Issue Details: First known date: 2016... 2016 Levels of Life : Modernity and Modernism in David Malouf's Fly Away Peter
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'David Malouf's novel Fly Away Peter (1982) uses modernist techniques to describe the impact of modernity on the emergent Australian nation. At its centre is the country lad Jim Saddler, who dies in the industrialised battlefield in France. His fate is entwined with that of his friend Ashley Crowther, who inherits his family's property, and whose embrace of modernity includes a determination to preserve the land and its wildlife. Ashley recognises the value of Jim's instinctive connection with the natural world, and his knowledge of, and fascination with, birds. This fascination aligns Jim with the photographer Imogen Harcourt. Miss Harcourt is a modern woman, using the new technologies of representation to record the natural world, its movement and change. At the novella's end, it is Imogen who turns her lens towards a new future, as her grief for Jim is transfigured through an epiphanic vision of a surfer riding the waves to the beach.' (Publication abstract)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Queensland Review Queensland Modernism vol. 23 no. 2 2016 11363617 2016 periodical issue

    'To posit Queensland's modernism may seem like an oxymoron. Queensland is often the butt of the southern states’ jokes. North of its more cultured and intellectual sibling-states (or so popular perception would have it), Queensland is ‘backward’, naïve, behind the times, provincial. According to this mythology, Brisbane is a glorified country town, Queenslanders refuse daylight saving for the sake of their very sensitive cows and curtains, and there is very little ‘culture’ to mention.' (Editorial introduction)

    2016
    pg. 258-269
Last amended 13 Jun 2017 13:26:38
258-269 Levels of Life : Modernity and Modernism in David Malouf's Fly Away Petersmall AustLit logo Queensland Review
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