I began Chapter 3 – which, like this one, explores the Australian novel in the post-war period – with Webby's description of the 1970s and 1980s as a ‘golden age of Australian publishing and the promotion of Australian literature’. What I did not discuss in that chapter were the specific connections Webby draws between the rise and fall of this ‘golden age’ and gender trends in Australian authorship. According to Webby, Australian literature in the decades prior to 1970 was dominated not only by publishing interests external to the nation, but by male authors, or the ‘WACM – WHITE, ANGLOCELTIC MALE’. Progressive cultural politics of the late 1960s and 1970s, ‘from the student, feminist and black power movements’, as well as animating an independent local publishing industry, fundamentally undermined the institutional and social structures that had maintained ‘the former supremacy of the white, heterosexual, Anglo male’. In altering the ‘stories we…tell about ourselves’, and the subjects ‘able to assert their… subjectivity’, these political changes sponsored a proliferation of authors other than white men, of whom women were the major group. The economic shifts of the 1990s and 2000s, which supposedly brought an end to the ‘golden age’ of local publishing by enabling multinationals to enter and dominate the Australian market, also signalled the resurrection of ‘WACM power’.