This chapter examines the networks and institutions that fostered the production of explicitly ‘literary’ novels in Australia during the late twentieth century. It considers how economic changes to the publishing industry since 1980 affected the way that novels were produced and received. While literary novels were primarily produced by major trade publishers and university presses in the 1980s and early 1990s, they have increasingly been published by small presses. Literary novels arguably now have less influence within the larger literary field, but remain important within prestigious networks and institutions. The chapter then examines the careers of two authors – Gerald Murnane and David Malouf – who both began writing during the ‘conglomerate era’ and have continued to publish during the ‘age of Amazon’. While both authors have had national and international literary success, this success has relied on different institutions and networks. Malouf has had a broad success, in part because his works have been enthusiastically taken up in secondary and tertiary educational settings, whereas Murnane has relied on a more diffuse network of publishers and reviewers interested in experimental forms of writing.

Where in the nineteenth century the representation of Aboriginal characters and things was occasional and marginal in the Australian novel, the twentieth century saw a new attention to Aboriginal characters. The twentieth century saw Australia’s foundation in 1901 marred by the emergence of the White Australia policy, which excluded migrants of colour and indirectly affected Aboriginal policy. So would begin a vexed erotics of miscegenation. In her short fiction, Katharine Susannah Prichard would deal with cross-race relations in northern Australia before producing her influential novel Coonardoo in 1929. Nearly a decade later, Xavier Herbert published Capricornia (1938), an epic northern Australian novel concerned with assimilation. Each of these novels is concerned with the field of discursive Aboriginality as a fantasy space for negotiations of appropriate whiteness and identity, as is Eleanor Dark’s Timeless Land trilogy (1941–53) and even works by Patrick White such as Voss (1957) and A Fringe of Leaves (1976), to finally mark the beginning of what has been called post-Mabo fiction in David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon (1993). This chapter tracks these examples of Aboriginal as represented in Australian novels and more ‘minor’ ones along the way.

David Malouf and Christos Tsiolkas represent very different generations of gay men with migrant backgrounds, but both use the novel form as a way of articulating gay experience. Malouf, born 1934, started out as a poet, and continued to publish poetry for his entire career. His work is exquisitely styled and highly verbally self-conscious. As opposed to the meditative, scholarly Malouf, Tsiolkas, born 1965, is far grittier and rancorous in his approach. Loaded (1995) details a world of drug use and casual sex, whereas Dead Europe (2005) overturns the traditional Australian nostalgia for and even pretention about continental Europe by examining its sordid post-Cold War reality. Though Malouf and Tsiolkas are very different writers, their concern with aesthetics, history, and what it might be to live in a community make their juxtaposition not just heuristic but inevitable. This chapter explores one convergence between them: their queering of mateship.