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The earliest attempts to sample Australian writing in anthologies include Isaac Nathan's The Southern Euphrosyne and Australian Miscellany (1848), which contains 'original Anecdote, Poetry and Music'; The Australian Souvenir for 1851 (1851), which contains stories, essays and poems; and W.H.H. Yarrington's Prince Alfred's Wreath (1868), which, with its selections from Henry Kendall, J. Sheridan Moore, W.M. Adams and others, is the first approximation to later verse anthologies. In 1869 William H. Williams introduced a form of anthology with his Christmas 'annuals' for holiday reading; his Illustrated Australian Annuals for 1869-70 and 1870-71 contain a medley of verse, short fiction and sketches, mostly by Australian writers. The 'annual' rapidly became a popular anthological device; well-known examples include The 'Vagabond' Annual (1877), by John Stanley James; Hash (1877) by Garnet Walch; The Antipodean (1893, 1895, 1897) by George Essex Evans and others; and The Golden West (1906-46) by R.C. Spear. One of the earliest examples of the anthology that comprises selections taken from a newspaper, magazine or journal is Punch Staff Papers (1872), a collection of short fiction, sketches and verse by members of the staff of Sydney Punch; among the contributors were D.H. Deniehy, Henry Kendall, G.G. McCrae, Garnet Walch and Richmond Thatcher. The first significant anthology to combine selections and criticism was G.B. Barton's Poets and Prose Writers of New South Wales (q.v., 1866); Barton used extracts from the writings of Deniehy, W.B. Dalley, W.C. Wentworth, Charles Harpur, Henry Kendall, J.L. Michael and others to illustrate and substantiate his critical commentary.

The centenary of the colony in 1888 produced two busy anthologists, Douglas Sladen and Arthur Patchett Martin, who took advantage of the historic moment to promote Australian literature; their critical discrimination was, however, somewhat overruled by their enthusiasm and hampered by their lack of awareness of the new spirit of nationalism that was already affecting Australian writing. Sladen's first anthology, Australian Ballads and Rhymes (1888), was a selection of 'Poems inspired by Life and Scenery in Australia and New Zealand'; it was reissued in the same year with a critical introduction and in an enlarged edition, titled A Century of Australian Song. With the help of contributions and suggestions gained from canvassing in the press, Sladen published an even wider selection, Australian Poets, 1788-1888 (1888). In all, he published the work of more than eighty poets; inevitably many were undeserving of recognition and were discarded by later anthologists. Sladen's sins were also of omission. Much of Adam Lindsay Gordon is missing, the Bulletin writers are excluded, as are Ada Cambridge, Victor Daley, Mary Hannay Foott and John Farrell. Martin, who had edited an earlier anthology, An Easter Omelette in Prose and Verse (1879), drew upon Australian writers resident in England for a collection of stories and sketches, Oak-Bough and Wattle-Blossom (1888); contributors included Rosa Praed, Sladen, Philip Mennell and Martin himself. His wife, Harriette Anne Martin, compiled similar anthologies, Under the Gum Tree (1890) with contributions from Praed, Jessie Couvreur and Hume Nisbet, and Volcanic Gold (1890); she also edited the first all-women collection, Coo-ee: Tales of Australian Life by Australian Ladies (1891). Philip Mennell added In Australian Wilds (1889), a similar collection of largely undistinguished short fiction, and Lala Fisher made a selection of writings by Australians in England, By Creek and Gully (1899).

Ignored by Sladen and Martin, the Bulletin proceeded to publish its own miscellanies; in 1890 J.F. Archibald in collaboration with F.J. Broomfield compiled 'A Golden Shanty': Australian Stories and Sketches in Prose and Verses by 'Bulletin' Writers. Those represented include Henry Kendall, Victor Daley, Edward Dyson, A.B. Paterson, John Farrell and Henry Lawson; the fact that only Kendall appears in Sladen and Martin shows how lacking in literary discrimination the earlier anthologies were. Further Bulletin collections were The Bulletin Story Book and The Bulletin Reciter, both edited by A.G. Stephens in 1901; in 1920 Bertram Stevens selected and edited The 'Bulletin' Book of Humorous Verse and Recitations.

The first half of the twentieth century brought a continuous stream of anthologies of all kinds, some of which can now be seen as significant landmarks in Australian literary history. Bertram Stevens edited An Anthology of Australian Verse in 1906; from it came The Golden Treasury of Australian Verse (1909), the first collection that could be said to be truly reflective of Australian sentiment and attitude. Stevens produced other minor anthologies such as Bush Ballads (1908), The Australian Birthday Book (1908), A Book of Australian Verse for Boys and Girls (1915); and he collaborated with George Mackaness to produce The Children's Treasury of Australian Verse (1913) and Selections from Australian Poets (1913). The selections are characteristically Australian not only in content (Australian life, landscape and events) but also in their simple, direct and sometimes rugged style. Mackaness, an anthologist of other genres also, returned to verse anthologies twenty years later with The Wide Brown Land (1934), chosen by himself and his daughter Joan: perhaps the most famous of all Australian verse anthologies, it took its title from a phrase in Dorothea Mackellar's poem, 'My Country', and was often reprinted. Douglas Stewart continued the title with his 1971 anthology. A significant milestone was reached in verse anthologies in 1918 when Walter Murdoch edited the first Oxford Book of Australasian Verse; when the second edition was published in 1923 'Oxford' was omitted from the title. Murdoch's original selection did not please all critics but it was more wide ranging than most of those published earlier and less emphatic on Australian content than the 1913 anthology of Stevens and Mackaness. Murdoch's third edition (1945) was the subject of considerable criticism in Southerly (1946); the fourth edition, titled A Book of Australian and New Zealand Verse (1950), was edited jointly by Murdoch and Alan Mulgan; Judith Wright's A Book of Australian Verse (1956, second edition 1968), ultimately replaced the Murdoch Oxford anthologies. Another well-received verse anthology of the early twentieth century was Percival Serle's An Australasian Anthology (Australian and New Zealand Poems) (1927). Serle was assisted by 'Furnley Maurice' and R.H. Croll, both of whom were established critics; the combination produced a comprehensive and well-balanced selection and was accompanied by an account of the development of Australian and NZ poetry. The third edition of Serle's anthology (1946) added a short and rather unsatisfactory section on contemporary verse. Another significant anthologist of this period was J.J. Stable, professor of English at the University of Queensland, who compiled The Bond of Poetry in 1924. It combined English and Australian poems because Stable felt that poetry provided a bond that might keep nationalistic Australians linked to their British heritage. The Bond of Poetry remained a popular school text for many years, more so than Stable's later anthology, The High Road of Australian Verse (1929). One of the earliest movements towards the regional collection of verse was Stable's A Book of Queensland Verse (1924, with A.E.M. Kirwood), which was published in conjunction with the Brisbane centenary and illustrated the development of verse in Queensland. A verse anthology that stood deliberately apart from the nationalistic collections of this period was Poetry in Australia 1923 (1923), edited by Jack Lindsay and Kenneth Slessor, with a preface by Norman Lindsay that decried nationalism in literature. Compelled to accept the 'accident' of geographical location and thus label its poetry 'Australian', the anthology is not representatively Australian in a general sense; its contributors were chosen largely to illustrate the Lindsay and Vision insistence on internationalism in literature and the importance of language in creative thought. Much of the selected poetry came from Hugh McCrae, Jack Lindsay and Kenneth Slessor, all of whom wrote at that time in accord with Vision attitudes. A notable specialised anthology of the period was Louis Lavater's The Sonnet in Australasia (1926), a collection of about 225 sonnets by more than 100 Australian poets. The occasional annual selection of the poetry of the period, e.g. Australian Poetry Annual 1920-21 (1921), chosen from contributions to the magazine Birth, was the forerunner of the poetry magazines that proliferated after the middle of the century and of such annual selections of verse as Australian Poetry, published by Angus & Robertson and which ran 1941-73 (and revised later) with a different editor for each volume. Most of Australian Poetry's editors were established poets/critics, e.g. Douglas Stewart, R.D. FitzGerald, Kenneth Slessor and Judith Wright, and the annual selections were, at least until the 1960s, conventional and predictable. Notable among the specialised verse anthologies of the first half of the century were those published by the Jindyworobaks. They ran 1938-53, included only poetry that satisfied the Jindyworobak criteria, and were edited by notable poets of the movement, e.g. Rex Ingamells, Flexmore Hudson, W. Hart-Smith, Ian Mudie and Roland Robinson.

Although less prolific than verse anthologies, prose collections in the first half of the twentieth century were no less significant. In addition to the Bulletin anthologies already mentioned, other early collections of note were the stories reprinted from the Sydney Mail, Red Kangaroo and Other Stories (1907); Donald McLachlan's Austral Garden: An Anthology of Australian Prose (1922), which contained chapters from novels and extracts of non-fiction as well as short stories; Australian Short Stories (1928), edited by Mackaness; An Australian Story Book (1928), selected by Nettie Palmer and restricted to stories written in the twentieth century; and Adventures in the Bush: Australia's Story (1931), edited by Herbert Strang. Most prominent in these early anthologies are Barbara Baynton, Henry Lawson, 'Louis' Becke, Edward Dyson, Ernest Favenc, Vance Palmer, Katharine Susannah Prichard and Ethel Turner. In 1941 Coast to Coast, an anthology of the year's best stories, was first published; it ran annually 1941-48, and biennially 1949-70, with a final issue in 1973. Coast to Coast was revived in 1986 with Kerryn Goldsworthy as editor. Early collections of Australian essays include Essays, Imaginative and Critical (1933), compiled by Mackaness and John D. Holmes, and Australian Essays (1935), selected by G.H. Cowling and 'Furnley Maurice'. Notable essayists represented are Marcus Clarke, John le Gay Brereton, Walter Murdoch and Ernest Scott.

Drama and literary criticism also appeared in anthology form in the first part of the twentieth century. Collections of one-act plays include Eight Plays by Australians (1934) and Five Plays by Australians (1936), both published by the Dramatists' Club of Melbourne; Best Australian One-Act Plays (1937), edited by William Moore and T. Inglis Moore; and Leslie Rees's Australian Radio Plays (1946). In somewhat similar vein to G.B. Barton's critical anthology of the previous century are Colin Roderick's The Australian Novel (1945) and 20 Australian Novelists (1947), where critical and biographical commentary accompany excerpts from such writers as A.H. Adams, 'Rolf Boldrewood', Marcus Clarke, Henry Kingsley, Jessie Couvreur and others of the more modern period.

After the Second World War poetry anthologies came in four main categories: general anthologies that gave a selection from colonial times to the present; those which attempted a periodic update of the contemporary scene prior to 1968; those which specifically illustrated the 'New Australian Poetry' which dated from 1968; and those which reflected sectional interests or illustrated particular types and periods of poetry. The general anthologies, largely a continuation of similar types published earlier in the century, include Judith Wright's A Book of Australian Verse (1956, rev. edn 1968), Geoffrey Dutton's Australian Verse from 1805 (1976) and Rodney Hall's The Collins Book of Australian Poetry (1981). Most of those attempting an up-to-date view of poetry in the period up to 1968 convey their intention by using the word 'modern' in their titles; they include H.M. Green's Modern Australian Poetry (1946, rev. edn 1952); R.G. Howarth, Kenneth Slessor and John Thompson's The Penguin Book of Australian Verse (1958, titled Modern Australian Verse in 1961), which was replaced by Harry Heseltine's The Penguin Book of Australian Verse (1972); Douglas Stewart's Modern Australian Verse (1964), which is the second volume of the two-volume Poetry in Australia; Rodney Hall and Thomas Shapcott's New Impulses in Australian Poetry (q.v., 1968), which concerns itself with the poetry of the 1960s but which appeared before the 'New Australian Poetry' had fully developed; David Campbell's Modern Australian Poetry (1970), which was also compiled before 1968 and which closes with the work of Geoffrey Lehmann, the only poet in the anthology who was born in the 1940s; Dennis Robinson's Those Fabled Shores: Six Contemporary Australian Poets (1972), which contains only the work of the mainstream poets, Slessor, Hope, Wright, James McAuley, Stewart and FitzGerald; and Thomas Shapcott's Contemporary American and Australian Poetry (1976), which includes some post-1968 poetry but which continues to emphasise the older representatives of contemporary Australian poetry, i.e. Hope, Wright, McAuley, Campbell, Gwen Harwood, Blight and others. The 'New Australian Poetry', which came after 1968, has been given almost blanket coverage, chiefly by the myriad poetry magazines that are a striking phenomenon of the modern literary scene, and to a lesser extent by more formal anthologies. The latter include Shapcott's Australian Poetry Now (1970), which is the companion to and extension of David Campbell's Modern Australian Poetry and which focuses on the poets who were on the verge of the new movement, e.g. Michael Dransfield, Robert Adamson, John Tranter and Roger McDonald; Robert Kenny and Colin Talbot's Applestealers (q.v., 1974), a collection specifically stated to represent the 'renaissance in Australian poetry'; John Tranter's The New Australian Poetry (1979), which includes selections from twenty-four poets of 'Australian poetry's most exciting decade', e.g. Bruce Beaver (one of the seminal poets of the 'renaissance'), Dransfield, Adamson, Rae Desmond Jones, Nigel Roberts, Jennifer Maiden, Vicki Viidikas and John Forbes; Heseltine's The Penguin Book of Modern Australian Verse (1981), which includes both new and somewhat older writers, e.g. many born in the 1920s and 1930s; and two important attempts to assist the development of the then contemporary poetry, the Paperback Poets series of UQP which culminated in two paperback poetry anthologies (1974, 1981) and Angus & Robertson's Poets of the Month series. Robert Gray and Geoffrey Lehmann's The Younger Australian Poets (1983) brings the poetry scene up to date at that time, thereby relegating the 1968 revolution to history. The same two also produced Australian Poetry in the Twentieth Century (1992), a radically new overall approach to the poetry of the second Australian century.

Increasingly in recent years the anthology has been used as a device to espouse causes, highlight philosophies and attitudes, illustrate particular literary movements, types of writing and groups of writers, and draw attention to particular periods, places and regions. The feminist movement is represented by such collections as Mother I'm Rooted (1975), an anthology of Australian women poets edited by Kate Jennings; Hecate's Daughters (1978), verse and prose edited by Carole Ferrier; Stories of Her Life (1979), edited by Sandra Zurbo; The True Life Story of ... (1981) and Frictions (1982), prose anthologies edited respectively by Jan Craney and Esther Caldwell and by Anna Gibbs and Alison Tilson; and The Half-Open Door (1982), accounts of the lives and careers of sixteen modern Australian women, edited by Patricia Grimshaw and Lynne Strahan. A similar collection of interviews (with Susan Mitchell) was Tall Poppies (1984). The success of the feminist movement in the 1970s and 1980s led to numerous further anthologies of women's writing, e.g., And So Say All of Us (1984), ed. Pearlie McNeill and Marie McShea (short stories); The Penguin Book of Australian Women Poets (1986), ed. Susan Hampton and Kate Llewellyn; Happy Endings: Stories by Australian and New Zealand Women 1850s-1930s (1987), ed. Elizabeth Webby and Lydia Wevers; and The Babe is Wise (1987), ed. Lyn Harwood, Bruce Pascoe and Paula White (short stories). It was the Bicentenary (1988), however, which turned this trickle of all-women anthologies into a flood. The Bicentenary year saw such collections as 200 Australian Women: A Redress Anthology, ed. Heather Radi; Angry Women, ed. Di Brown, Heather Ellyard and Barbara Polkinghorne; Room to Move, ed. Suzanne Falkiner; the Redress Press Anthology of Women's short stories; and Eclipsed: Two Centuries of Australian Women's Fiction, ed. Connie Burns and Marygai McNamara. Some did not make it through the presses in that hectic year, e.g. Eight Voices of the Eighties (1989), ed. Gillian Whitlock; Feeling Restless (1989), ed. Connie Burns and Marygai McNamara; Kiwi & Emu (1989 - NZ and Australian women writers), ed. Barbara Petrie. Somewhat different was Moments of Desire (1989), ed. Susan Hawthorne and Jenny Pausacker, an anthology of fiction, prose and poetry exploring women's sensuality. Later all-women collections included Speaking with the Sun (1991), ed. Stephanie Dowrick and Jane Parkin (new stories by both NZ and Australian women), Heroines (1991), ed. Dale Spender, and Life Lines: Australian Women's Letters and Diaries 1788-1840 (1992), ed. Patricia Clarke and Dale Spender.

The experience of war had produced earlier anthologies such as C.E.W. Bean's The Anzac Book (1916) and Ian Mudie's Poets at War (1944). Modern variations on traditional war anthologies include the anti-war collection We Took Their Orders and Are Dead (1971), a protest against the Vietnam War compiled by Shirley Cass, Ros Cheney, David Malouf and Michael Wilding; and Geoff Page's Shadows from Wire (1983), which demonstrates, by juxtaposing modern reactions to the First World War with actual war photographs, the irony of the initial response to the war. Recent war anthologies include John Laird's The Australian Experience of War (1988) and On All Fronts: Australian Stories of World War II (1989). The reaction to the experience of incarceration is collected in two volumes of poetry, Poems from Prison (1973), edited by Rodney Hall, and Walled Gardens (1978), poems from NSW prisons, published by the aptly named Ball & Chain Press. The experiences of the immigrant in Australia are the theme of Louise Rorabacher's group of short stories, Two Ways Meet (1963); Nancy Keesing's edition of Jewish stories, Shalom (1978); Voci Nostre (Our Voices) (1979), an Italo-Australian anthology edited by G.L. Abiuso, M. Giglio and V. Borghese; Manfred Jurgensen's verse and prose anthology, Ethnic Australia (1980), the work of twenty-four writers whose native language is not English; Tradition (1982), edited by R.F. Holt; Pomegranates: A Century of Jewish Australian Writing (1988), ed. Gael Hammer; Beyond the Echo (1988), ed. Sneja Gunew and Jan Mahyuddin, an anthology of women's multicultural writing with a considerable feminist flavour; On the Fence (1985), featuring the work of Ukrainian writers in English with their experiences both in the 'homeland' country and in Australia; and Homeland (1991), ed. George Papaellinas, twenty-five writers expressing their idea of 'homeland'. Regionalism provides a constant impulse to anthologising and never so much as in the Bicentenary period: recent examples include the WA collections Soundings (1976) ed. Veronica Brady; Quarry (1981), ed. Fay Zwicky; Summerland: A West Australian Sesquicentenary Anthology (1979), ed. Alec Choate; Portrait: A West Coast Collection of Short Fiction and Poetry (1986), ed. B.R. Coffey and Wendy Jenkins, which celebrates a decade of publishing by Fremantle Arts Centre Press; Celebrations: A Bicentennial Anthology of Fifty Years of Western Australian Poetry and Prose (1988), ed. Brian Dibble, Don Grant and Glen Phillips; Wordhord: A Critical Selection of Contemporary Western Australian Poetry (1989), ed. Dennis Haskell and Hilary Fraser, a collection of poetry written in the 1980s; and the twin Bicentenary anthologies, Margins: A West Coast Collection of Poetry, 1829-1988 (1988), ed. William Grono, and Impressions: West Coast Fiction 1829-1988 (1989), ed. Peter Cowan. SA anthologies include Dots Over Lines (1981), a collection of recent poetry from that state; Unsettled Areas: Recent Short Fiction (1986), ed. Andrew Taylor; The Orange Tree (1986), ed. K.F. Pearson and Christine Churches, an anthology of SA poetry from its beginnings to the present, which borrows its title from John Shaw Neilson's famous poem, although Neilson was only a South Australian until the age of 10; and The Inner Courtyard (1990), ed. Anne Brewster and Jeff Guess, a collection of contemporary SA love poetry. Queensland was represented quite early in the century by Stable and Kirkwood's A Book of Queensland Verse (1924), then by the Queensland Centenary Anthology (1959), ed. R.S. Byrnes and Val Vallis, later by Place and Perspective (1983), ed. Barry O'Donohue, collecting the works of thirty Queensland poets, and the twin anthologies North of Capricorn: An Anthology of Prose (1989), ed. Des Petersen and Stephen Torre, and North of Capricorn: An Anthology of Verse (1988), ed. Elizabeth Perkins and Robert Handicott. The Northern Territory's own collections include Latitudes: New Writing from the North (1986), ed. Susan Johnson and Mary Roberts; North of the Ten Commandments (1991), ed. David Headon, an anthology of various types of Territory writing; and the companion volumes of the Northern Territory Writers' Groups, Life Beyond the Louvres (1989) and Bugs and Bliss (1991). Tasmanian poetry was collected in Effects of Light: The Poetry of Tasmania (1986), ed. Vivian Smith and Margaret Scott; the Australian Capital Territory's anthologies include Canberra Tales (1988), where seven ACT women writers weave stories with a Canberra setting, and The Poetry of Canberra (1990), ed. Phillip Mackenzie. Gippsland (the 'soul-country' of Eve Langley) is the base for Shadow and Shine (1988), ed. Patrick Morgan, and the Hunter Valley of NSW has various collections including Norman Talbot's Hunter Valley Poets (1973) and Ross Bennett's This Place: Poetry of the Hunter Valley (1980).

Typical of specific period anthologies has been the return to colonial writing in such collections as T. Inglis Moore's From the Ballads to Brennan (1964), Brian Elliott and Adrian Mitchell's Bards in the Wilderness: Australian Colonial Poetry to 1920 (1970), G.A. Wilkes's The Colonial Poets (1974), Colonial Voices (1989), ed. Elizabeth Webby, containing letters, diaries, journalism and other accounts of nineteenth-century Australia, The Poet's Discovery: Nineteenth Century Australia in Verse (1990), ed. R.D. Jordan and Peter Pierce, an anthology arranged by colony, The Penguin Book of Australian Ballads (1993), ed. Philip Butterss and Elizabeth Webby and The Penguin Book of Nineteenth Century Australian Literature (1993), ed. Michael Ackland.

A narrowing of the focus to inspect the most important decade of the nineteenth century - the Nineties - is made in Leon Cantrell's collection of writings from that decade, The 1890s (1977). A similar narrowing is seen in the somewhat frenetic efforts of anthologists to capture the character of the literature being written in the immediate here and now - i.e. contemporary literature, e.g., Transgressions: Australian Writing Now (1986), ed. Don Anderson, with its emphasis on the innovative and experimental; Contemporary Australian Poetry (1986), ed. Dimitris Tsaloumas; The Tin Wash Dish (1989), an anthology edited by John Tranter of the poetry entered in the ABC/ABA Bicentennial competition; Expressway (1989), ed. Helen Daniel, an anthology of short fiction offering a contemporary view of Australia; Contemporary Australian Poetry (1990), ed. John Leonard; The Australian Anthology of New Poets (1989); Picador New Writing (1993), ed. Robert Dessaix and Helen Daniel; and Penguin's ceaseless battle, using the term 'modern' on several occasions over the decades, to be the first with the latest, The Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry (1991), ed. John Tranter and Philip Mead. And there are plenty of anthologies which continue to give not a narrow but an overall view, e.g. (among many) Two Centuries of Australian Poetry (1988), ed. Mark O'Connor; The Heritage of Australian Poetry (1984), ed. Geoffrey Dutton; The New Oxford Book of Australian Verse (1986, expanded 1991), ed. Les Murray, which extends from Aboriginal songs to modern verse; The Penguin Best Australian Short Stories (1991), ed. Mary Lord; and The Macmillan Anthology of Australian Literature (1990), ed. Ken Goodwin and Alan Lawson, which, with its 629 pages, is about the largest, though undoubtedly not the last word in complete anthologies.

Readily identifiable thematic groups of anthologies in recent decades include the book of erotic verse Within the Hill (1975), ed. Alan Gould and others; The Oxford Book of Australian Love Poems (1993), ed. Jennifer Strauss; the humorous collections Comic Australian Verse (1972), ed. Geoffrey Lehmann; Robust, Ribald and Rude Verse in Australia (1972), ed. Bill Wannan; The Penguin Book of Australian Satirical Verse (1986), ed. Philip Neilsen; The Illustrated Treasury of Australian Humour (1988), ed. Michael Sharkey; The Flight of the Emu: Contemporary Light Verse (1990), ed. Geoffrey Lehmann; and The Oxford Book of Australian Light Verse (1991), ed. R.F. Brissenden and Philip Grundy; the nationally oriented Wannan collections, The Wearing of the Green (1965) and The Heather in the South (1966); David Stewart's Voyager Poems (1960); and David Martin's book of left-wing verse, New World, New Song (1955).

Black Writing is contained in Australian Aboriginal Literature: An Anthology (1987), ed. Adam Shoemaker, Inside Black Australia (1988), ed. Kevin Gilbert, a collection of Aboriginal poetry, and Paperbark: A Collection of Black Australian Writings (1990), ed. Jack Davis et al. Science fiction is indebted to well-known writer Damien Broderick, who has edited The Zeitgeist Machine (1977), Strange Attractions (1985) and Matilda at the Speed of Light (1988). Les Murray collated the important and popular Anthology of Australian Religious Poetry (1986). Symptomatic of the changes in public perception in recent times is the ready acceptance of gay and lesbian anthologies, e.g., Edge City on Two Different Plans (1983), ed. Margaret Bradstock, Gary Dunne et al., a collection of poems, songs and fiction from forty-three gay/lesbian writers; The Exploding Frangipani (1990), ed. Cathie Dunsford and Susan Hawthorne, featuring Australian and NZ lesbian writing; Travelling on Love in a Time of Uncertainty (1991), ed. Gary Dunne, a book of contemporary Australian gay fiction; Falling for Grace: an Anthology of Australian Lesbian Fiction (1993), ed. Roberta Snow and Jill Taylor; and Australian Gay and Lesbian Writing (1993), ed. Robert Dessaix. Reminscences of childhood are the theme of In the Half Light (1988), ed. Jacqueline Kent, and Australian Childhood: An Anthology (1991), ed. Gwyn Dow and June Factor. The growing popularity of crime fiction in Australia is reflected in recent anthologies of crime and mystery short fiction, Sand on the Gumshoe (1989), ed. David Latta, and two edited by Stephen Knight, Dead Witness (1989) and More Crimes for a Summer Christmas (1991). The best Australian air stories are brought together in On a Wing and a Prayer (1989), ed. Terry Gwynn-Jones; the best travel stories in Home and Away (1987), ed. Rosemary Creswell; and the most ardent expressions of romance in The Language of Love (1991), ed. Pamela Allardice, which is an anthology of Australian love letters, love poetry and prose.

Literary societies and groups have compiled anthologies of the writings of their members: Wesley Milgate and Imogen Whyse produced the Poetry Society of Australia's first anthology in 1956; Nancy Keesing's Transition (1970) is a collection of the ASA; Square Poets (1971) groups the work of the Queensland FAW, as does Breakaway (1980) for the WA branch of the FAW, Barry Bannister's Walk a Different Way (1979) for the Darwin FAW and Island Authors (1971) for the Tasmanian Branch. Tuesday Night Live (1993), ed. Jeri Kroll and Barry Westburg, contains the work of eighty Friendly Street poets of SA. Selections from literary journals and newspapers have been gathered together in periodical collections, e.g. Austro-verse (1952) from Austro-vert; An Overland Muster (1965), selected by Stephen Murray-Smith from Overland 1954-64; On Native Grounds (1968), selected by C.B. Christesen and The Temperament of Generations (1990), by Jenny Lee, Gerald Murnane and Philip Mead from Meanjin; The Vital Decade (1968), chosen by Geoffrey Dutton and Max Harris from Australian Letters; Poems from the Age 1967-79 (1979), edited by R.A. Simpson; and Quadrant: Twenty-Five Years (1982), selected by Peter Coleman, Lee Shrubb and Vivian Smith. Compatible groups of poets have been brought together in such volumes as Judith Green et al. Four Poets (1962), Vincent Buckley's Eight by Eight (1963), Alexander Craig's Twelve Poets 1950-1970 (1971), and Michael Dugan's The Drunken Tram: Six Young Melbourne Poets (1972). Poetry and short stories submitted to competitions are frequently collected; examples of such anthologies are those associated with the Mattara Spring Festival, the C.J. Dennis and the Harold Kesteven poetry competitions, and the Henry Lawson festivals at Grenfell, NSW.

In the second half of the twentieth century, there has been an intensive gathering of Australian folk-songs and ballads, tall tales and folklore; Bill Wannan has been the most assiduous compiler of the last, having published many collections. A.B. Paterson's 1905 edition of Old Bush Songs was the fore-runner of a host of similar modern collections of ballads and folk-songs by such writers as Vance Palmer, Will Lawson, Douglas Stewart, Nancy Keesing, John Meredith, John Manifold, Russel Ward, Hugh Anderson and Ron Edwards.

The increased attention paid to Australian literature by recent generations of scholars and students has led to a proliferation of critical writing. Notable among the collections of important critical statements are Australian Literary Criticism (1962) edited by Grahame Johnston; The Literature of Australia (q.v., 1964, rev. edn 1976), edited by Geoffrey Dutton; Literary Australia (1966) by Clement Semmler and Derek White-lock; Twentieth Century Australian Literary Criticism (1967) by Semmler; The Writer in Australia (1969) by John Barnes; The Australian Nationalists (1971) by Chris Wallace-Crabbe; Bards, Bohemians, and Bookmen (1976) by Leon Cantrell; and The Penguin New Literary History of Australia (1988) under the general editorship of Laurie Hergenhan.

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A printed collection of musical works, usually by several composers, selected from a particular repertory. In the 16th century collections of separate popular forms are common, e.g. Petrucci's of French polyphonic chansons (Odhecaton, 1501), Attaingnant's over 70 chanson collections (1528-52) and the vast number of madrigal collections (from 1530), notably the famous Il trionfo di Dori (1592) and The Triumphes of Oriana (1601). Collections of sacred vocal music became popular in the late 16th century and the early 17th, but the trend by the late 17th was for music for amateur domestic music-making, vocal or instrumental (A Musicall Banquet, 1651); many such collections extended to long series or were issued as periodicals (Journal hebdomadaire, 1764-1808). The first anthologies devoted to older music appeared in the later 18th century, flourishing in the 19th. Among anthologies of special interest are those commemorating individuals (Josquin, Belyayev, Fauré) or historical events (a royal wedding, a military victory).

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anthology 1. Greek. The word anthologia, literally ‘flower-gathering’, has come to denote a collection of extracts from literary works, and particularly a collection of poems. Many collections of poems were made in Greece from the fourth century BC onwards. These have been lost as separate entities, but a vast collection of short poems, mostly in the elegiac metre, ranging in time from the seventh century BC to the tenth century AD, survives in what we know as the Greek Anthology. The basis of this collection went back many centuries. The earliest source of which we know is the Garland compiled by Meleager in the early years of the first century BC; it contains poems attributed to some fifty poets from Archilochus to Meleager himself. Few were more than eight lines long. Another anthology of epigrams written after Meleager's time was compiled around AD 40 by Philip of Thessalonika. The next most notable collection was the Syllogē or Cycle made c. AD 560 by the Byzantine poet and scholar Agathias from epigrams written by his contemporaries and himself. These three anthologies became the principal sources for an important and comprehensive anthology compiled c. AD 900 by the learned Constantine Cephalas, an official of the Imperial Palace at Byzantium, but perhaps never completed or published in the normal way. All these various collections have perished as such; the surviving Greek Anthology, a collection of sixteen books of epigrams, is derived from two Byzantine compilations which were based on Cephalas' work but with many additions. The first and larger is the Palatine Anthology, so-called because the unique tenth-century manuscript that contains it was found in the Count Palatine's Library at Heidelberg. The second is a collection made by the scholarly Byzantine monk Maximus Planudes in about 1300, and the only one known until the Palatine manuscript was discovered by the young French scholar Salmasius (Claude de Saumaise) in 1606. Those epigrams of Planudes which are not found in the Palatine manuscript are now published as book 16 of the Palatine Anthology.

The Greek Anthology contains a wide variety of poems, many of great charm. There are epitaphs (including the famous epitaphs attributed to Simonides), dedications, reflections on life and death and fate, poems on love, on family life, on great poets and artists and their works, and on the beauties of nature. A certain proportion are humorous or satirical, making fun of doctors, rhetoricians, athletes, etc., or of personal peculiarities, such as Nicon's long nose.

The dedicatory poems form perhaps the group that throws most light on ancient Greek life. There are dedications not only of arms, but of many kinds of implements and articles of daily use: a girl about to marry offers up her dolls and toys, a traveller his old hat, ‘a small gift, but given in piety’.

2. Latin. The Anthologia Latina is the title given to a collection of some 380 short Latin poems made in Africa during the early sixth century AD and preserved in the famous Codex Salmasianus (named after its former owner Salmasius: see above) of the seventh or eighth century. The collection contains poems written by African poets during the Vandal occupation (fifth to early sixth century) and a few miscellaneous earlier pieces, including the Pervigilium Veneris and three epigrams of the philosopher Seneca. It played an influential part in the development of medieval Latin poetry.

A collection of selected literary, artistic, or musical works or parts of works.

IN BRIEF: A collection of works from different authors.

The author's first work appeared in an anthology.

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For a list of words related to anthology, see:

• Publications - anthology: selection of poems, stories, or essays published together; compilation; treasury
• Books and Pages - anthology: collection of writings by different authors

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Dansk (Danish)
n. - antologi

Nederlands (Dutch)
bloemlezing

Français (French)
n. - anthologie

Deutsch (German)
n. - Anthologie, Auswahl

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - ανθολογία

Italiano (Italian)
antologia

Português (Portuguese)
n. - antologia (f), coletânea (f)

Русский (Russian)
антология

Español (Spanish)
n. - antología, florilegio

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - antologi

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
诗选, 文选

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 詩選, 文選

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 명시선집

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - アンソロジー, 名曲集

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) مقتطفات ادبيه مختاره‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮לקט, מקראה, קובץ, אנתולוגיה‬

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