Michael Wilding’s Wild Bleak Bohemia

Abstract

This essay discusses the various aspects of Michael Wilding’s work as an academic, creative writer, teacher, publisher and editor in terms of the ecological relationships he is able to maintain in these areas. Such relationships may be understood in terms of his attempts to develop co-operative relationships with others. The tone of the essay is as much informal as it is formal; spoken as it is written; personal as it is detached. The meaning of any communicative action is as much a matter of form as it is of content. In discussing his attraction to, and then turn away from, postmodernism, the argument is made that such a return to the ideas of realism seems a natural thing. But, as he is about to publish a documentary on the early literary scene in the Australian colonies as Wild Bleak Bohemia, the question is asked: have recent developments in the Australian literary scene created such another apparently bleak scene for the creative writer, academic, publisher and teacher? Wilding’s experience may have much to teach those who seem perplexed by the current state of literary life, not only in Australia, but in their own environments.