1997 Winner - "The Glade within the Grove" by David Foster

Commenting on the winner's novel, the Judging Panel wrote:
"David Foster invokes tradition in his learned and comic novel The Glade within the Grove. The book is a sharp, witty and seductive critique of one of the most influential periods in the recent history of ideas in Australia. A serious interest in the ideologies of the liberation movements of the sixties and seventies, in the rhetoric of Trotstyite politics, and the causes and effects of young peoples' retreat to the promise of a rural paradise is brought into balance by reference back to the myths of Attis and Cybele, and to ancient practices and religious beliefs. "

Miles Franklin Literary Award 1997 Shortlist

The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow, Thea Astley
Night Letters, Robert Dessaix
The Drowner, Robert Drewe
The Glade within the Grove, David Foster
Oyster, Janette Turner Hospital
The Conversations at Curlow Creek, David Malouf
Before I Wake, John Scott

Judges' Report

"For this year's Miles Franklin Award there was a record 84 entries. The initial sorting of these was an immense task, and all of us came to feel that we need to find some way of reducing the burden of culling, to allow more time for the consideration of the long short list. We were at great pains to ensure that justice was done to all the entries. By the time we reach our final decision we have read and re-read the short list, and have had a wide-ranging discussion of the books from many points of view.

Imaginative possibilities of location and topography are explored in each of the novels. In David Malouf's The Conversations at Curlow Creek, a romantic vision of Ireland is recalled in a mud hut in New South Wales. Robert Dessaix's Night Letters moves between Venice and Melbourne. John Scott's Before I Wake is located on the south coast of New South Wales, and in Paris, England and Tasmania. Robert Drewe's The Drowner moves outward from Wiltshire and Africa to the Australian Goldfields. David Foster' The Glade within the Grove is set in Australia but invokes a world of classical mythology and religion. Both Thea Astley's The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow and Janette Turner Hospital's Oyster belong (in several senses) to Queensland.

The legacy of history is a living force, for good or ill, in most of these novels. Malouf and Astley expose the brutality of crime and punishment in the early years of the colony and towards aboriginal children and adults in more recent times. Geography determines history in Drewe's striking contrast between the ancient technologies which control water in Wiltshire, and the new technology which brings it to drought-stricken Kalgoorlie in the mid 19th century. In Robert Dessaix's Venice, history is a mixed legacy of beauty and cruelty, cultural sensitivity and decadence. David Foster travels beyond history to ancient myths and legends to explain the rural commune movement of the 1960s and 70s.

Beyond history, however, is a range of human emotions and relationship, explore through satire, metaphor and symbolic resonance especially by Scott, Malouf, Drewe and Foster. The long conversation between police office and condemned convict in Malouf's novel is also a dialogue of self and soul for the office torn between action and mediation. Scott's narrator moves in and out of the lives of the other characters in a way somewhat reminiscent of Brennan's Wanderer, ending, like him, in resolving to be irresolute.

Passion and idensity mark the relationship between Drewe's surprising lovers, who live within a borderline world where imagination, fantasy and reality merge and dissolve, and where love and fear are constant companions. In The Drowner landscape, history and even topography, vivid as they are, are servants of a personal drama. Drewe provides a vision, in a recognisable literary tradition, of how the iron grip of the wasteland is broken.

David Foster, too, invokes tradition in his learned and comic novel The Glade within the Grove. The book is a sharp, witty and seductive critique of one of the most influential periods in the recent history of ideas in Australia. A serious interest in the ideologies of the liberation movements of the sixties and seventies, in the rhetoric of Trotstyite politics, and the causes and effects of young peoples' retreat to the promise of a rural paradise is brought into balance by reference back to the myths of Attis and Cybele, and to ancient practices and religious beliefs.

In what everyone can see is a very strong short-list we found great richness and variety, and, as is our custom, reached our decision by consensus."

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