Anyone about? Driving through the Outback. Photograph: Dave G Houser/Corbis
I'd like to reveal to you, exclusively, the fact that some Australian literature is really good. Amazing, eh? And there you were thinking it was just Clive James scribbling away, while the country's 20,999,998 other lucky residents were either down on the beach drinking Castlemaine XXXX and tossing their surfboards on the barbie, or, for reasons best known to themselves, eating meat pies in Shepherd's Bush.
Or maybe you weren't. It doesn't take a genius to work out that a country the size of Australia will have a rich literary scene - after all, it's got the international plaudits to prove it. Patrick White's complex, bitter portrayals of his homeland won him the Nobel prize for literature, and if you include JM Coetzee (born in South Africa, now an Australian citizen) there have been four Australian Booker winners: Thomas Keneally and DBC Pierre both have one, and Peter Carey's got two.
But when it comes to getting noticed in the UK, Australian literature suffers from the same problem as writing from, say, Canada or India: it isn't British or American. Prizes mean press coverage, so authors such as Carey are high-profile in the UK, but Australia's awardless authors are routinely neglected in the same way as other non-American foreigners. Even literary veterans such as David Malouf (Booker-shortlisted for Remembering Babylon) and Peter Goldsworthy (pick up a copy of Three Dog Night, you won't regret it) get very little British attention.
But while the UK press might not be doing a lot for Antipodean fiction, there is a brilliant do-it-yourself solution in the shape of Black Inc's annual Best Australian Stories.
As I've mentioned before, I'm normally dubious about short story collections, but the beauty of this selection is its variety. Contributors range from stalwarts (Goldsworthy and Malouf again) to authors who've never before appeared outside of literary magazines. For me, some of these stories are the best, especially Barry Cooper's 9.7 Milligrams of Heaven: three-and-a-half pages of invective from the perspective of a well-read young indigenous Australian who's more at home with a packet of high-strength codeine tablets than either his family or white society. Nam Le's tale of a Vietnamese-Australian writer struggling with the current fashion for "ethnic lit" provides a thoughtful counterpoint to some of the more earnest contributions to Granta's Young American Novelists 2007. And after reading his muscular tale of Melbourne schoolboys, I can't wait for Robert Williams to finish the novel his biog says he's working on.
But there are also treats from established Australian writers who get no coverage in the UK at all. Ryan O'Neill's pensive July the Firsts is one of the most elegant tales of regret I've read; I'm even prepared to brave some more short story collections (Six Tenses and A Famine in Newcastle) to get to more. Carmel Bird's story of spoiled, bored rich schoolgirls sent me straight to Amazon in search of her novel The White Garden.
Inevitably, there are a few duds - I could have done without Shane Maloney's facile rejigging of Little Red Riding Hood. But apart from anything else it's just a rare luxury to be able to browse all these Australian authors. Back issues, here I come.
