Vale Brian Kiernan, 1937–2024

Brian Kiernan, who died on March 1, was a major figure in the development of Australian literary studies, and of the teaching of Australian literature in the university. He was one of a group of scholars who crucially contributed to the acceptance of Australian literature as a recognised academic discipline from the 1960s onwards.

Born in Melbourne on July 24, 1937, he was a student at Xavier College. His reminiscence of his years there that he contributed to a series of articles on schooldays in Quadrant (January 1969) resulted in the school’s cancelling him from the old boys’ register.

He studied English literature at the University of Melbourne, where he completed his BA, Dip Ed and MA. He spent some time in Italy teaching English to the Italian Air Force, and always maintained connections with the country; his wife studied Italian at the University of Sydney and lectured in it both there and at Melbourne University. His cousin, the novelist and journalist Desmond O’Grady, was for some years Vatican correspondent of the Sydney Morning Herald. After a period lecturing in literature at Swinburne College of Technology, in 1972 he was appointed to a lectureship in English at the University of Sydney, where he taught English, American and Australian literature until his retirement, having been made Associate Professor in 1987.

His first book, Images of Society and Nature: Seven Essays on Australian Novels (1971) took issue with what critics like A.A. Phillips had privileged as the dominant tradition in Australian fiction with an emphasis not on the interior life of the individual but on his activities as a social being (particularly his work experiences), a working-class viewpoint, and the employment of a colloquial idiom:

One good reason for doubting the importance placed on the “Lawson-Furphy tradition” is that none of its exponents has been able to suggest more than superficial resemblances between its presumed founders. Lawson and Furphy have little in common except similar social material; the uses they make of it are not only quite different, they are of a different order.

In this book he offered readings of what he considered to be “the most original and imaginative of Australian novels” by Joseph Furphy, Henry Handel Richardson, Christina Stead, Xavier Herbert, Patrick White and Thomas Keneally. It was followed by a monograph, Criticism (1974), examining the various critical approaches to Australian literature. Laurie Hergenhan noted, “His critical approach is always flexible, fluent and accessible as he turns over the possibilities, weighing the cosmopolitan context—of which no critic in the field has a wider knowledge—against the local.”

Kiernan’s reassessment of the Lawson “tradition” did not involve a dismissal of Lawson’s actual work. In 1976 Hergenhan invited him to edit a selection of Lawson’s writing for the University of Queensland Press’s new series of Portable Australian Authors. It became the best-selling title in the series. Kiernan was later involved in other major projects on Lawson, editing The Essential Henry Lawson (1982) and introducing the two volumes of Henry Lawson: Complete Works edited by Leonard Cronin (1984).

During the late 1960s and early 1970 Kiernan was regularly reviewing new Australian fiction in the press and the magazines. He wrote a positive review of Frank Moorhouse’s first book, and this led to Moorhouse’s inviting him to join the editorial board of the innovative short story magazine Tabloid Story in 1972. He was appointed as the Melbourne editor; his move to Balmain disconcerted Moorhouse. “How appropriate you live in Dock Road, since you’re always on trial,” he told him—interstate visitors and outsiders were always on trial for Frank. I drew on the various taunts and tensions of this time to write The Short Story Embassy: A Novel. Brian said on reading it, “I felt myself more deeply drawn in the further I read.” He bore no ill will, and he later wrote about it in the festschrift he and David Brooks edited for me, Running Wild.

Meanwhile Tabloid Story, which was designed as a short story supplement to existing magazines, was having difficulty finding any hosts that would take it. Brian recalled: 

As acting editor, while the others roved, I became slowly entombed by the mounting walls of paper—fresh manuscripts, manuscripts to be returned, letters from writers whose stories had been accepted but not yet published. Feelers put out to possible new hosts encountered nothing. Even apparently firm agreements appeared to be jinxed. Then at the lowest moment, the editor of The Bulletin rang and asked if the editors would be interested in placing an issue and would like to discuss it over lunch at their office. The Bulletin and a free lunch! The Bulletin had been the vehicle for a generation of writers immediately before and after Federation who had wanted to make it new in terms of their experience and to break through the prevailing conventions—Henry Lawson, Barbara Baynton, Edward Dyson, Steele Rudd … For myself as acting editor, this was an historically symbolic opportunity to present the new fiction of the seventies in the magazine that had carried the new fiction of the nineties. The sense of some symmetry in time, of an appointment with history, was also felt by roving editor Moorhouse, who roved back at this time. Much earlier in his career, Frank had been a copy boy in the Telegraph building, and now had satisfaction in recalling those times with senior management and writers over coffee and liqueurs in Sir Frank Packer’s private dining room. We ran Murray Bail’s “The Drover’s Wife” as the lead story. My accompanying note that The Bulletin had published Lawson’s story of the same title in 1892 was subbed out; the press missed covering our meeting with history.

Editing Tabloid Story and living in Balmain, he soon became an active member of the literary community thriving there, and the Sydney Morning Herald featured Brian and his wife in its survey of the glitterati. In 1977 he edited the influential short story anthology The Most Beautiful Lies, featuring fiction by Murray Bail, Peter Carey, Morris Lurie, Frank Moorhouse and myself. Four were Balmain residents at the time. As for Lurie, Brian had lived next door in Melbourne to the original on whom Lurie’s character Rappaport was based.

Brian was one of those literary critics who moved happily between the worlds of academia, writing and journalism. Publishers’ lunches may have been going out of fashion, certainly as far as our publishers went, but Brian maintained the tradition of the literary lunch. A photograph from his fiftieth birthday which I drew on for the cover of a novel, Superfluous Men, shows him at a characteristic occasion—with David Williamson, Frank Moorhouse, Don Anderson, Dale Atrens and myself. Barry Oakley, Luke Slattery, Ken Stewart and Laurie Hergenhan were other regulars. And he was a welcoming host to visiting scholars and writers from the United States, Britain and China.

In 1976 he was visiting fellow in American literature at Yale University. He lectured widely on Australian literature in France, Italy, Denmark, Britain and China. He was involved in teaching the first visiting group of Chinese scholars studying Australian literature at Sydney University in the 1980s, and his editorial and critical work had a strong influence on the development of Australian studies in China.

In 1980 his pioneering study of Patrick White’s fiction appeared, and for a number of years Brian taught a seminar on White’s fiction, until a purge of dead white males ended it. It was followed by another major work in 1990, his biography of David Williamson, with whom he had taught at Swinburne in the 1960s. A collection of his essays, Studies in Australian Literary History, appeared in 1997. During the 1990s he contributed the Australian literature component to the Modern Humanities Research Association’s annual bibliography in the UK.

Kiernan was a founding member of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, and for many years he was its president. He was Australian representative for the American Association of Australian Studies and was honoured by a festschrift of tributes in its journal Antipodes in 2008. And he was a long-time committee member of the New South Wales Writers’ Centre.

He is survived by his wife Suzanne and his daughter Teresa. His son Michael predeceased him.

Michael Wilding’s most recent book is the pair of crime novels Find Me My Enemies and Cover Story, published in one volume by Arcadia in 2022