Click here to return to Editorials . Once back in America, I subscribed for a while to the Austlit mailing-list , and was rather taken aback by the lack of enthusiasm there for these authors. I do not mean to demean those scholars to them, these classics were like a sunrise no doubt inspiring, but rather overdone. I, on the other hand, was a new convert. My first exposure to Australian literature was on the internet, back about 1993, thanks to an Israeli whose sister had visited Australia.
Strange things happen on the net.
The author was Henry Lawson , and I only saw a few of his poems, but they were good enough that I was surprised I had not heard of him before. I was not aware that either Lawson or Paterson had a large body of work. I should note that while I am no literary scholar, neither am I any great slouch when it comes to books. That is why I would like to bring this to the attention of others who are in a better position than myself to introduce the world to Australia's classic authors. Make no mistake about it, Gordon , Kendall , Boldrewood , Lawson, Paterson, and others, are world-class writers.