Bush Studies is famous for its stark realism—for not romanticising bush life, instead showing all its bleakness and harshness.
Economic of style, influenced by the great nineteenth-century Russian novelists, Barbara Baynton’s short-story collection presents the Australian bush as dangerous and isolating for the women who inhabit it.
‘The terror Baynton evokes,’ Helen Garner writes in her introduction to the book, ‘is elemental, sexual, unabashedly female.’
Barbara Baynton was born in the Hunter Valley town of Scone, New South Wales, in 1857. In the 1890s, financially secure from her marriage to the retired surgeon Thomas Baynton, she began writing short stories, poetry and articles for the Bulletin. Her first tale, ‘The Tramp’, was published in 1896.
After failing to find an Australian publisher for her collection of six short stories, she visited London and in 1902 Duckworth published Bush Studies. Human Toll, a novel, appeared in 1907; Cobbers, which combined Bush Studies with two new stories, was published in 1917.
Full bio and photo courtesy of Text Publishing
So precise, so complete, with such insight into detail and such force of statement, it ranks with the masterpieces of realism in any language.
BulletinAuthor Barbara Baynton
Publisher Text Publishing
Date of Publication 1902
ISBN 9781922079497
Category Short Stories
5475724
240
