In human reckoning, Golden Ages are always already in the past. The Greek poet Hesiod, in Works and Days, posited Five Ages of Mankind: Golden, Silver, Bronze, Heroic and Iron (Ovid made do with four). Writing in the Romantic period, Thomas Love Peacock (author of such now almost forgotten novels as Nightmare Abbey, 1818) defined The Four Ages of Poetry (1820) in which their order was Iron, Gold, Silver and Bronze. To the Golden Age, in their archaic greatness, belonged Homer and Aeschylus. The Silver Age, following it, was less original, but nevertheless ‘the age of civilised life’. The main issue of Peacock’s thesis was the famous response that he elicited from his friend Shelley—Defence of Poetry (1821).

Let us take a long step and a deep breath: move to prose from poetry, and to Australia in the 1940s, there to find four of the greatest of local novelists, if at different stages of their careers. Henry Handel Richardson died in 1946. Her last work was the posthumously published autobiography, Myself When Young (1948). Her trilogy, The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, appeared as single volume in 1930. In the year of Richardson’s death, Martin Boyd’s finest novel, Lucinda Brayford, was published. His Langton tetralogy and unfictionalised autobiographies lay ahead, before a lonely, expatriate death in Rome in 1972. Although she would write on for decades, Christina Stead’s most remarkable novels also appeared in the 1940s: The Man who Loved Children (1940) and For Love Alone (1944). Finally, Patrick White completed his first great novel, The Aunt’s Story, while on the boat that took him back to Australia in 1948.