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Thanks to Netflix, yet another Pride and Prejudice adaptation is coming our way. Bonnets and Bennets will again infect the zeitgeist, not that we had a real break. We live in a wretched state of perma-Austen. Breaks are hallucinations – and always short-lived.
But news of the upcoming series has got me thinking about Jane Austen’s famous opening sentence: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.”
I cringe whenever it’s quoted or parodied. To be fair, this is more about my distaste for the Jane Austen Industrial Complex than for the sentence itself. It’s fine, I guess. But – in the spirit of sweeping statements – it is a fact that many Australian novelists have written better openers than Austen. I’m here to prove it.
“Unemployed at last!” from Such is Life by Joseph Furphy is short, snappy, roguish and an undeniable banger. But I might be biased towards unnerving exclamations because I also love Brian Castro’s opener to Chinese Postman, “How time-honoured custom reverts to ruin!” and Luke Davies’ opener to Candy, “Everything’s f—ing beautiful!” In each case, the reader is plunged straight into a highly questionable perspective. That’s the kind of thing I love in fiction.
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The first sentence of Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career is also an exclamation: “Boo, hoo!” It’s short and snappy but also annoying. However, since I’m being strict on grammar (counting only one-sentence openers), but loose on what counts as the first sentence (accepting both prologues and first chapters), Franklin’s masterpiece still qualifies for an honourable mention. The prologue begins with bluster: “MY DEAR FELLOW AUSTRALIANS, Just a few lines to tell you that this is a story all about myself – for no other purpose do I write it.”
Bluff, bluster and bravado are big in Australian novels. The opening to Peter Carey’s Bliss goes much further. “Harry Joy was to die three times, but it was his first death which was to have the greatest effect on him, and it is this first death which we shall now witness.” (The opening to Olivia De Zilva’s 2025 novel, Plastic Budgie, continues this tradition: “People accuse you of lying when you say you remember your birth.”)
I love novels that kick off with startling or cryptic images. “The boy is curled up in his bed like a skinny black question mark” from Bitin’ Back by Vivienne Cleven is a great one. And I love “The front door of Thea’s flat was ajar so Lilian gave it a push and went in, her eyes on swivels.” That’s from Elizabeth Harrower’s The Long Prospect.
Ellen van Neerven flings the reader into a world of roadhouse pies and lineal confusion with Heat and Light: “It was a slight, old woman in a pie shop off the highway that told me who my grandmother was.” Michelle de Kretser hints at sordid continental glamour with Scary Monsters: “That was the year we went to Sardinia to meet John Berger’s mistress.”
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In terms of instant gut-punch, Kim Scott’s Taboo is in a category all of its own: “Our hometown was a massacre place.” The first sentence of Kenneths Cook’s classic, Wake in Fright, is disturbingly riveting: “He sat at his desk, wearily watching the children file out of the room, reflecting that, this term at least, it was reasonable to assume that none of the girls was pregnant.”
There have been some knock-out openers in books published in recent years. I’m thinking of Signs of Damage by Diana Reid (“The coroner is difficult to take seriously”) and Nock Loose by Patrick Marlborough (“They blast Cold Chisel and kick off hell”). The first line of Ella Baxter’s Woo Woo is excellent: “Sabine had traumatised only a few people in her life, and one of them was her husband.” Right off the bat, I have a lot of questions. If Sabine has traumatised only a few, what is the expected number of people a vigorous modern woman should traumatise in her lifetime? How am I tracking?
Of course, there are many great Australian writers who reel readers in slowly, casting their spell over paragraphs. And the one-liners I’ve listed here are only scratching the surface. I don’t have room for all my favourites! But this is an open-and-shut case. Do I need to go on?
MY DEAR FELLOW AUSTRALIANS, as we steel ourselves for another ritual force-feeding of a-truth-universally-acknowledged, it is clear that we are not in want of our own great literary opening gambits. I rest my case.
The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from Jason Steger. Get it delivered every Friday.
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