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On the 14^th of December 1972, a schoolteacher named Helen Garner found herself fired. Summoned to the Victorian Education Department and admonished by the Deputy Director of Secondary education, she was sacked on the spot after she unapologetically confessed to using four-letter words in the classroom. This paper considers what these choice words, the ethos they expressed, and the transition from teaching to writing they necessitated have meant for her fiction. I argue that the terms of her firing inform the frank sexual realism of her first novel Monkey Grip (1977), which is unabashedly fluent in and indeed narratively yearns for various forms of the four-letter contraband that got her sacked in the first place. I will also show how a related yet different set of teaching appointments – a succession of writer-in-residencies she undertook in the 1980s – are reflected in the taut minimalism of her masterpiece, The Children’s Bach (1984). More generally, I want to suggest that the close connection between Garner’s pedagogy and her prose style illustrates an interrelation that, with the emergence of creative writing as a tertiary discipline, has become increasingly representative of the workings of the national literary field.

Garner’s dismissal took place on the brink of institutional upheavals which would programmatically yoke fiction-making to pedagogy by re-housing its production within a new site of concentrated aesthetic education: the tertiary creative writing classroom. Put otherwise: a few years after Garner was fired, writers began to be hired – not to teach sex ed in secondary schools, but creative writing in universities, and this sweeping process of authorial professionalisation has left its marks on the works of student and teacher alike, diverse and even inimitable as the best of those works are. Garner’s firing therefore heralds the belated emergence of a new period of Australian literary history, in which the diversity of literary fiction cannot be fully comprehended, as Mark McGurl argues in his seminal study of postwar American fiction The Program Era (2009), without close attention ‘to the increasingly intimate relation between literary production and the practices of higher education’ (ix). That Garner would later take up numerous offers to teach in tertiary classrooms allows us to see her untimely exile from the system of secondary education as an event of at least ironic significance to this period, insofar as it both kickstarted the career of one of our finest writers and ejected an aspiring novelist from the education sector at a moment when it was in the early stages of creative writing’s formation as a tertiary discipline.

Compared with the long term affiliations of such contemporaries as Thea Astley, Elizabeth Jolley, and Gerald Murnane, who taught creative writing at Macquarie, Curtin and Deakin Universities respectively for a combined total of over half a century, Garner was a relative stranger on campus, witnessing creative writing’s institutionalization at first hand primarily through the series of writer-in-residences that she undertook while drafting The Children’s Bach. Yet one affordance of this view from the educational system’s peripheries is that it inflects her fiction’s artfully compressed response to that same system’s pedagogical and verbal norms. Garner’s relative externality to the university, and thus her later work’s emblematic significance as an illustration of the transnational reach of creative writing’s influence on literary production, is an implication I will return to in this paper’s conclusion.

Joseph Steinberg is in the final year of his doctorate, which he is completing at the University of Cambridge with the generous support of the Cambridge Trust. In 2020, his research was also supported by a Seymour Summer Scholarship at the National Library of Australia. His dissertation, titled ‘The Program Goes South: Australian Prose and the University, 1970-2020’, argues that the emergence of creative writing as a tertiary discipline has powerfully shaped the last half-century of literary production in Australia. His articles and reviews are published and forthcoming in ALS, AHR, JASAL, and The Cambridge Quarterly.