The Chantic Bird is the confession of a teenage anarchist, who combines a contempt for contemporary society with a great tenderness and warmth for his younger siblings and for Bee, the girl who looks after them. The first of David Ireland's masterful novels, The Chantic Bird contains the same characteristic indictment of the bovine mindlessness of collective humanity, and the home-owning wage slaves. This edition of The Chantic Bird comes with a new introduction by Geordie Williamson. David Ireland was born in 1927 in south-western Sydney. He lived in many places and worked at many jobs, including greenskeeper, factory hand, and for an extended period in an oil refinery, before he became a full-time writer. His first novel, The Chantic Bird, was published in 1968. In the next decade he published five further novels, three of which won the Miles Franklin Award: The Unknown Industrial Prisoner, The Glass Canoe and A Woman of the Future. David Ireland was made a member of the Order of Australia in 1981. In 1985 he received the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal for his novel Archimedes and the Seagull. 'One of the most remarkable novels - first, fifth or fifteenth - to appear on the scene for many a long day...Compassionate and pitiless, savage and sad, ironic and naive, horrifying and farcical.' Sydney Morning Herald 'Gloriously and savagely comic.' Adelaide Advertiser

" ... Documents the history and development of [Post-colonial literatures in English, together with English and American literature] and includes original research relating to the literatures of some 50 countries and territories. In more than 1,600 entries written by more than 600 internationally recognized scholars, it explores the effect of the colonial and post-colonial experience on literatures in English worldwide.

This book is an original contribution to literary geography and commentaries on the work of David Ireland. It plots the relationship between the spaces and places of 1970s Australian capitalism as it evolves through Ireland’s 1971 Miles Franklin prize-winning novel The Unknown Industrial Prisoner. In particular, the book theorises the relationship between space and place in literature through two highly innovative arguments: a focus on the spatial unconscious as a means to assess and track the spatiality of capitalism in the novel form; and the articulation of a regime of space through the perceived, conceived and lived constitution of space. Drawing together concepts from radical geography and structural Marxist literary theory, it explores the dominance of the regime of abstract space in the Australian context. The text also examines the nature and possibilities of place-based strategies of resistance, and concludes by suggesting opportunities for future research and plotting the ways in which The Unknown Industrial Prisoner continues to speak to contemporary Australia.

Alarmed by the increasingly marginal status of Australian literature in the academy, Williamson has set out to reintroduce us to those key writers whose works we may have forgotten or missed altogether. His focus is on fiction that gives pleasure, and he is ardent in defence of books that for whatever reason sit uneasily in the present moment.