Short stories over time [1]

        First up, if you love creative writing, get a copy of this and put it on that shelf in your study, no matter where you're from, as it's a rich source of the human experience over time.

       I have to say that it's hard to work out how the editor went about this massive exercise, of picking 100 Australian short stories, from 1900 to 1999, from Federation to Millennium. Maybe I should read the Foreword and/or the (damn long) Introduction. But I don't tend to. Always too impatient to get into the meat of it.

       I thought about that whole alpha By Author construction again, and decided no way I was going to let that put me off this great opportunity, to wallow in story evolution. So I did what they should've done, laboriously pencilled in the page number of each story against the chronological list (which has no page numbers! - I mean, f'godsake people!) and launched into it.

        Upshot is, as 100 short stories are going to take quite a bit of wallowing time, I decided to do it in order, in decade bites, starting with.....

1900 - 1909

        Only five stories made it, 2 of them Good, 1 Unreadable, 2 Great. All are set in the day or the recent past, of colonial Aus struggling to grow up just after Federating the States into a new Commonwealth, but four of them are set in the bush, well sprinkled with bush "characters", as was the way of a great deal of Aus Lit back then.

        The Unreadable is set in Melbourne, a dry, looong-paragraphed, overwritten account of some new arrivals. It got less than a minute. One of the Greats is the classic Henry Lawson's "Loaded Dog", which I've read at least five times over the last 60 years, each time finding a dry laconic Aussie laugh in every line. The other Great was one of Tom Collins's (set in a scrappy gold mining area), and one of the other two was an extract from the Steele Rudd material of the day, looking back - tongue in cheek - at life on a new "Selection" block on the outskirts.

        So, all about what I expected.

1910 - 1919

        Nothing made it apparently. I would've expected to see at least one from WWI, or of its aftermath. Very disappointing. I must go looking for one.

        Stay tuned for the Twenties.....

            Trev

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