War Correspondents in Australian Literature: An Outline

Abstract

The capacity to mix fine prose with accuracy and insight is not easy to come by, and I have long believed that a distinguished list of Australian war correspondents who later made their mark in our literature, not only had this capacity, but it was the fact that they had it that was one of the motivating influences that propelled them into the adventurous roles that war offered. And once they were there, writing under pressure and of incidents and events that taxed their skills to the utmost to convey graphically and succinctly, so their talents were the more honed and refined. It is no accident that Hemingway. Dos Passos. Malcolm Cowley and other young American writers deliberately involved themselves in World War I and emerged to occupy the front line (if one may put it that way) of American writing in the 1920s and 1930s.