SOURCE: Wilding, Michael. “The Modern Australian Short Story.” Critical Survey 6, no. 1 (1994): 112–17.

In the following essay, originally published in 1992, Wilding presents an overview of contemporary Australian short fiction.

‘What is unique about the short story is that we all can tell one, live one, write one down,’ Christina Stead wrote.¹ The story is that most accessible of literary forms. Everyone has a story. It has never been an exclusive or elitist form. The great short-story writers have also been novelists, poets, dramatists. One of the appeals of the story is the way it attracts such a variety of practitioners. This in its turn contributes to the variety of formal procedures—narrative, lyric, dialogue, fable, yarn or memoir. The story is in dialogue with novels, poets, plays, essays; it is not sealed off from other genres. It can contain the verbal concentration of a poem, the documentary transcription of the...