A great man is defined in terms of the various examples and pieces of evidence of his existence contained in a museum devoted to him, beginning with an ashtray and culminating in an example of his excrement. The story "Portrait of Electricity" contains the seeds of Bail's first novel, Homesickness. Bail's version is a monologue by the deserted husband, based on a famous painting by Russell Drysdale. Bail's interest in the relationship between language and reality is present in all the stories and especially "Zoellner's Definition." "The Drover's Wife" is a rewriting of Henry Lawson's classic story. The first of many tricks is that there no story called "Contemporary Portraits." The collection was later republished as The Drover's Wife and Other Stories. Bail's first book was a collection of short stories titled Contemporary Portraits and Other Stories. Since then he has established a reputation as one of Australia's most original and distinctive novelists. Murray Bail is, with Peter Carey and Frank Moorhouse, one of the chief innovators in the tradition of the Australian short story and is especially associated with its revival in the early and mid-1970s.
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