E. O. Schlunke, Angus & Robertson, and the Making of Regional Umwelt

Abstract

This article explores the dynamics between a Riverina fiction-writer, his Sydney publisher and the national government's literature funding body (CLF) in the mid-twentieth century. Rich archival material shows how E.O. Schlunke’s publications, promoted as typifying the region and its culture, were shaped in part not from the region itself but the priorities of the metropolitan centre. Publishers’ acceptance and rejection of minor “literary” writers’ manuscripts depended on Commonwealth funding, itself influenced by the national impetus to redefine Australia as benignly culturally diverse, its wool and wheat producers advanced and efficient. Schlunke, though determined to distinguish his region and era from the comic and colonising precedents, focused on the contemporary farm life, German community and town society subject he observed and lived, his own environment. The terminology in blurbs for his short story collections and correspondence between him, Beatrice Davis, her co-workers at Angus & Robertson and the CLF, show his published stories conforming to the new primary producer and to quaintly benign non-Anglo paradigm of characters. Schlunke lost interest in this version of the region and began a very different trajectory. Davis, his editor, rejected work that showed a complex, less charming, local community and those manuscripts remain unpublished.