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T h is collection © 1985 by D am ien Broderick.
C opyright resides in authors in respect o f th eir own
contributions.
T h is book is copyright. A p art from any fair dealing
for the purposes o f study, research, criticism ,
review, o r as otherw ise perm itted u n d e r the
C opyright Act, no p a rt m ay be reproduced by any
process w ithout w ritten perm ission. Inquiries
should be m ade to the publisher.
Typeset, printed & bound by
Southw ood Press Pty Lim ited
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H ale G flrem onger P ty Lim ited
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National Library of Australia Catalogue Card no. and
ISBN 0 86806 208 1 (casebound)
ISBN 0 86806 209 X (paperbound)
Publication of this book has been assisted by the
L iteratu re B oard of the A ustralia C ouncil, the
Federal G overnm ent’s arts funding and advisory
body.
For
U rs u la Le G u in
a n d G e n e Wolfe:
H o n o u re d
G uests
Contents
Introduction
7
Damien Broderick
T he L ipton Village Society
14
Lucy Sussex
T im e and flowers
29
Anthony Peacey
A step in any direction
43
Timothy Dell
T he way she smiles, the things she says
Greg Egan
M r Lockwood’s narrative
62
Yvonne Rousseau
Glass Reptile Breakout
75
Russell Blackford
After the Beowulf expedition
92
Norman Lalbot
Precious Bane
103
Gerald Murnane
T he ballad of Hilo Hill
112
Cherry Wilder
T he elixir operon
132
David Foster
T he sanctuary tree
151
John Playford
O n the nursery floor
164
George Turner
C aveA m antem
193
Carmel Bird
Jagging
198
Anthony Peacey
T he Interior
226
Damien Broderick
Notes on contributors
235
Introduction
©
DAMIEN BRODERICK
Here is an odd fact. I encourage you to marvel at it:
Not until twenty years ago (when I was only slightly younger
than I am today) was the first mass-market sf collection by an Australian published in Australia.
Why is this surprising? Well, after all, science fiction was hardly
brand-new, in the world at large, twenty years ago. H. G. Wells, its
major innovator, had been dead since 1946. Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, by 1965, were already ash two decades past. So was the
fabled American Golden Age of sf.
Indeed, at that very moment the New Wave of rebellion against
Golden Age science fiction was beginning to roil in Britain. Brian
Aldiss and Cordwainer Smith and Samuel R, Delany and Tom
Disch were recasting the nature of the genre. And we in Australia
were . . . what? Sending out our first collection to sniff the air. (As
it chanced, this novelty was a small pulpy gathering of my own
small inept stories.)
Since the late fifties, of course, other fledgling professionals —
John Baxter, David Boutland, Stephen Cook, Lee H arding and
Wynne Whiteford — had placed sf stories abroad. An adopted son,
Captain A. Bertram Chandler, had been active in the dreaded
Golden Age itself. Still earlier we’d had Erie Cox’s Out of the Silence
and M. Barnard Eldershaw’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow (recently
republished uncut). But sf was thin on our native ground.
By 1968 and 1971, John Baxter was still hardly overwhelmed in
7
Introduction
his choices as he collected stories for his Pacific Books of SF.
Abruptly then, about a decade back, everything changed.
People date the change from AussieCon I in 1975, the first World
Science Fiction Convention held in the Antipodes (snatched from
its traditional custodians, I said grandly at the time in my anthology The Zeitgeist Machine, like the America’s Cup — as, years later, the America’s Cup was indeed to be snatched).
AussieCon was catalytic. It fetched here (with the aid of the
Literature Board of the Australia Council) Ursula Le Guin, Guest
of Honour, the world’s best sf writer. It built around her a most
remarkable writing workshop. Was some switch thrown at that
moment? Probably this is an illusion. Still, within a few years we
saw book after book of short stories (H arding’s 1978 Rooms of Paradise combining without embarrassment work from here and abroad), major novels of speculative fiction by George Turner, Lee
Harding, Gerald M urnane, Cherry Wilder and others, and the
emergence of several small specialist publishers (notably Norstrilia
Press and, more recently. Ebony Books) whose dedication has been
to get this work out into the light of day, not always without cost to
themselves.
(Non-genre speculative fiction has also appeared, happily, from
Glenda Adams,
