Not to be confused with the much younger founder of New Jersey's Christ Church.

https://www.smh.com.au/culture/books/david-ireland-giant-of-letters-and-three-time-miles-franklin-winner-dies-20220729-p5b5ou.html
(includes photo)

By Jason Steger
July 29, 2022

David Ireland, the Australian novelist who won three Miles Franklin awards in the 1970s, has died at the age of 94.

He was best known for his second novel, The Unknown Industrial Prisoner (1971), for which he won his first Miles, and then followed it up with works such as The Glass Canoe, A Woman of the Future, which won The Age book of the year award in 1980, The Chosen and his last novel to be published, The World Repair Video Game in 2015.

After The Chosen, there was a long hiatus. When novelist Malcolm Knox reviewed The World Repair Video Game in this masthead he said Ireland, “the giant of letters”, had become “the unpublished struggler, writer of phantom novels, unseen, unreceived, unknown, and yet – the main thing – undeterred”.

He described the book as “a magnificent novel of ideas in the purest, simplest language, a work of vast scope smuggled inside the meandering days of a quiet dog owner renewing a coastal bushland”.

Ken Gelder, professor of English at the University of Melbourne and author of Atomic Fiction: The Novels of David Ireland, said The Unknown Industrial Prisoner was an amazing novel.

“The general thing you’d say about David Ireland is that he didn’t fit into Australian literature as it was understood. The Unknown Industrial Prisoner was an urban wasteland novel, and we didn’t have an urban wasteland novel in Australian literature until that time..

“And even more than that, it’s an industrial novel. It’s about an oil refinery and the workers at the refinery. We’ve had a lot of Australian novels about working life, but not industrial working life. We still don’t have many novels about industrial working lives. Australian novelists still go and set their novels in the country, a country town, which is also what David Ireland started to do later on.”

Michael Heyward, who published four of Ireland’s books in the Text Classics series, said Ireland was one of the post-war writers who changed the shape of the novel in Australia.

“He tackled industrial and working-class themes. He was a singular writer and did it with a really sturdy and stern grasp of the vernacular, so it felt like the novel could say something new. I think my favourite of his books is The Glass Canoe, which a funny and warm novel of male pub culture.”

Margaret Connolly, who had been Ireland’s agent for 36 years, said he had been writing until last year.

“I have never seen such a dedicated writer; writing was his vocation. He wrote every day. He had incredible understanding of his country and its people.”

Ireland was born in Lakemba, NSW, in 1927 and worked as a greenkeeper, in a factory and for a long period in an oil refinery. He first wrote poetry and plays, and his first novel, The Chantic Bird, was published in 1968. He gave up work to write full time in 1973. Connolly said there remained some manuscripts “that we will look at and talk over with the family”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Ireland_(author)

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/a/david-ireland/a-woman-of-the-future/
(one Kirkus review)

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/455672.David_Ireland
(reader reviews)

From Benet's Reader's Encyclopedia:

"Australian novelist and playwright. Ireland is essentially a political writer whose attacks on the materialism and apathy of Australian society reflect concern with the human condition rather than any specific ideology. His blackly humorous, surrealistic works amass minutely described details to reveal an absurdist vision of an impersonal, dehumanized society..."