New Literary History of Australia (1988), edited by Laurie Hergenan (Decolonising a Blog… a work in progress #4)

Cultural warning: this post contains the names of First Nations authors who have died.

Laurie Hergenan PhD AO FAHA(1931 – 2019) was an Australian literary scholar. Educated at the University of Sydney and Birkbeck College in London, he held academic positions in Tasmania and Queensland.  He was the founder and former editor of Australian Literary Studies (1963) and he published on Xavier Herbert.

And he was also the editor of the 1988 Penguin New Literary History of Australia. 

This literary history, published in Australia’s bicentennial year, has been sitting on the shelf for a while.  I picked it up to see what it had to say about Frank Moorhouse (and The Electrical Experience in particular) and ended up reading it, chapter by chapter, at bedtime.  (Yes, a tad nerdy, I know.)

Even at university, I was not a scholarly reader.  I’ve always been much more interested in the book than…