REVIEW 0F:       CENTURY 0F AUSTRALIAN STORIES

Reviewed by Sian Pryor on ABC Radio National (Australia) 

Carmel Bird has edited a big new book called The Penguin Century of Australian Stories, a review of the last one hundred years of Australian short story writing. And it’s a treat - one hundred different stories, from turn-of-the-century writers like Barbara Baynton and Henry Lawson, through to Hal Porter and Christina Stead, and then contemporary writers like Elizabeth Jolley, Tim Winton, Peter Carey and Elliott Perlman..Buying this book is a kind of investment in Australian culture. It’s a book you’ll dip into and come back to time and time again throughout your life. You really get a sense of the history of this country over the past century through this writing... from Barbara Bayton’s stories about women struggling to live decent lives in the harsh Australian bush at the beginning of the century... through to a futuristic story by Barry Oakley about football, called ‘Fosterball.’ Actually maybe it’s not so futuristic... this is just a very ‘short’ short story, only about four pages, about a world where the media and big business has so entirely taken over football, you don’t go to a match at an oval any more, you watch it in holographic, virtual reality in the comfort of your own living room. It’s a big hardback book, over seven hundred pages long, but it’s a lovely read. Carmel Bird writes in the introduction that she "imagined international flights where the passengers dipped into the century of stories between movies and drinks, the words and images taking them into realms that no air-craft could ever reach". It’s probably a bit too heavy for carrying on plane trips, but I know what she means, because what we really want from short stories are these short-term trips to other worlds.