and universal values."

"Everything has a cause and the cause of anything is everything."

"The mind of the people is like mud, From which arise strange and beautiful things."

"When I was but thirteen or so I went into a golden land, Chimborazo, Cotopaxi Took me by the hand."

"If you imagine you are going to read of model children, with perhaps a naughtily inclined one to point a moral, you had better lay down the book immediately and betake yourself to "Sandford and Merton" or similar standard juvenile works. Not one of the seven is really good, for the very excellent reason that Australian children never are."

"Everyone agreed that the day was just right for the picnic to — a shimmering summer morning warm and still, with s shrilling all through breakfast from the outside the dining-room windows and bees murmuring above the pansies bordering the drive. ... The boarders at Mrs Appleby's College for Young Ladies had been up and scanning the bright unclouded sky since six o'clock and were now fluttering about in their holiday s like a flock of excited butterflies. Not only was it a Saturday and the long awaited occasion of the annual picnic, but Saint Valentine's Day, traditionally celebrated on the fourteenth of February by the interchange of elaborate cards and favours."

"There’s a version of Lindsay’s life story that is defined by the men in her life. She was the daughter of a judge and the granddaughter of a state governor. She was married to painter , the director of the between 1942 and 1956, and later knighted for his services to the arts. Novelist was her cousin, was her drawing teacher and her friend launched Picnic at Hanging Rock."

"... it was written as a mystery, and it remains a mystery. ... like dropping a stone into water ..."

"Had Lindsay not written ', she might now be simply described as the enigmatic and charming wife of – artist and director of the – hostess of their rural mansion , a minor writer and artist renowned for her skills in hospitality and flower arrangement."

"What a happy woman I am, living in a garden, with books, babies, birds, and flowers, and plenty of leisure to enjoy them! Yet my town acquaintances look upon it as imprisonment, and burying, and I don't what besides, and would rend the air with their shrieks if condemned to such a life. Sometimes I fell as if I were blest above all my fellows in being able to find my happiness so easily."

"Elizabeth von Arnim is probably best remembered as the author of ' (1898) and ' (1922), and as the elder cousin of Katherine Mansfield. In recent times, fresh scholarship has begun has begun to reinstate van Arnim into the cultural milieu of which she was a significant part, while research into the complex relationship between Mansfield and her cousin has done much to shed light on the familial, personal and literary connections between these unlikely friends. ... Although their lives appeared to be very different (Mansfield's largely one of penurious poor health, von Arnim's chiefly one of robust privilege), we know each experienced the other's influential presence. They read and commented on each other's work, and Manfield's critical assessments became part of the widespread reception of von Arnim's writing, while von Arnim's skill as as an author seeped into her cousin's youthful aspirations and into her firs collection of stories, ' (1911)."

"... Books have their idiosyncrasies as well as people, and will not show me their full beauties unless the place and time in which they are read suits them. If, for instance, I cannot read Thoreau in a drawing-room, how much less would I ever dream of reading Boswell in the grass by a pond! Imagine carrying him off in company with his great friend to a lonely dell in a rye-field, and expecting them to be entertaining. "Nay, my dear lady," the great man would say in mighty tones of rebuke, "this will never do. Lie in a rye-field? What folly is that? And who would converse in a damp hollow that can help it?" So I read and laugh over my Boswell in the library when the lamps are lit, buried in cushion and surrounded by every sign of civilisation, with the drawn curtains shutting out the garden and the country solitude so much disliked by both sage and disciple. Indeed, It is Bozzy who asserts that in the country the only things that make him happy are meals."

"Father ... appeared to take it for granted that his daughter would continue about him as before, side by side with his new wife, on the ground that homes were the natural places for maiden daughters; and when she reminded him that she was thirty-three, he merely inquired with acerbity, for in his heart he was thinking that she ought to have been married and out of the way long ago, whether being thirty-three altered the fact that she was a maiden daughter."

"Looking out of the club window into —hers was an economical club, but convenient for , where she lived, and for 's, where she shopped—Mrs. Wilkins, having stood there for some time very drearily, her mind's eye on the Mediterranean in April, and the , and the enviable opportunities of the rich, while her bodily eye watched the really falling steadily on the hurrying umbrellas and splashing , suddenly wondered whether this was not the rainy day Mellersh—Mellersh was Mr. Wilkins—had so often encouraged her to prepare for, and whether to get out of such a climate and into the small mediaeval castle wasn't perhaps what had all along intended her to do with her savings. Part of her savings, of course; perhaps quite a small part."

"... Whether in or New York, London or , von Arnim’s settings almost always tell the reader about the insufferable constraints placed upon the women who inhabit them. Elizabeth von Arnim was also brilliant at men, or rather at skewering their behaviour, usually with the help of outlandish names. Married men, in particular, are targeted as they ignore their wives, whine about their misfortunes, or want fish for breakfast. They also lie, cheat, bully, and diminish. Von Arnim made frequent and barely disguised use of the men in her life. The husband of Elizabeth and her German Garden, based closely on her own, is referred to as ‘the Man of Wrath’, a bald-faced hint that, for all of its delights, Elizabeth was only superficially a book about gardens. Subsequent lovers, including H.G. Wells and publisher (thirty years her junior), also became fodder for her fiction. So did her second husband, , brother of the more famous Bertrand and a human bulldozer who pursued von Arnim in various forms for perceived damages long after their separation. Von Arnim tended to hide such unpleasantness under the guise of humour, at which she was unequivocally brilliant (P.G. Wodehouse must surely have been inspired by her novels). Clergy, relatives, dogs, and toddlers all come with laugh-out-loud descriptions, while her skill at satire rests upon ruthlessly close observation filtered through playful, often inventive language or placed in biting juxtaposition. But underneath – whether taking aim at dismissive doctors or overbearing fathers or the bizarre niceties of the – bristles a bitterness that goes beyond the waspishness of say, Muriel Spark, as von Arnim exposes the societal structures used to limit the autonomy and opportunity of her female characters."

"Once I knew a bishop rather intimately—oh, nothing that wasn't most creditable to us both—and he said to me, "Dear child, you will always be happy if you are good." I'm afraid he couldn't have been quite candid, or else he was very inexperienced, for I have never been so terribly good in the bishop's sense as these last three years—turning my back on every private wish, dreadfully unselfish, devoted, a perfect monster of goodness. And unhappiness went with me every step of the way."

""... I haven't had much time to think, have I? But I can't stay here," said Jen quickly ... "There isn't room for two women in this house. It simply wouldn't hold us both." No; that was precisely what he had been thinking. Though he never, being a decent father, would have said so, it was perfectly true. The house, except extremely awkwardly, couldn't hold them both. No house had yet been built which could hold, in peace and comfort, a maiden daughter approaching middle age, and a young second wife. But that Jennifer should see this at once, and clearly, was the last thing he had dreamed of."

"You see, what has happened has taken away my faith in goodness—I don't know who you are that I keep on wanting to tell things to, but I must talk and tell you. Yes; that it is what it has done; and the hurt goes too far down to be healed. Yet I know time is a queer, wholesome thing. I've lived long enough to have found that out. It is very sanitary. It cleans up everything. It never fails to sterilize and purify."

"Pitied? Horrid thought. The great thing in life was to be so situated that you can pity others. But to be pitied yourself?"

"Father was very pleasant indeed, if faintly apologetic — not embarrassed, for he was never that, but there was a faint flavour of apology in his manner, which was perhaps not to be wondered at, since his new wife was ever so much younger, one could see at once, than his daughter, and he sixty-five. "You mustn't think, Jennifer," he said after , which had been the oddest meal of her life, as he called her into the back diningroom where protected by folding doors from anything that might be going on in the front one, they had worked together so long — she the obedient handmaid waiting on his thoughts, taking them down as they emerged from him, typing and retyping them, over and over again with dogged patience typing a single paragraph, a single sentence, sometimes for days working on a single sentence till it was, in father's eyes, as near perfect as it could humanly be got, — "you mustn't think, Jennifer," he said, "that I've sprung this on you unfairly.""

"Beauty; beauty. What was the good of beauty, once it was over? It left nothing behind it but acid regrets, and no heart at all to start fresh. Nearly everything else left something."

"Hugh Walpole was tutor to Elizabeth's children during her time at , as was E.M. Forster, who was a Cambridge friend of Elizabeth's nephew, . In later years, Forster was to recall his inconspicuous arrival at the , 'his average welcome' ... by the von Arnims, as well as his genuine appreciation of Elizabeth 'as a writer'. ... Though he also insisted that personally, the two, 'were never — or almost never! — in sympathy'. ..."

"She was an exceedingly pretty girl, who ought to have been enjoying herself. She had a soft, irregular face, charming eyes, dimples, a pleasant laugh, and limbs were long and slender. Certainly she ought to have been enjoying herself. Instead, she wasted her time in that foolish pondering over the puzzles of existence, over those unanswerable whys and wherefores, which is as a rule restricted, among women, to the elderly and plain."

"By the time she was twenty-four, nearly all the girls who had when she did were married, and she felt as though she were a ghost haunting the s of a younger generation."

"Still, she did seem to have shrunk. Now why should she have shrunk? he wondered, aggrieved. He hadn't; quite the contrary. However, he mustn't mind. She was Fanny, presently to be his Fanny, and he mustn't mind any little alterations. What he did mind mind was that, like Soames, she appeared not to recognize him. She soon would, though, he told himself; and he went over to her determined and confident, lifted her unresisting hand, kissed it with all the fervor of happy reunion, and said with what he felt was immense tact and presence of mind, "I would have known you anywhere." Fanny was much too astonished to speak. She stared at the head bent over her hand. Who was this bald man?"

"Some writer has described Melbourne as Glasgow, with the sky of Alexandria; and certainly the beautiful climate of Australia, so Italian in its brightness, must have a great effect on the nature of such an adaptable race as the Anglo-Saxon. In spite of the dismal prognostications of Marcus Clark regarding the future Australian, whom he describes as being "a tall, coarse, strong-jawed, greedy, pushing, talented man, excelling in swimming and horsemanship," it is more likely that he will be a cultured, indolent individual, with an intense appreciation of the arts and sciences, and a dislike to hard work and utilitarian principles. Climatic influence should be taken into account with regard to the future Australian, and our posterity will be no more like us than the luxurious Venetians resembled their hardy forefathers, who first started to build on those lonely sandy islands of the Adriatic."

"I don't like Latin," said Miss Frettlby, shaking her pretty head. "I agree with Heine's remark, that if the Romans had had to learn it they would not have found time to conquer the world."

"Diplomacy," said Calton, to one young aspirant for legal honours, "is the oil we cast on the troubled waters of social, professional, and political life; and if you can, by a little tact, manage mankind, you are pretty certain to get on in this world."

"Young men, not bein' old men," she replied, cautiously, "and sinners not bein' saints, it's not nattral as latch keys should be made for ornament instead of use, and Mr. Fitzgerald bein' one of the 'andsomest men in Melbourne, it ain't to be expected as 'e should let 'is latch key git rusty, tho', 'avin' a good moral character, 'e uses it with moderation."

"Raki is bad enough, but it's nectar compared with pulque."

"I was not myself on that night. The wine was in and the wit was out."

"It was Saturday morning, and of course all fashionable Melbourne was doing the Block. With regard to its "Block," Collins Street corresponds to New York's Broadway, London's Regent Street and Rotten Row, and to the Boulevards of Paris. It is on the Block that people show off their new dresses, bow to their friends, cut their enemies, and chatter small talk."

"History was being manufactured at the rate of a sensation a week."

""Whatever you do, don’t go on to the beaches at dusk," was all he said. Then he vanished."

"Young men of the present day are very fond of running down women, and think it a manly thing to sneer at them for their failings; but God help the man who, in time of trouble, has not a woman to stand by his side with cheering words and loving smiles to help him in the battle of life."

"Potent as was the wonderful lamp of Aladdin, and magnificent as were its successes, the power of gold has equalled in its marvellous effects all that the warm orient fancy has pictured for us in the Arabian Nights. Gold has done even more than ever mere magician achieved. It certainly has operated magically in Australia, and in no part of the country has it created greater marvels than in Ballarat ..."

"It takes two persons to make a Proper Friendship. The one has to be befriended, the other to be friendly. I'd rather be the friendly man by a darned sight. He gets all the fat off the mutual leg of mutton, and not unfrequently scrapes the bone."

"I have just finished writing a full-sized novel; title, Such is Life; scenery, and northern Vic.; temper, democratic; bias, offensively Australian."

"He couldn't be content with small profits, so he took to cards, and was shot aboard a river steamboat. God bless him. He died like a hero, with a king up his sleeve."

"Bouncer was a friend of mine, and when I was going to be married to Miss Tallon, with £50,000, Bouncer said, 'Q., introduce me, old fellow, as your friend! I did; and in six weeks he married the lady. My only consolation was that her father became insolvent before the end of the year."

"Unemployed at last!"

"Friendship, if you know how to work it, is better than a cousin in Parliament."

"Everything he touched turned to gold. When he married an heiress even she died of the yellow fever."

"Friends as a rule are a mistake."

"As Mr Burnett said to me long ago, 'Q———, you will never be one of us. You have ruined your constitution by early temperance.'"

"I have had many friends, like the hare in the fable, but most of them didn't pay expenses. Friendship is like mining; sometimes you drop into a good thing, but the majority of places are duffers."

"I used to be a dreadful fellow — nearly as bad as the drunkards in the storybook. I have been drunk for a year and a-half at a stretch. It was natural for me to drink. When I was about three days and a-half old, I saw my nurse hide a brandy bottle away in a cupboard that she couldn't get at afterwards. I never said anything about it then, but as soon as I could walk, I got the keys and drank that brandy."

"I used to drink so that the publicans, when they went out of business, used to sell me among the valuable fixtures."

"Our virgin continent! how long has she tarried her bridal day!"

"They are the cream of the social bowl—in their own estimation. The stone pillars which, according to the Arabic legend, hold the earth up. There never was, or can be, anything to equal them. You may be the best fellow in the world, the sole support of an aged mother, and the protector of a whole boarding-schoolful of orphan sisters. You may work like a horse, and give all your goods to feed the poor, but if you are not a Business Man, you are sounding brass or tinkling cymbal. To be a Business Man is a special gift—a sort of inherent virtue, like a cast in the eye."