‘Is the creative writing program’, Mark McGurl archly wonders in his landmark work of literary history The Program Era (2009), ‘an exceptionally American phenomenon?’ As he is well aware, the last half-century has seen the establishment of such programs throughout and beyond the anglosphere. If creative writing ever was an exceptionally American phenomenon, then that exception has now become the rule, in the form of a system of institutions that have shaped the careers of countless writers around the globe. This dissertation offers the first sustained consideration of how the rise of creative writing has defined the production of literary fiction in a hitherto unexamined national context: Australia. Its central contention, advanced implicitly and explicitly throughout, is that this process of institutionalization has reshaped Australian literary production in ways so diverse that an initial study of this period can only begin to grasp them. By mapping out half a century of Australian literary activity in and around the creative writing classroom, it contradicts speculative accounts of the discipline’s internationalisation that would see it as synonymous with the spread of aesthetic and ideological conformity with a wealth of evidence to the contrary.

Beginning with the novelist Thea Astley, who from 1968 preached her practice at Macquarie University, its first chapter shows how her novel The Acolyte (1972) rewrites the Nobel Laureate Patrick White’s The Vivisector (1970) on terms that speak to her newfound employment. This line of influence is extended through to the writer Kate Grenville, whose acclaimed historical novel The Secret River (2005) was shaped by her time as a doctoral student in creative writing at the University of Technology Sydney and her reading of Astley’s A Kindness Cup (1974). The second section trades the continuity of influence for an opposition between truth and lies – between the minimalist inner landscapes of Gerald Murnane and the maximalist tall tales of Peter Carey – through which we can follow opposed aesthetic responses to the question of fictionality, one which underpins all creative writing instruction. The third section moves geographically west, to the Western Australian Institute of Technology, where Tim Winton launched his career as an undergraduate wunderkind in the classes of the prolific Elizabeth Jolley: this section attends to the work of novelists who have actively ‘dropped out’ of the educational system and sought in various ways to distance their fiction from it, an alternative genealogy it also tracks through the firing and flourishing of Winton’s friend and mentor, the inimitably candid Helen Garner. Finally, its fourth section returns to historical fiction with the Noongar novelist Kim Scott’s That Deadman Dance (2010), which he wrote as part of his doctorate at the University of Western Australia, as an illustration of the aesthetic management of research: it concludes by approaching the question of disciplinarity in Waanyi writer Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book (2013) and her collective memoir Tracker (2017), which she declares is a blueprint for building an independent, Aboriginal-controlled university.