Taylor, Cheryl M. (2017) "It Fits Where It Touches": Ronald McKie's fiction and 1970s feminism. Antipodes, 31 (1). pp. 206-220.

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Abstract

[Extract:] When twenty-six-year-old Ronald McKie joined the reporting staff of the Sydney Telegraph in 1935, the editor Brian Penton, whose novel Landtakers had been hailed a year earlier as an Australian classic (Buckridge 138–40), encouraged him in his boyhood ambition to write fiction. McKie subsequently discarded his first attempt, a one-hundred-thousand100,000-word historical novel set in Queensland (de Berg). It was not until his retirement in the 1970s, following a career as a war correspondent, journalist, and author of popular military histories and Asian travel books, that McKie fulfilled his literary ambition by publishing three novels. The Mango Tree, winner of the 1974 Miles Franklin Award, was followed in 1977 by The Crushing and in 1978 by Bitter Bread. This essay traces the effects of McKie’s earlier life and writing experiences and of the 1970s feminist movement on gender as a central concern of his fiction.

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