The writing life.(Wild Amazement)(Book review)

Wild Amazement, by Michael Wilding; Central Queensland University Press, 2006, $25.95.

I HAD THE MISFORTUNE to be in Melbourne in the 1960s and early 1970s, when I was thinking of abandoning my academic career to take a chance on writing fiction for a living, and the interesting and innovative Melbourne writing was for the theatre. The likes of David Williamson, Jack Hibberd and John Romeril were writing for La Mama and the Pram Factory and packing them in.

Never interested in writing plays, I heard about the new sort of stuff being written in Sydney by Michael Wilding, Frank Moorhouse, Vikki Viidikas and others and I longed to be able to tap into that milieu. It took me a while, but when I got to Sydney I found that it was all true. The writers of short stories (my first tentative venture into fiction) were there. They were at the university, in the pubs, in the restaurants and they were writing, reading and being published. As well as the established journals, there were outlets like Tabloid Story (inserted in a range of newspapers), the Nation Review and experimental, often ephemeral publications.

Michael Wilding was an important part of the activity that made Sydney seem such a fertile ground and stimulated me to have a go. A busy writer, he was publishing stories and with Pat Woolley founded Wild & Woolley, to publish writers who might never otherwise have got into print.

Wilding made the transition from short stories to longer forms with books like Living Together, The Paraguayan Experiment, Under Saturn (novellas) and, more recently, Academia Nuts. A keen reader of historical novels, I thought The Paraguayan Experiment, described as a ...