The sociologists want an anthology which is socially representative while the litcrits want to fire their canon. Litcrits love their canon. They polish and caress it and build careers on it. They are Fo dogs, literary lions guarding the National Temple of Excellence. No matter that it’s a district branch of a subtemple, it is their very own.

Each temple has a top dog, noisy and theatrical, with a big swinging lexicon. No point complaining to the council, Peter will still howl at the moon.

If the anthology purports to be both canon and sociology, the Faux dogs are right.

Hughes also seems unaware that Peter Craven’s inadequate and sloppy review of the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature (or, more precisely, his review of the second half of its Table of Contents pages) betrays a very incomplete knowledge of the history of said literature, particularly that produced before about 1955, whatever Craven or his apologists may think about his alleged expertise.

Some of us, however, have more complex and less antiquated views on the subject of literature than either Craven or Hughes, hence the broad spectrum of the anthology. Hughes also appears to be using Sophie Cunningham’s excellent piece merely as an excuse to fulminate on his own account about how awful and silly those ignorant, ideologically-driven editors must be. As one of them, I feel obliged to point out to him, regarding his closing remark, that ‘inferring’ means ‘deducing’, not ‘implying’. To infer racism from a piece of writing is to deduce that it exists there, to which one can only reply ‘quite’.