Review of Kenneth Slessor, A Biography by Geoffrey Dutton, and The Annotated Such is Life by Joseph Furphy, ed. F. Devlin-Glass, R. Eaden, L. Hoffman, and G.W. Turner

Abstract

It is strange to think of 1944, with its shortages and paper rationing, as an annus mirabilis for a publisher, but in that year Angus & Robertson published for the first time their subsequently often-reprinted edition of Such Is Life and Kenneth Slessor's One Hundred Poems 1919-1939. Furphy's novel was made available to a new audience, and one which would read it more sympathetically and with a commitment which would probably have surprised its author. Slessor's poems, despite the changing tastes of the past fifty years, have remained as referent points for the emergence of the modern in Australian poetry.