In 2009 we are, I believe, in a very different period from the 1980s, when public support for the humanities could still be taken for granted, and when critics were busy questioning canonicity and practising critique. This year I was unable to teach Patrick White’s autobiography, Flaws in the Glass, and his last great novel, The Twyborn Affair, to honours students at the University of Sydney because both are out of print. In the September issue of ABR, Tony Hassall, whose book Strange Country (1986) did so much to champion the work of Randolph Stow, lamented the almost complete decline of Stow’s contemporary reputation.

Clearly, present times require an active defence of Australian literature – as a corpus of valued primary texts; as an ongoing disciplinary formation – and exploration of other, more positive ways of approaching literature. Earlier this year, at the launch of Bernadette Brennan’s illuminating new book on the novels of Brian Castro, I commented that it is good to see Australian critics turning back from critique to criticism. I like the term ‘curatorship’ as a way of grasping our function now: the assumption that literary academics have a responsibility as custodians of their discipline and its canons to instil both a capacity for critical thinking and what Pat Buckridge has called an appreciation of literature. In thinking in terms of a curatorial role, I mean to suggest that we need to see ourselves not always, or not just, as critics in a negative sense but also as advocates for Australian literature, and ways of teaching and writing positively about it in the same way that an art gallery is responsible for exhibiting and promoting informed, intelligent discussion about its paintings.

One small way I have been able to express this view has been through my general editorship, with Bruce Bennett, of Sydney University Press’s new Australian Classics Library. The series is designed to make classic texts of Australian literature more widely available for the secondary and undergraduate university classroom, and to the general reader, by using print-on-demand technology. Our selection is drawn from the list of out-of-print works already digitised by SETIS, the Sydney Electronic Text and Image Service. Supported by funding from Copyright Agency Limited (CAL), each text in the series is accompanied by a fresh scholarly introduction and a basic editorial apparatus – a biographical essay and select bibliography – drawn from the resources of AustLit, the online database for Australian literature.

Sydney University Press has now launched a first tranche of twelve titles in this series. They are Jessica Anderson’s The Commandant (introduced by Delys Bird), Barbara Baynton’s Bush Studies (Susan Sheridan), Martin Boyd’s A Difficult Young Man (Susan Lever), Rosa Cappiello’s Oh Lucky Country (Nicole Moore and Gaetano Rando), C.J. Dennis’s The Moods of Ginger Mick (Philip Butterss), Ernest Favenc’s Tales of the Austral Tropics (Cheryl Taylor), William Lane’s The Working Man’s Paradise (Andrew McCann), Henry Lawson’s Joe Wilson and His Mates (Christopher Lee), Gerald Murnane’s Inland (Nicholas Birns), A.B. ‘Banjo’ Paterson’s The Man From Snowy River and Other Verses (Peter Kirkpatrick), Henry Handel Richardson’s Maurice Guest (Clive Probyn and Bruce Steele) and Price Warung’s Tales of the Early Days (Laurie Hergenhan).

It is fortuitous that our launch of the Australian Classics Library coincides with the publication in May this year of the framing paper for the National Secondary Curriculum in English, which allocates a strong place to Australian literature. Indeed, the success of the series will largely be determined by the extent to which its titles are adopted as textbooks. The current debate about a national curriculum returned us to some first principles. Do schools and universities have a responsibility to teach Australian literature? If they do, what is the relationship between Australian literature and the idea of the nation?

Early attempts to promote Australian literature were bound up with cultural nationalism, and it remains the bedrock of the discipline. In the 1920s, Nettie and Vance Palmer, for example, worried that Australians were being overwhelmed by British and American culture. They wanted to see a distinctive Australian identity and believed this would be expressed in literature, especially the novel. Looking back to Federation, Nettie Palmer wrote in Modern Australian Literature (1924): ‘Perhaps the chief possession of Australian writers in the year 1901 was this consciousness of nationhood … What [Australia] was to mean … lay in the hands of her writers, above all, to discover.’

But the connection between literature and national consciousness is never straightforward. Two of the canonical writers of this period, Lawson and Paterson, expressed quite different attitudes to the idea of Australia: put simply, Lawson’s view was dark and pessimistic, Paterson’s romantic and full of hope, and they argued these different points of view in their famous debate in the Sydney Bulletin.

Not only are canonical writers often critical of the nation, but the canon as it developed was internally conflicted. There has always been debate about what kinds of writers should be included in the canon and which excluded from it, and the process of canonical formation thrives on disagreement. When we teach classic texts, we also teach the history of this formation, which is a history of contested values. Put simply, the twentieth-century canon comprised authors who could broadly be described as ‘national’ writers, such as Lawson and Paterson, migrant or ethnic writers such as Cappiello, and still others who were ‘international’ or ‘cosmopolitan’ writers – such as Richardson, Boyd and Christina Stead – who looked overseas for their inspiration, travelled extensively abroad and sometimes became expatriates.

The canon, then, is not set in stone. It is not so much a thing as a process, a series of ongoing arguments that reflect different views about what it means to be an Australian writer. Most recently, it has opened spectacularly to include indigenous writers such as Kim Scott and Alexis Wright. And the classic texts of Australian literature do not have a simple relationship to the nation: they are volatile, unpredictable works of art that generate a range of views on issues such as the way women and migrants are treated in Australia, and white Australia’s treatment of Aboriginal people and the environment. This is an argument, then, for teaching classic Australian works, but also for a more complex understanding of what the canon is than we have seen in recent public discussion. It is important to teach the canon because of the richness of its individual works and because the history of debates around the canon provides a rich social history of Australia.

Australian literature has always had to fight for its place in the curriculum. Now and in the future it will require as much advocacy as it has at any other time in its history. We have a responsibility as custodians of the discipline and its canons to instil both a capacity for critical thinking and an appreciation of literature. This is not to say that Australian classics should be taught uncritically or unhistorically, but we must introduce them to new generations of readers.

To date, twelve titles are available in the Australian Classics Library. For full information and purchase details, contact the Sydney University Press e-store: www.sup.usyd.edu.au. Retail prices range from $19.95 to $40.00.