Gangaroo
Encyclopedia
Gangaroo is the Australian imprint
Imprint
In the publishing industry, an imprint can mean several different things:* As a piece of bibliographic information about a book, it refers to the name and address of the book's publisher and its date of publication as given at the foot or on the verso of its title page.* It can mean a trade name...

 of Austrian publisher Gangan Verlag.

History

In 1989 Gerald Ganglbauer
Gerald Ganglbauer
Gerald Ganglbauer is an Austrian Australian publisher diagnosed with Parkinson's disease at the age of 48 years. Since then he has been an ambassador for Parkinson's support groups.- Life :...

, a young Austrian publisher, arrived in Australia and started collecting Australian short stories
Short Stories
Short Stories may refer to:*A plural for Short story*Short Stories , an American pulp magazine published from 1890-1959*Short Stories, a 1954 collection by O. E...

, experimental prose, and poetry
Poetry
Poetry is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning...

. Back then Australian literature
Australian literature
Australian literature is the written or literary work produced in the area or by the people of the Commonwealth of Australia and its preceding colonies. During its early western history, Australia was a collection of British colonies, therefore, its literary tradition begins with and is linked to...

 was largely unknown in German speaking countries, and he had the ambition to change that with Gangaroo (a coinage of the words Ganglbauer and kangaroo), the imprint of now Sydney based small press Gangan Books Austr(al)ia. Together with Bernard Cohen
Bernard Cohen (Australian author)
Bernard Cohen is an Australian writer, the author of four novels and a children's picture book.- Life :Cohen was sub-editor for Editions Review, editor for Gangaroo, and his short stories have been widely anthologised, including in the Penguin Century of Australian Stories, Best Australian Stories...

, Rudi Krausmann
Rudi Krausmann
Rudi Krausmann is an Austrian born Australian playwright and poet.- Life :Rudi Krausmann studied Economics in Vienna and worked as a journalist for the Austrian newspaper, Salzburger Nachrichten...

 and Michael Wilding
Michael Wilding (writer)
Michael Wilding is an Australian writer and academic in Sydney.- Life :Michael Wilding, novelist and critic, was born in Worcester UK and read English at Oxford...

, he created The OZlit Collection in three volumes: Vol. 1: Air Mail from Down Under (Short Stories, translated into German), Vol. 2: Malevolent Fiction, was not published in print, but online (in parts) and Vol. 3: Made in Australia (Poetry, bilingual English/German).

However, in spite of having received good reviews in Germany as well as in Australia, sales were slow, and not not even a grant from the Australia Council could help the publisher to break even, which put an end to The OZlit Collection in print. As a consequence, new titles were published online since 1996.

Volume 1

  • Rudi Krausmann
    Rudi Krausmann
    Rudi Krausmann is an Austrian born Australian playwright and poet.- Life :Rudi Krausmann studied Economics in Vienna and worked as a journalist for the Austrian newspaper, Salzburger Nachrichten...

    , Michael Wilding
    Michael Wilding (writer)
    Michael Wilding is an Australian writer and academic in Sydney.- Life :Michael Wilding, novelist and critic, was born in Worcester UK and read English at Oxford...

    : Air Mail from Down Under. Zeitgenössische Literatur Australiens. Short Stories 1990, ISBN 186336000x


The short stories in Air Mail from Down Under by Glenda Adams
Glenda Adams
Glenda Emilie Adams was an Australian novelist and short story writer, probably best known as the winner of the 1987 Miles Franklin Award for Dancing on Coral...

, Inez Baranay, David Brooks
David Brooks (author)
David Gordon Brooks is an Australian author.He graduated from the Australian National University in 1974. He married Alison Summers in 1975. Brooks and Summers then studied abroad and received their M.A. degrees from the University of Toronto...

, Peter Carey, Helen Garner
Helen Garner
Helen Garner is an award-winning Australian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and journalist.-Life:Garner was born in Geelong, Victoria, the eldest of six children. She attended Manifold Heights State School, Ocean Grove State School and then The Hermitage in Geelong...

, Kate Grenville
Kate Grenville
Kate Grenville is one of Australia's best-known authors. She's published nine novels, a collection of short stories, and four books about the writing process....

, Kris Hemensley
Kris Hemensley
Kris Alan Hemensley is a poet, who was born on The Isle of Wight, and spent his early childhood in Alexandria, the son of an Egyptian mother and an English father who was stationed in Egypt with the Royal Air Force. He visited Australia at the age of 18, and emigrated there in 1966...

, Nick Jose
Nicholas Jose
-Biography:Born Robert Nicholas Jose in London, England, to Australian parents, Nicholas Jose grew up mostly in Adelaide, South Australia. He was educated at the Australian National University and Oxford University. He has traveled extensively, particularly in China, where he worked from 1986 to 1990...

, Rudi Krausmann
Rudi Krausmann
Rudi Krausmann is an Austrian born Australian playwright and poet.- Life :Rudi Krausmann studied Economics in Vienna and worked as a journalist for the Austrian newspaper, Salzburger Nachrichten...

, David Malouf
David Malouf
David George Joseph Malouf is an acclaimed Australian writer. He was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 2000, his 1993 novel Remembering Babylon won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 1996, he won the inaugural Australia-Asia Literary Award in 2008, and he was...

, Frank Moorhouse
Frank Moorhouse
Frank Moorhouse is an acclaimed Australian writer with a growing international reputation. He has won major Australian national prizes for the short story, the novel, the essay, and for script writing....

, Gerald Murnane
Gerald Murnane
- Life :Murnane was born in Coburg, Melbourne, and has almost never left the state of Victoria. Parts of his childhood were spent in Bendigo and the Western District. In 1956 he matriculated from De La Salle College Malvern....

, Oodgeroo Noonuccal
Oodgeroo Noonuccal
Oodgeroo Noonuccal was an Australian poet, political activist, artist and educator. She was also a campaigner for Aboriginal rights...

, Janette Turner Hospital
Janette Turner Hospital
Janette Turner Hospital is a novelist and short story writer who has lived for most of her adult life in Canada or the U.S., principally Boston , Kingston and Columbia...

, Vicki Viidikas
Vicki Viidikas
Vicki Viidikas was a twentieth century Australian poet and prose writer.Vicki Viidikas was born and grew up in Sydney, Australia. Dropping out of school, she encountered the Balmain New South Wales poetry scene in the late 1960s. There she encountered, among others, Ken Bolton, John Forbes, Martin...

, Patrick White
Patrick White
Patrick Victor Martindale White , an Australian author, is widely regarded as an important English-language novelist of the 20th century. From 1935 until his death, he published 12 novels, two short-story collections and eight plays.White's fiction employs humour, florid prose, shifting narrative...

, Michael Wilding
Michael Wilding (writer)
Michael Wilding is an Australian writer and academic in Sydney.- Life :Michael Wilding, novelist and critic, was born in Worcester UK and read English at Oxford...

, and Renate Yates were translated into the German language by Marc Adrian, Bettina Boss, Gerald Ganglbauer, Bernd und Barbara Hüppauf, Rudi Krausmann, Olaf Reinhardt, and Nic Witton.

When Gerald Ganglbauer and Michael Wilding launched the first volume in Vienna, an Austrian newspaper titled their review "More than kangaroos and koalas", and wrote: Gangan Verlag proves with this important new release that Australia's cultural output consists of more than "Crocodile" Dundee and The Thorn Birds
The Thorn Birds
The Thorn Birds is a 1977 best-selling novel by Colleen McCullough, an Australian author.In 1983 it was adapted as a television mini-series that, during its television run 27–30 March, became the United States' second highest rated mini-series of all time behind Roots; both series were produced by...

. The Falter
Falter
Falter is a weekly magazine published in Vienna, Austria.Founded in 1977, it is published weekly on Wednesdays. Since Spring 2005 a local edition has also been published in Styria. The magazine reports from a broadly left-liberal perspective on politics, media, culture and the life...

 agreed: As far as literature is concerned, Australia is a largely unknown continent even for an Anglophile.

Volume 2

  • Bernard Cohen
    Bernard Cohen (Australian author)
    Bernard Cohen is an Australian writer, the author of four novels and a children's picture book.- Life :Cohen was sub-editor for Editions Review, editor for Gangaroo, and his short stories have been widely anthologised, including in the Penguin Century of Australian Stories, Best Australian Stories...

    , Gerald Ganglbauer
    Gerald Ganglbauer
    Gerald Ganglbauer is an Austrian Australian publisher diagnosed with Parkinson's disease at the age of 48 years. Since then he has been an ambassador for Parkinson's support groups.- Life :...

    : Malevolent Fiction. Experimentelle Literatur Australiens 1992, ISBN 1863360018


Malevolent Fiction never made it to the printing press. However, some contributions (the late Jas H Duke
Jas H. Duke
Jas Heriot Duke was a cult figure in the Australian performance poetry scene. He worked much of his life in Melbourne Board of Works and began writing poetry in 1966. He was influenced by Dada, Expressionism and experimental movements...

, Paul Hewson / Linda Marie Walker, Ruark Lewis, Chris Mann
Chris Mann
Chris Mann is an Australian composer, poet and performer specializing in the emerging field of compositional linguistics, coined by Kenneth Gaburo and described by Mann as "the mechanism whereby you understand what I'm thinking better than I do."...

 and Ania Walwicz
Ania Walwicz
Ania Walwicz is a contemporary Australian poet and prose writer, and visual artist.Ania Walwicz spent her childhood in Poland, coming to Australia in 1963 where she attended the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne. Her writing tends toward an impressionistic, stream of consciousness...

) have appeared online in the publisher's literary magazine Gangway
Gangway (magazine)
Gangway is an international online literary magazine, bridging Austria and Australia. Its founder and editor in chief is Gerald Ganglbauer, the first issue was launched in June 1996 in Sydney.- Profile :...

.

Volume 3

  • Gisela Triesch, Rudi Krausmann
    Rudi Krausmann
    Rudi Krausmann is an Austrian born Australian playwright and poet.- Life :Rudi Krausmann studied Economics in Vienna and worked as a journalist for the Austrian newspaper, Salzburger Nachrichten...

    : Made in Australia. Die Poesie des fünften Kontinents, Australian Poetry Today 1994, ISBN 1863360026


Made in Australia is a bilingual English-German edition of selected work by eighty contemporary Australian poets. This literary crowd, and its host of German apparitions, is squeezed into a mere three hundred pages, as a kind of export package. Each poet’s name is actually stamped with the familiar, triangular “Australian Made” trade logo. Poetry as merchandise. Please consider.

The arrangement of the poets Made in Australia is by date of birth, beginning with Margaret Diesendorf, who was born in 1912 and died two years ago, and leading up to poets born in 1960. Obviously, preference and available space determined inclusions and omissions, but few readers will dispute that it is a well-balanced, carefully selected anthology. The inclusion, as the last poem, of Maureen Watson’s “Stepping Out” with its final “I don’t walk, I strut/ ‘Cause now, I’m liberated” provides a very moving ending. There are no dates alongside her name (Unknown, as sometimes the case with Aboriginals having no birth certificates).

Around 140 selected poems from Australian poets such as Robert Adamson
Robert Adamson (poet)
Robert Adamson is an Australian poet and publisher.-Biography:Adamson grew up in Neutral Bay and spent much of his teenage years in Gosford Boys Home for juvenile offenders. He discovered poetry while educating himself in Gaol in his 20s. His first book, Canticles on the Skin, was published in 1970...

, Richard Allen
Richard James Allen
Richard James Allen is a contemporary Australian poet, dancer and filmmaker. The former Artistic Director of the , and founding director of the , Richard was Co-Artistic Director with Karen Pearlman of That Was Fast and Tasdance , and now at The Physical TV Company .Richard James Allen recently...

, Bruce Beaver
Bruce Beaver
Bruce Victor Beaver was an Australian poet and novelist.-Biography:Beaver was born in Manly, New South Wales. He was educated at the Manly Public School and at the Sydney Boys' High School...

 to Banumbir Wongar, Judith Wright
Judith Wright
Judith Arundell Wright was an Australian poet, environmentalist and campaigner for Aboriginal land rights.-Biography:...

, and Fay Zwicky
Fay Zwicky
Fay Zwicky is a contemporary Australian poet, short-story writer, critic and academic primarily known for her autobiographical poem Kaddish which deals with her identity as a Jewish writer.-Life:...

, to name but a few from A to Z were translated into the German language by C. W. Aigner, Hans Magnus Enzensberger
Hans Magnus Enzensberger
Hans Magnus Enzensberger , is a German author, poet, translator, and editor. He has also written under the pseudonym Andreas Thalmayr. He lives in Munich.- Life :...

, Gerhard Fischer, Gerald Ganglbauer, Rudi Krausmann, Michael C. Prusse, Olaf Reinhardt, Isolde Scheidecker, Gisela Triesch, and Volker Wolf.

External links

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