ABSTRACT
The poetic “Generation of 68” represented the belated arrival of not just the Beat movement but modernism and Bohemianism themselves to Australian shores. Australia in the 1960s had a notably conservative literary reputation, especially in poetry, where the neo-Augustan Formalism of A. D. Hope held sway. This all changed with the Generation of 68, which made American Beat styles and modes common artistic parlance in Australia. If Australian bohemianism had its headquarters in the Sydney suburb of Balmain beginning in the early 1970s, its earliest moments can be said to have occurred in two very different contexts.
