John McLaren – Writing in Hope and fear

For most of the postwar period, Australian literary debate was marked by the division between radical nationalists on the left and cultural conservatives on the right. 

These Cold War ideological positions were represented respectively by the journals Overland and Quadrant and played out in novels and newspapers. 

Writing in Hope and Fear is a broad cultural history that traces the origins of these conflicts, discusses key literary works and major journals, and focuses on the numerous writers, editors and activists involved in various sagas, scandals and struggles. 

John McLaren shows that, as well as being a reflection of society, writing became a form of politics, expressing either hope or fear about the revolution that was perceived to be 
imminent. 

The work of politically committed writers such as James McAuley, Dorothy Hewett, Frank Hardy and Frank Moorehouse is closely examined in the book, as is the response to ostensibly unpolitical writers like Patrick White and Hal Porter. 

John McLaren also considers the new journalism and the work of younger poets like Michael Dransfield and Robert Adamson, among others. 

Yet the strength of the work lies in its illuminating insights into the context of this writing, which the author argues could be both stultifying and energizing. 

Not until the political and intellectual ferment of the 1960s and the reforms of the Whitlam government did literature truly free itself from political positioning. 

The first broad history of postwar literature as a national institution, the book will be of interest to readers of Australian literature, politics and history. 

While written from the perspective of a dramatically different literary climate, the book argues that these earlier debates laid the basis for an open, multicultural literary culture in Australia at the close of the century. 

John McLaren is Professor in Humanities at the Victoria University of Technology, Melbourne. He has been a parliamentary candidate, newspaper columnist and schoolteacher, and has written or edited ten books on Australian literature, literary history, education, culture and politics. 

He was founding editor of the Australian Book Review (second series), and has been an associate editor of Overland literary quarterly since 1966, and editor since 1993. 

Cover illustration: Noel Counihan, Man with Bloody Hand, oil on hardboard, 1971. Courtesy Pat Counihan.