ABSTRACT
Australia in the 1960s had a notably conservative literary reputation, especially in poetry, where the neo-Augustan Formalism of A. D. Hope held sway. Literary life on Hydra, presided over by George Johnston and Charmian Clift as honorary "parents" of an assortment of younger bohemians, was a forum for Australian writers to flourish in an expatriate environment. Although individual bohemian figures stood out against this decorous, traditionalist background—Harry Hooton was a bohemian anarchist who had connections to American anti-establishment figures such as Tuli Kupferberg—they were few. The Sydney neighborhood of Balmain was the epicenter of the Australian Beat influence. Though, for instance, the Balmain scene was not primarily political in its activities, certainly there was a sympathy of mood between the countercultural activity there and the Whitlam government. In 1999, Bruce Russell, a Western Australian writer who had come to fiction only in his fifties, published The Chelsea Manifesto.
