Reading for the Flavor of Life and Labor: Four Social/ist Realist Novels in Mid-Twentieth Century Australia

Abstract

Australian interwar and mid-century Social Realist literature is a rich, if undervalued tradition in Australian cultural life. As in other Western countries, Australians feared ‘reds under the bed’ especially from the Cold War on. During World War Two, Stalin was nevertheless something of a popular hero, even appearing on the cover of the popular magazine The Australian Women’s Weekly in 1945. Yet communist culture was never fully at home in Australia, and worker writing remained marginal, even if communism was also a perennial presence in its everyday life (Macintyre). Academic culture valued English literature over the local product. Australia had a strong working class culture, committed to working-men’s rights to a good life, or at least one of frugal comfort. These cultural values were en-shrined in legislation, such as the Harvester Judgement (1907), whereby a worker’s wage was to be based on the cost of living for a man and his family; women’s right to vote came early (1902), subject to race and ethnicity (Indigenous women and men were excluded until 1967). More abstract, masculinist values of mateship and the belief in a ‘fair go’ also under-pinned popular culture and everyday life in Australia. Liberalism ruled as an ideology, but laborism was also a cultural dominant. 1 Social Realism, and Socialist Realism were part of this story. The distinctions often remain less than clear, the terms sometimes used inter-JNT