In the decade after 1979, the year A Woman of the Future was published, David Ireland was considered the most intriguing literary figure in Australia and its foremost novelist of ideas. A Woman of the Future, Ireland's complex and mischievous The Unknown Industrial Prisoner (1971), and his acknowledged comic masterpiece The Glass Canoe (1976) had each received the most prestigious literary prize in Australia, the Miles Franklin Award, not always in controversial circumstances but always with controversial outcomes. The Unknown Industrial Prisoner was clearly subversive in its attack upon the ownership of Australian companies and Australian lives by foreign concerns, and charges of suppression were leveled when government funding to the motion picture being made of it was cut in 1978; both The Glass Canoe and A Woman of the Future included sexual material of such directness that education officials barred the former from being studied by schoolchildren, and one of the...