The previous chapter ended with the 1890s, described by Martyn Lyons as ‘perhaps the most mythologised decade in Australian cultural history’. He identifies the ‘generation of the 1950s [as] largely responsible for idealising the 1890s, as intellectuals searched nostalgically for roots that might sustain a post-war resurgence of Australian literary culture’. This generation, he argues, imagined the 1890s

This understanding of the 1890s has been widely recognised and critiqued – or as Lyons puts it, ‘thoroughly contested’ and ‘severely punctured’ – by the generation that followed that of the 1950s, commonly referred to as ‘baby boomers’. Indeed, one could argue that the major movements in literary studies spearheaded by this generation since the 1970s – Marxism, feminism and post-colonialism – have been articulated in the Australian context as a series of challenges precisely to this 1950s definition of ‘Australian literature’, and the literary nationalism underpinning it.