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"In this intensely personal and memorable book, [one very much 'sui generis'], Judith Wright, the well-known Australian poet, tells the story of her forebears in Australia, a family who were pioneers of the wine-growing and cattle-raising industries in New South Wales and in Queensland. ... The names, dates and events are factual and are based on diaries, letters and personal reminiscences, but the author has given us something more than a conventional biography." (In her then Publisher's initial Book Release, as in 1959.) As the cited references must indicate, 'The Generations of Men' was to be seen - as it still is - by all its readers - as, firstly, as an historical prose text by a nationally well-known poet, but then as an infinitely complex entity, since it partakes of a series of significant literary genres ( - these now craftily melled - ) and because it contains harrowing personal matter which is not usually the core material of a sweeping and nation-preparing chronicle ; yet much of this dynastic family is to be found both here and elsewhere - as contemplating, Hesiod-like, on the minutiae of its poignantly evoked eastern Australian settled generations' 'works and days'. |
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