AWW Gen 3 Week Summary

Australian Women Writers Gen 3 Week 12-18 Jan. 2020

Artist: Grace Cossington Smith

Another successful ‘Gen’ week negotiated – thank you all, readers and writers – without the benefit of holidays this time, as I drove from Perth to Albany (WA) to Goulburn (NSW), picked up my new trailer somewhere in the wilds north of Windsor, outside Sydney, ran empty to Melbourne, had a day off to visit mum, loaded, and here I am in Adelaide, Sunday night, ready to top up in the morning and head home.

Each time we do a Gen week, I find surprising both the gems we discover and the major works we fail to get to. My list of the major works of the Australian Women Writers Gen 3 period, from the end of WWI to the end of the 1950s, would include –

Henry Handel Richardson, The Fortunes of Richard Mahoney (trilogy)
Katharine Susannah Prichard, Coonardoo and Working Bullocks
Christina Stead, Seven Poor Men of Sydney and For Love Alone
M Barnard Eldershaw, A House is Built
Eleanor Dark, Prelude to Christopher and The Timeless Land
Miles Franklin, All That Swagger
Kylie Tennant, Ride On Stranger and The Battlers
Cusack & James, Come in Spinner
Eve Langley, The Pea Pickers

I think that’s close to chronological order. Anyway that’s a pretty powerful list and we didn’t get to any of them. Yet I’m happy with the books we did cover and I think between us we chose books that illustrated the principal themes of Gen 3 – Modernism, Social Realism (Socialist Realism for Communists) and Pioneering. And the hidden gems? Well definitely Zora Cross and Dorothy Cottrell.

So, in the lead up to and over the course of AWW Gen 3 Week we saw the following reviews/posts –

Eleanor Dark, The Little Company, ANZLitLovers
Ruth Park, A Fence Around the Cuckoo, Travellin Penguin
Dora Birtles, The Overlanders, Luvvie’s Musings
Drusilla Modgeska, Exiles at Home, wadh
Cathy Perkins, The Shelf Life of Zora Cross (biog.), The Resident Judge
Monday Musings on Christina Stead, Whispering Gums
Dorothy Hewett, In Midland Where the Trains Go By (poem), Brona’s Books
Jean Devanny, Sugar Heaven, ANZLitLovers
Myrtle Rose White, No Roads Go By, wadh
Mena Calthorpe, The Dyehouse, Brona’s Books
Dorothy Cottrell, The Mysterious Box, Jessica White
Park & Niland, The Drums Go Bang, Whispering Gums
Monday Musings on Christina Stead (2), Whispering Gums

There are more reviews in the AWW Gen 3 page, as many as I can find that we’ve done over the years, including most of the ‘major’ works above, plus ‘Related Posts’ particularly the many posts Whispering Gums has done on 1930s writers, plus all the major literary prize winners (that I can dig up) for the period.

Christina Stead and Miles Franklin have pages of their own – Franklin (here) and Stead on ANZ LitLovers (here). Let me know if you do an AWW Gen 3 (or 2 or 1) review, or have done and I’ve missed it, and I will add it to the appropriate page. I’m currently working on a big post(s) on Daisy Bates and her The Passing of the Aborigines but I might let it rest for a while before I put it up. And then there’s Ernestine Hill, more Stead, more Eleanor Dark, Dorothy Cottrell’s The Singing Gold to find, so much to do!

At this stage I’m thinking we’ll do more Gen 3 next year and I’d like to take the time to look a little closer at the boundary between Gen 3 and Gen 4. I’ve tended to conflate Gen 4 and Baby Boomers, but just as much of ‘our’ music is by people ten years older than us, eg. The Beatles, so, I think, many of those writers we regard as ‘oldies’ like Tom Keneally, David Ireland and Thea Astley probably properly belong by style and subject matter in Gen 4.

Thank you all again, and it’s back to ‘normal’ reading for a while, well until a challenge catches my eye or ANZ LitLovers Indigenous Writing Week sneaks up on us again.