Literature:

Australia’s Aborigines had a rich oral tradition. It included not only sacred mythology, but also ordinary tales and stories—some oral history, or presumed to be so. A number of the stories existed in several versions; the version used depended on the situation and the storyteller. See Also Australian Literature. 

Australia’s six states became a nation under a single constitution on 1 January 1901. Today Australia is home to people from more than 200 countries.

Australian qualities: convicts, the bush, bushrangers, folklore, tales of pioneering, family sagas, floods, droughts, bushfires, battlers, Aboriginal people, Irishmen and lost children.

Early Australian novelists included: Marcus Clarke, (Stella Maria Sarah) Miles Franklin, Clarence (Clarrie or Den) Michael James Stanislaus (CJ) Dennis, Edward Dyson and Doris Pilkington. 

The most eminent fiction writer after 1945 was Patrick White, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1973. In a dozen novels from Happy Valley (1939) to Memoirs of Many in One (1986), White examined, often satirically, the conflict between inner consciousness and social existence.

Children's literature

Australia has a strong tradition of children's books. The earliest books published for children were mostly instructive tales - stories to teach children how to behave. By the late 19th century, Australian writers began to focus on stories showing real life experiences and everyday adventures, such as settling in Australia and family life.

Some children's books , are:  Norman Lindsay's “The Magic Pudding and May Gibbs”,  Snugglepot and Cuddlepie. Ruth Park also wrote the famous children's series The Muddle-Headed Wombat.

Theatre

Australian playwrights were largely ignored for a hundred years or so. Betty Roland had to wait 70 years to see her play performed, as the theatre owners were much more interested in bringing new overseas plays to Australia than taking a risk with local material. The Lighthouse Keeper's Wife by Mary Wilkinson was performed briefly in 1922, but the work of Tasmanian Catherine Shepherd has not been performed since its debut in 1942. However, the ABC began radio broadcasts of live drama in 1932, which focused attention on plays. 

Poetry

Henry Kendall, encouraged by Harpur, was the first Australian poet to draw his inspiration from the life, landscape and traditions of Australian, and its influence on human beings. George Gordon McCrae incorporated Aboriginal themes into his poetry. The English-born Adam Lindsay Gordon, with his Bush Ballads and Galloping Rhymes (1870), 'revitalised the traditional ballad form by infusing it with bush themes'.

Modern Australian poets were influenced both by the 'literary nationalism' of the late 1890s which espoused Australian values as well as the contemporary modernist writings which challenged writers to use their imagination and be innovative in describing what was 'real'.

'Sandgropers and Islanders' - Dorothy Hewett

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