Tales from New England

In August 2003 I addressed the Armidale and District Historical Society on a topic which has been a research focus for me for several years and also because my book of the same name is scheduled to appear in 2004. In a sense I have been aware of the need for such a project ever since many general readers in the southern half of the Northern Tablelands of New South Wales began to identify with or define various texts somewhat loosely as 'New England Tales'. These included Judith Wright's "The Generations of Men" (1959), the then more recent fictional writings of 'David Forrest', by that time a member of the Department of History at the University of New England, and those in part locally set novels of the somewhat younger Thomas Keneally (b.1935), who was long - and rightly - regarded as a New Englander. I had by then also myself focussed quite sharply on the rich Armidale cultural and biographical details of the period 1884-1885, when the novelist Rolf Boldrewood/ Police Magistrate Thomas Browne wrote and served locally. And so a pattern of genres/ types of New England writing and the more relevant authors, their preferred modes of writing and their biographical details began to form slowly for me into some sort of order.