This anthology came about serendipitously, via a 2001 PEN Writers in Prison Conference in Godavari, Nepal. There, Wendy Birman, President of the International PEN Perth Centre, met and befriended Para Limbu, one of the editors for Spiny Babbler. Spiny Babbler – named after a bird long thought to be extinct in the world but rediscovered and now thriving in Nepal – has several emphases, each focussing on the arts and education. For example, it uses the arts to improve the conditions of school and college students in Nepal; it provides more than sixty young volunteers who use various creative processes to improve the lives of young people in shelters and hospitals; its cultural tourism programs introduce visitors to Nepali arts, music, drama and literature; and it runs art and literature festivals (nine in 2001). It has a multicultural and multinational focus that has resulted in various publications, like Patricia Oxley, ed.,Selected Poems of the United Kingdom (2001). This anthology complements that one.

     Para Limbu expressed an interest in publishing an anthology of Australian short stories and Wendy Birman offered PEN’s assistance. Eventually, Birman approached me (by chance the Foundation President of PEN Perth Centre), and I suggested that an interesting collection could be made of the work of students in Creative Writing courses in Australian universities. As a member of the Executive of the Australian Association of Writing Programs, I was well placed to approach lecturers through that organisation.

     Creative Writing was introduced to Australia as a tertiary-level academic discipline in the early 1970s. At first, most Australian universities were dismissive of such work. One caustic view had it that university Departments of English should be concerned, metaphorically, to teach their students how to drink tea but not how to make it. That view was reminiscent of the one that obtained twenty-five years earlier when Cornell University in the United States hired the Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov to teach Russian and European literature: someone said it was like the Department of Zoology hiring an elephant, the object of study, rather than the lecturer who studied the object.

     The colleges of advanced education turned that attitude around in Australia, appointing writers as lecturers and also offering short-term appointments to writers in residence, often with the help of the Literature Board of the Australia Council. Doing so was consistent with the government’s charge to the colleges to concentrate on practice, leaving the universities to concentrate on theory, a false distinction that could not stand. One of the early appointments of a writer qua writer was Elizabeth Jolley (1978) at the then-Western Australian Institute of Technology (now Curtin University of Technology).

     Today, virtually all of the more than three dozen Australian tertiary education institutions have Creative and/or Professional Writing programs that, in the universities especially, have kept English departments from going the way of the classics, languages or philosophy departments. The process was symbolically completed in 1997 when the University of Adelaide appointed Tom Shapcott (poet, librettist and novelist) as Australia’s first Professor of Creative Writing.

     The Australian Association of Writing Programs was the brainchild of Nigel Krauth (Griffith University in Queensland) and Tess Brady (then of Griffith, now of Deakin University in Victoria). It became a formal entity at its first conference that was hosted by the University of Technology Sydney in 1996. Now the AAWP has members from all Australian universities with Creative/Professional Writing programs. And, at its November 2001 meeting at the University of Canberra, it mooted enlarging its umbrella to include New Zealand institutions, a move encouraged by the conference’s keynote speaker, Bill Manhire, who runs a successful program at Wellington University in New Zealand.

     Thus I approached all of the Australasian ^{note: 2} tertiary institutions with Writing courses, asking the lecturers to encourage their undergraduate and postgraduate students to submit short stories and excerpts from novels for our consideration. The result was gratifying, producing a final selection of 48 stories by students from 22 institutions. They range from traditional ones to experimental ones, like Boehm’s “Virginia (… and John T.),” Hummel’s SMS ^{note: 3} version of a scene from a Shakespeare play, and Russell’s “Venus of Wilendorf.” In my opinion, the stories are of a high quality as well. We have come to expect quality writing from our students, who often win Australia’s major literary awards, like the Vogel and the Miles Franklin awards and those offered by the Premiers of the various states. In fact, one of our graduates (Tim Winton) was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1995 and again this year.

     But how to introduce these student stories to a Nepali audience, especially the Spiny Babbler audience that has such an international outlook?

     The usual way of doing so seems fatuous. Typically, it might note that a line can be drawn from Kathmandu in Nepal through Alice Springs in Australia to the South Island of New Zealand. True, but that is a line equal to a third of the earth’s circumference, and it is radically discontinuous. At one end is Nepal with 23,214,000 (2001 census) people living on 147,181 square kilometres sandwiched between China and India. At the other end is New Zealand with only three and a half million people living on nearly twice that amount of land (270,000 square kilometres), isolated by some 2000 kilometres from Australia and more than 3500 kilometres from Antarctica. In between is Australia, the smallest continent but the largest island, with roughly the same number of people as Nepal but twenty times more land than the other two together. And, yes, both New Zealand and Australia are severely vertically challenged in comparison with Nepal, the former’s Raupehu being 2518 metres high and Australia’s Mount Kosiusko 2228 metres, whereas Nepal’s Himalayan peak at 8848 metres.

     Nepal contrasts more than it compares with Australasia. There are at least half a dozen other dramatic indicators of difference.

     One is the fact that Nepal is officially a Hindu country – the only one in the world – with less than 1% Christian population. Unlike their mother country England, Australia and New Zealand do not have official religions. In fact, mentioning religion in the Australian context can generate embarrassment: if some 68% of Australian people are nominally Christian (more Catholics [27%] than Anglicans [21%]), the number in mainstream denominations has been steadily falling over the last twenty years. In fact, I know fewer Christian churchgoers than my formally worshipping Buddhist, Muslim, Jewish colleagues and friends who respectively constitute only 1.9%, 1.5%, and 0.4% of the Austra-lian population. Thus Nepali readers will find these stories without much reference to religion, churches or clerics – Weiss’s “Garment,” a Jewish story, being an exception. ^{Note: 4}

     Further, Nepali readers will find characters engaged in lifestyles displaying a morality that contrasts greatly with their own more conservative values and practices, a fact perhaps not surprising given that Nepal was a closed country until the 1950s. This is equally true of the male and female characters in the stories written by the men and women represented here: note that 39 of the 48 stories were written by women. Interestingly, some of the stories depicting a hedonistic society also seem to describe characters suffering from anadonia, an inability to feel pleasure (as in Shulz’s “Slipshod” or Breen’s excerpt “from Ante-Up”).

     In this same connection, I should note how strong language is conspicuous in some of these stories. Swear words and references to bodily parts and functions are used like punctuation marks, largely emptied of their primary meanings as well as their subsequent meanings. To take an old, non-Australian example, “zounds,” an English contraction of “God’s wounds” (referring to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ), subsequently became an exclamation signalling surprise or indignation. Most such words in Australia have gone one step further. Either they have become merely intensifiers, or they have become almost entirely phatic, empty of literal meaning, like the maddening “you know” phrase many people use to punctuate their speech. Such language is not restricted to the lower classes, and it seems more common among younger Australians; moreover such language can be used all along the social spectrum if each speaker consciously or unconsciously agrees. Phatic words and phrases are used to open, maintain and close a channel of communication; they are used to establish and nurture a form of bonding. Thus they have a significant meaning and beneficial use that contradicts their apparent vulgarity or offensiveness. They are an important hallmark of current Australian vernacular.

     A second indicator of significant difference is the fact that Nepal is a rural country, with approximately 90% of its people living in the countryside, some 60% speaking ethnic languages. Australia is highly urbanised, with 85% of its people huddled in a few cities, mainly on its 37,000-kilometre coastline; and New Zealand is comparably urban. This has any number of implications, including for Nepal problems of communication, and the unequal distribution of wealth and education. For example, Nepali literacy is about 66% among males, 35% among females, meaning that far fewer than a third of the people in Nepal will be able to read this anthology since most of them will not be literate in English.

     Stories in this collection directly concerned with the travails of Australian women include Ellis’ “Mother of the Abused” and Ratcliff’s “He Will Drive,” each dealing with the abuse of a partner, although neither has a country setting. But other stories are preoccupied with rural areas or the bush or outback, like Mann’s “We Leave at 5,” Parravicini’s “Touching Bottom,” van Loon’s “eternal return” and Whalley’s “Cars.” The bush exerts a powerful pull on the Australian imagination, like a pastoral ideal of the pleasant countryside and the simple life that stands in opposition to urban clutter and stress. The great majority of us don’t live in the bush, and most of us don’t often go there, and hence we do not see its problems, which include drought, soil salinity, poverty, high suicide rates, and a depopulation of our country towns and centres. Thus the pastoral ideal persists.

     A third indication of difference is that Nepal has been forever naturally embedded in Asia – its recorded history goes back at least to Buddha being born in Lumbini in Southern Nepal in about 568 B.C. By contrast, colonised Australia and colonised New Zealand are (respectively) late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century western impositions upon a corner of the Asian world, countries that dispossessed and disenfranchised their indigenous people. (Albertson’s “Seeing the Light” foregrounds an Aboriginal man and Baddiley’s “Traces on the Island” mentions a Maori man more in passing.)

     Although Nepal was never colonised, after the 1814-1816 border war with the East India Company it had to tolerate a British presence, and in the latter half of the twentieth century it has had to try to stare India down. It is one of the poor countries in the world whereas the stories here depict Australians as relatively affluent and self-confident, travelling freely overseas and/or familiar with overseas places. See Aitkens’ “Water Girl,” Baddiley’s “Traces on the Island,” Fowler’s “Sunshowers,” Guineay’s “Chez Jeanne,” Moo’s “(How the Family Bussandri...),” Sumby’s “Blue Sky Red Apples,” Wooller’s “Granny’s Farewell” – indeed, in Neil’s “Every Day” the main character travels to Kathmandu.

     The personal independence of Australians implies Australia’s political independence as well, but John Pilger has pointed out in The Guardian (October 5, 1999) that “Australia has fought the battles of the great imperial powers from the Boxer Rebellion to the Viet Nam war.” If bigger, stronger countries bully smaller, weaker ones, whom those big, strong countries bow to and why they do so tells a great deal about them. For example, while he was Prime Minister (December 1991-March 1996) Paul Keating, a Labor politician and a republican, worked hard to wean Australia from a dependence on the United States and to forge friendships and links in Asia, something he successfully did with President Suharto of Indonesia – indeed, he is said to have addressed the twenty-three-year-older politician as “Bapak” or “father.” Keating’s successor, Prime Minister John Howard, a Liberal ^{Note: 5} politician and a royalist, in 1999 said that he was “Washington’s deputy sheriff” (Pilger). In just three years Howard had restored Australia’s orientation to its earlier position.

     A fourth indicator of difference relates to our monarchies. Nepal has a royal family regarded as a constitutional monarchy. It also has a living goddess revered by both the Hindus and the Buddhists. By contrast, Australia has a vestigial royal family, the Queen of England being our titular head, an office she exercises through her Governor-General in Australia. However, her Governor-General, Archbishop/Doctor Peter Hollingworth, is not the better off for wear, recently having been accused in the press of being soft on a priest in his Queensland diocese who sexually abused a fourteen-year-old girl a decade ago.

     In addition, Nepal’s royal family has a dynamic that makes the British royal family look effete by comparison. Crown Prince Dipendra shot and killed ten members of the royal family on Black Friday, June 1, 2001, including himself, Prince Nirajan, Princess Shruti, his father King Birenda and his mother Queen Aishwarya. (Thankfully, Australia has no political horror story to compare to that mass murder – certainly not the poet Peter Kocan’s feeble 1966 attempt to assassinate Arthur Calwell, the Labor Party leader of the day.) Australians who compare Nepali royal news of the past few years to royal affairs in the United Kingdom have to realise, if they did not do so before, that newspaper stories and magazine articles about Sarah (“Fergie”) Fergusson Duchess of York, Diana Princess of Wales and Camilla Parker Bowles, stories that engage and titillate our prurient interest, belong not to the political columns but to the society pages, if not, indeed, to the comic pages.

     Since Queen Elizabeth was also much concerned with her children’s choice of spouses, an uninformed cynic might say that on Black Friday the Nepali royal family was acting out with real weapons a classic palace melodrama that the British royal family acts out by metaphorical back-stabbing. But that would be to disregard the Nepali context and the significance of the event: the aftermath of Black Friday is changing the course of Nepali history before our eyes, although no one can know what course it will finally take. The Nepali royal family has been integral to the political process, the country since 1990 attempting to combine a constitutional monarchy with a bicameral parliamentary democracy.

     The royalist-republican debate, a hot topic in Australia in the 1990s, came to a head on November 6, 2001 when a referendum asked voters if Australia would support “an act to alter the constitution to establish the Commonwealth of Australia as a republic with the Queen and Governor-General being replaced by a President appointed by a two-thirds majority of the members of the Commonwealth Parliament.” The motion lost by a 56%-44% vote, the basic exercise being problematic for concentrating more on detail than on the principle. Everyone still has an opinion, but no one seems to care so passionately now: the monarchists can have their royal family and the republicans can know that it means little or nothing. None of these stories mentions the British royal family nor, in fact, Australian politicians.

     The fifth indicator is that at this moment there is a bloody Maoist uprising in the streets of Kathmandu and in the Nepali countryside. My West Australian (October 12, 2002) said that King Gyanendra sacked the Nepali government and is running the country by himself. Over preceding weeks we had read about forty-eight policemen and others being murdered in the village of Bihman, and had seen photographs of destruction caused by Maoists in Kathmandu (a vandalised Mercedes, ironically...). Most recently The Bulletin (October 29) reported that “Maoist rebels killed three policemen in an ambush in the Kigali district of Nepal.” If native-born Australians generally have not been much concerned about violence overseas and/or the possibility of it at home, it is instructive to note that the stories here referring to such violence are by overseas-born writers, namely, Matza’s “Dreaming of Shorelines” and Uthay-kumaran’s “Desolation.”

     The sixth is that Australia is changing with respect to race, religion and ethnicity, such that it will be increasingly hard for Australia to continue its identification with the west without also identifying with some of its Southeast Asian neighbours. Harvard Professor Samuel Huntington said in 1993 that “the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic” – ideological/economic considerations are probably the primary source of the current conflict in Nepal, and they are equally probably the primary considerations John Howard has in mind as he stands shoulder to shoulder with George W. Bush. However, Huntington says, “the great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural.” ^{Note: 6} Thus Australia’s accommodation with its Asian neighbours must replace old prejudices with new understandings of our samenesses and differences, a process that need not involve an imperative to increase the former and to decrease the latter – that is the approach of colonialism. The process should affirm our neighbourliness.

     Changes in Australia in relation to race, religion and ethnicity are signalled by a variety of facts and events, including immigration patterns. Colonised by the British whose population was augmented by post-World War II European immigrants, Australia has more recently been the country of choice or the country of necessity for many Asian immigrants – in the 1990s European immigration numbers fell while Asian ones rose. In fact, “around 5,900 illegal immigrants arrived in Australia during 1999-2000, 94% more than that in 1998-99. Of these arrivals, 71% arrived by boat, over four-and-a-half times more than in 1998-99. Since 1989-90, there have been 10,250 people who arrived illegally by boat; 41% of these arrived in 1999-2000.” ^{Note: 7} This is a long-term trend, as indicated by the statistics showing that “In the 1960s the top six countries of birth [in order, the United Kingdom/Ireland, New Zealand, Italy, the Former Yugoslav Republics, Greece and Germany] represented 81% of all settler arrivals to Australia, including 51% born in the United Kingdom and Ireland. In the 1990s, 49% came from the top six countries with only 15% from the United Kingdom and Ireland.”

     Such shifts encourage a broadening of attitudes toward difference, but may also, for some, harden existing prejudices. The impact of such immigration patterns was sufficiently great to cause Queenslander Pauline Hanson to establish her racist One Nation party in 1998, a reflex reminiscent of Arthur Calwell’s unfortunate 1940s dictum in support of the government’s White Australia policy, namely that “two Wongs do not make a white.” Some of Hanson’s fire was subsequently stolen by Prime Minister John Howard, who sensed anti-Asian sentiment, or at least anxiety about an influx of Asian immigrants who might take jobs away from Australians. The most dramatic manifestation of the government’s position was that of Philip Ruddock (Minister for Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs), who on August 26, 2001 refused the Norwegian ship MN Tampa permission to enter Australian waters with its 460 mainly Afghans asylum-seekers – the Tampa had rescued them when the Indonesian boat they were on sank north of Christmas Island. John Howard remonstrated even louder with Indonesia’s President Megawati Sukarnoputri to control boats sailing with refugees from Indonesia to Australia. Ellson’s “The Lost Servicemen of Christmas Island” makes a subtle, telling reference to the Tampa.

     Australia’s traditional isolationism, however, has been dealt a blow by two key events. The first occurred a fortnight after the Tampa fiasco, on September 11, 2001, when the attack on the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City astonished the world by showing that its strongest, if not its biggest country, could be dropped to its knees by a handful of fanatics armed only with Stanley knives. Previously, Australians might have thought of racial conflict as, say, an African issue (disregarding white-Aboriginal conflict in Australia), of religious war as an Irish issue, of ethnic fighting as something that took place in Eastern Europe. And they were not inclined to be interventionist with respect to such conflicts. Thus, not all Australians were happy about Australia’s subsequently sending its Special Air Services commando troops to war in Afghanistan. That seemed to have more to do with currying favour with the United States rather than with supporting one faction over another for geopolitical reasons relevant to Australia’s own situation – in June of 2002 Howard was still insisting that “Australia is America’s best friend...” ^{Note: 8}

     Finally, as if by a quick twist of the kaleidoscope, on October 14 our view of the whole world and its relationships was changed by a terrorist attack on the Sari Club in Bali, an island 1.6 kilometres east of Java, in Indonesia. Allegedly targeting westerners, the bombing left nearly 200 people dead or missing, about half of them Australians. Every Australian seemed to know a person who was injured, killed or missing or to know someone else who knew one – for example, a Curtin University student was injured, and another is still missing. For Australians, that event made racial/religious/ethnic conflict seem universal, ubiquitous. As John Howard said, “this is not a problem confined to America or the Middle East or Europe – it’s right on our doorstep” (The Bulletin, October 22: 13).

     With that event, the United States was removed from the equation and the conflicted world’s intractable politics were suddenly a two-and-a-half hour, 1700-kilometre Qantas flight from Darwin. For the rest of the month Indonesian and Australian police, soldiers, doctors, scientists and technicians worked together to care for the injured, to identify the dead, to examine the crime scene and to pursue the terrorist killers. John Howard’s government’s was working closely with Indonesia’s Megawati Sukarnoputri in a way he probably could never have imagined. The strain soon started to show, with President Megawati being slow to authorise the questioning of Abu Bakar Bashir, a Muslim cleric thought to be the leader of Jemaah Islamiyah (a group sympathetic to Osama bin Laden), despite the fact that al-Quaeda from the beginning was suspected of being responsible for the bombing in Bali. Before the end of the month, Megawati was arguing for travel bans to be lifted because they were hurting Indonesia’s tourism business. By then, Howard was apparently frustrated: as America’s deputy sheriff, he should have been pursuing al-Quaeda, but he could not do so without further alienating the President of Indonesia, his most powerful neighbour. He was experiencing conflict based on cultural grounds, as America’s Islamic enemy killed Australians in a Muslim state halfway around the world.

***

     What might Nepali readers expect from a collection of stories from these writers currently studying in Australasian Writing courses? Now that New Zealand and (especially) Australia are caught between the anger, fear, frustration, hatred, intolerance and prejudice pent-up at home and blown-out overseas, we can expect that the writers in this anthology will comparably reach out to the world from their perspective that increasingly understands the dominating source of our conflict to be cultural. They are, in Walsh’s terms, full of ideas and passions which can show us how to avoid being a political neuter and to move toward transcending narrow notions of nationalism. ^{Note: 9}

***

     I am grateful for three affiliations that have made this collection possible, namely, my membership of the PEN Perth Centre, my position in the AAWP, and my relation to the Creative Writing program at Curtin University. I would specially like to thank Kelly Pilgrim (a graduate student) who worked heroically with me, and Sue Grey-Smith who provided the cover illustration for the collection. And also Para Limbu of Spiny Babbler who was always patient and understanding when it might have seemed to her that we were not doing any work whatsoever.

     Mobilising students of Creative Writing can be like trying to herd cats, but this time it was easy for they were wonderfully responsive and compliant: this anthology could not have happened without them, and I thank them for making it possible. I am sorry that I could not mention all of their names/stories in this introduction; and I apologise if I have wrongly characterised any of their stories. Those stories appear alphabetically by university, from Adelaide to Wollongong.

     Teaching Creative Writing is not rocket science: teaching Creative Writing is much harder than that. Lecturers in Creative Writing come from different backgrounds, have various attitudes and theories, use a disparate – and sometimes desperate! – range of techniques to encourage, inspire, and direct our students. Through their caring passionately about writing and about their students, we are the beneficiaries of their students’ genuinely magical acts of the human imagination.