Female shortlist a fitting tribute to an early feminist

Since its inception in 1957, the Miles Franklin Literary Award has been awarded 14 times to a woman, compared with 51 times to a man.

The big surprise of this year's shortlist of the prize, named after this author who was one of our first feminists, is for the first time the five shortlisted novels were all by women. Unlike the ''new wave'' of female writers of the 1980s, those writing now are just as likely to write in a male voice as a female one.

Where class was a dominant issue in earlier fiction, and gender became a preoccupation in the last decades of the 20th century, race - cultural and political clashes, persecution and dispossession - motivates much recent fiction. Many of the 13 Miles Franklin winners since 2000 have had such a focus.

Another unusual feature this year is that three of the books are first novels. So let's glimpse into the minds of our pre-eminent female fiction writers and see what's pre-occupying them.

Finalist Drusilla Modjeska's earlier books have won many non-fiction awards though all have drawn on fictional devices to recreate autobiographically or biographically based stories.

The Mountain is a monumental novel told in two parts and two voices: the first, covering 1968-73, takes in the years immediately before Papua New Guinean independence; the second, set in 2005-6 after independence. Only a handful of Australian novels have been set in PNG, and none has attempted such a broad historical sweep or created such compelling accounts of both the intellectual and political ferments in Moresby and the traditional cultures of remote villages.

Equally monumental, and covering much the same time period is fellow finalist Michelle de Kretser's fourth novel, Questions of Travel, which takes its title from an Elizabeth Bishop poem. Like Modjeska's, it is in part a novel of expatriation, dispossession and cultural and racial conflict. Like Modjeska's, it is told from both female and male perspectives. The slightly older Laura grows up in affluent Sydney; without any burning ambitions, she spends time living and travelling in London and Europe, eventually returning home to work for a publisher of travel guides. Ravi grows up in Sri Lanka, has mathematical talents that lead to an early interest in computers, marries young and has a child. When they are murdered in a most horrifying way, he is sent to Australia for safety and ends up working with Laura. While the plight of asylum seekers has figured in a number of recent Australian novels, Questions of Travel is unique in combining this with other contemporary issues, such as the impact of the internet and the commercialisation of travel.

While finalist Carrie Tiffany's Mateship with Birds takes place in the Australian bush in the 1950s, and could be termed a pastoral romance, it is anything but a conventional one. As in her prize-winning first novel, Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living (2005), Tiffany presents the familiar in a new light. That novel exposed the gap between theory and practice in Australian agriculture during the 1930s; Mateship, as its quirky title suggests, questions assumptions about human superiority to other animals. Dairy farmer Harry tends his cows while writing letters to his neighbour Betty. Eventually life forces triumph over the moral conventions of the 1950s.

The two novels by emerging rather than established writers are written in the first person, in both cases from the perspective of a child. In Romy Ash's Floundering, events unfold through the eyes of Tom who is taken to Western Australia by his unreliable mother. While he is left at a beachside camp rather than in the bush, I was reminded of that staple of Australian fiction, the lost child story. The boy suffers from thirst, hunger, exposure to the elements, the threat of predators. But Ash avoids both sentimentality and melodrama.

In The Beloved, Annah Faulkner allows her child narrator, Roberta, a much more colourful and lyrical use of language. This does not jar, however, since the narrative covers years rather than the days of Floundering, taking Roberta from childhood through to adolescence. This novel is set in the 1950s, mainly again in New Guinea. Like many earlier novels by Australian women, this is a coming of age story, involving mother-daughter conflict resolved only through pain and loss.

So, a very strong year for fiction by Australian women, a hard choice for the judges. Will it be another tie? We will find out on Wednesday in Canberra. How refreshing it will be to see a new female narrative emerge from our nation's capital.

Elizabeth Webby was professor of Australian literature at the University of Sydney from 1990 to 2007. She is a former judge of the Miles Franklin award.