University of Southern Queensland
QLD

2016

Australian Stories (ENL1001) Semester 2
y separately published work icon Bitin' Back Just Call Me Jean Vivienne Cleven , St Lucia : University of Queensland Press , 2001 Z669132 2001 single work novel (taught in 7 units) 'When the Blackout's star player Nevil Dooley wakes one morning to don a frock and 'eyeshada', his mother's idle days at the bingo hall are gone forever. Mystified and clueless, single parent Mavis takes bush-cunning and fast footwork to unravel the mystery behind this sudden change of face... Hilarity prevails while desperation builds in the race to save Nevil from the savage consequences of discovery in a town where a career in footy is a young black man's only escape. Neither pig shoots, bust-ups at the Two Dogs, bare-knuckle sessions in the shed or even a police siege can slow the countdown on this human time bomb.' (Source: Publisher's blurb)
y separately published work icon The Boat Nam Le , Camberwell : Hamish Hamilton , 2008 Z1495449 2008 selected work short story (taught in 42 units)

'In the magnificent opening story, "Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice," a young writer is urged by his friends to mine his father's experiences in Vietnam - and what seems at first a satire on turning one's life into literary commerce becomes a transcendent exploration of homeland, and the ties between father and son. "Cartagena" provides a visceral glimpse of life in Colombia as it enters the mind of a fourteen-year-old hit man facing the ultimate test. In "Meeting Elise" an ageing New York painter mourns his body's decline as he prepares to meet his daughter on the eve of her Carnegie Hall debut. And with graceful symmetry, the final, title story returns to Vietnam, to a fishing trawler crowded with refugees where a young woman's bond with a mother and her small son forces both women to a shattering decision.' (From the author's website.)

y separately published work icon Dead Europe Christos Tsiolkas , Milsons Point : Vintage Australia , 2005 Z1186455 2005 single work novel (taught in 14 units) 'The novel comprises two separate narratives. The first, told in the style of a fairytale, is set in a traditional Greek peasant village during and after World War II. Its world is still magical. ... The second narrative is set in the present time. The narrator is a 36-year-old gay, Greek-Australian photographic artist named Isaac. We meet Isaac at a time when he has travelled to Greece for what turns out to be a rather dismal officially funded exhibition of his works.'

Source: Manne, Robert. 'Dead Disturbing'. The Monthly. (June, 2005)
y separately published work icon Johnno : A Novel David Malouf , St Lucia : University of Queensland Press , 1975 Z25348 1975 single work novel (taught in 9 units)

'Dante and Johnno are unlikely childhood friends, growing up in the bustle of steamy, wartime Brisbane. Later, as teenagers, they learn about love and life amidst the city's pubs and public libraries, backyards and brothels, Moreton Bay figs and tennis parties. As adults, they make the great pilgrimage overseas and maintain an uneasy friendship as they seek to build their lives.

'An affectionate and bittersweet portrait, Johnno brilliantly recreates the sleazy, tropical half-city that was Brisbane and captures a generation locked in combat with the elusive Australian dream.'

Source: Publisher's blurb (Penguin).

form y separately published work icon Lantana Andrew Bovell , ( dir. Ray Lawrence ) Sydney : Jan Chapman Productions , 2001 Z900877 2001 single work film/TV thriller (taught in 6 units)

'A woman disappears. Four marriages are drawn into a tangled web of love, deceit, sex and death. Not all of them survive. LANTANA is a psychological thriller about love. It's about the mistakes we make, the consequences we suffer, and the attempts we make to fix things up.'

Source: Screen Australia. (Sighted: 4/12/2013)

form y separately published work icon Picnic at Hanging Rock Cliff Green , ( dir. Peter Weir ) Australia Adelaide : McElroy and McElroy , 1975 Z822342 1975 single work film/TV mystery horror (taught in 9 units)

On St Valentine's Day 1900, three schoolgirls and a teacher from an exclusive English-style boarding school go missing at the mysterious Hanging Rock in central Victoria. One of the girls is found alive a week later, but the others are never seen again. As morale within the school begins to disintegrate, the headmistress's increasingly incoherent anger is turned towards one student, leading to tragic consequences. Although the police suspect Michael Fitzhubert, a young English aristocrat, and his manservant Albert, who were in the area at the time the girls disappeared, the mystery is never solved. As Paul Byrnes (Australian Screen) notes, the suggested scenarios range from the 'banal and explicable (a crime of passion) to deeply mystical (a crime of nature).'

[Source: Australian Screen]

y separately published work icon Puberty Blues Kathy Lette , Gabrielle Carey , Carlton : McPhee Gribble , 1979 Z355484 1979 single work novel (taught in 1 units) ''By day, we were at school learning logarithms, but by night - in the back of cars, under the bowling alley, on Cronulla Beach, or, if you were lucky, in a bed while someone's parents were out - you paid off your friendship ring.' For Deb and Sue, life is about surfies, panel vans, straight-leg Levis, nicking off from school, getting wasted and fitting in. But why should guys have all the fun? Puberty Blues is raw, humorous and honest. An Australian classic. 'A profoundly moral story' -- Germaine Greer 'I don't recall reading Puberty Blues so much as devouring it. I was about thirteen, alone in my bedroom with the door firmly shut. I was fascinated' -- Kylie Minogue'
y separately published work icon Summer of the Seventeenth Doll Ray Lawler , 1955 London Sydney : Angus and Robertson , 1957 Z522838 1955 single work drama (taught in 56 units)

'The most famous Australian play and one of the best loved, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll is a tragicomic story of Roo and Barney, two Queensland sugar-cane cutters who go to Melbourne every year during the 'layoff' to live it up with their barmaid girl friends. The title refers to kewpie dolls, tawdry fairground souvenirs, that they brings as gifts and come, in some readings of the play, to represent adolescent dreams in which the characters seem to be permanently trapped. The play tells the story in traditional well-made, realistic form, with effective curtains and an obligatory scene. Its principal appeal – and that of two later plays with which it forms The Doll Trilogy – is the freshness and emotional warmth, even sentimentality, with which it deals with simple virtues of innocence and youthful energy that lie at the heart of the Australian bush legend.

'Ray Lawler’s play confronts that legend with the harsh new reality of modern urban Australia. The 17th year of the canecutters’ arrangement is different. There has been a fight on the canefields and Roo, the tough, heroic, bushman, has arrived with his ego battered and without money. Barney’s girl friend Nancy has left to get married and is replaced by Pearl, who is suspicious of the whole set-up and hopes to trap Barney into marriage. The play charts the inevitable failure of the dream of the layoff, the end of the men’s supremacy as bush heroes and, most poignantly, the betrayal of the idealistic self-sacrifice made by Roo’s girl friend Olive – the most interesting character – to keep the whole thing going. The city emerges victorious, but the emotional tone of the play vindicates the fallen bushman.'

Source: McCallum, John. 'Summer of the Seventeenth Doll.' Companion to Theatre in Australia. Ed. Philip Parson and Victoria Chance. Sydney: Currency Press , 1997: 564-656.

Fairytales and Other Forms (CWR2001) Semester 1
Law and Literature (ENL3007) Semester 1
y separately published work icon True Country Kim Scott , Fremantle : Fremantle Press , 1993 Z165486 1993 single work novel (taught in 30 units) 'Billy is drifting, looking for a place to land. A young school teacher, he arrives in Australia's remote far north in search of his own history, his Aboriginality, and his future. He finds himself in a region of abundance and beauty but also of conflict, dispossession and dislocation. On the desperate frontier between cultures, Billy must find his place of belonging.' (Source: Fremantle Press website)
form y separately published work icon Jindabyne Beatrix Christian , ( dir. Ray Lawrence ) Australia : April Films , 2006 Z1281547 2006 single work film/TV thriller crime mystery (taught in 4 units)

'The story of a murder and a marriage. A powerful and original film about the things that haunt us.'

Source: Screen Australia. (Sighted: 2/8/2013)

Writing About Place (CWR2002) Semester 2
Writing Good Prose (CWR1001) Semester 1
Writing about People (CWR1002) Semester 2

2015

Australian Stories (ENL1001) Semester 2
y separately published work icon Home Larissa Behrendt , St Lucia : University of Queensland Press , 2004 Z1113719 2004 single work novel (taught in 10 units)

'A story of homecoming, this absorbing novel opens with a young, city-based lawyer setting out on her first visit to ancestral country. Candice arrives at "the place where the rivers meet", the camp of the Eualeyai where in 1918 her grandmother Garibooli was abducted. As Garibooli takes up the story of Candice's Aboriginal family, the twentieth century falls away.

Garibooli, renamed Elizabeth, is sent to work as a housemaid, but marriage soon offers escape from the terror of the master's night-time visits. Her displacement carries into the lives of her seven children - their stories witness to the impact of orphanage life and the consequences of having a dark skin in post-war Australia. Vividly rekindled, the lives of her family point the direction home for Candice.

Home is a ... novel from an author who understands both the capacity of language to suppress and the restorative potency of stories that bridge past and present.' (Source: Publisher's blurb)

y separately published work icon Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature Nicholas Jose (editor), Kerryn Goldsworthy (editor), Anita Heiss (editor), David McCooey (editor), Peter Minter (editor), Nicole Moore (editor), Elizabeth Webby (editor), Crows Nest : Allen and Unwin , 2009 Z1590615 2009 anthology correspondence diary drama essay extract poetry prose short story (taught in 23 units)

'Some of the best, most significant writing produced in Australia over more than two centuries is gathered in this landmark anthology. Covering all genres - from fiction, poetry and drama to diaries, letters, essays and speeches - the anthology maps the development of one of the great literatures in English in all its energy and variety.

'The writing reflects the diverse experiences of Australians in their encounter with their extraordinary environment and with themselves. This is literature of struggle, conflict and creative survival. It is literature of lives lived at the extremes, of frontiers between cultures, of new dimensions of experience, where imagination expands.

'This rich, informative and entertaining collection charts the formation of an Australian voice that draws inventively on Indigenous words, migrant speech and slang, with a cheeky, subversive humour always to the fore. For the first time, Aboriginal writings are interleaved with other English-language writings throughout - from Bennelong's 1796 letter to the contemporary flowering of Indigenous fiction and poetry - setting up an exchange that reveals Australian history in stark new ways.

'From vivid settler accounts to haunting gothic tales, from raw protest to feisty urban satire and playful literary experiment, from passionate love poetry to moving memoir, the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature reflects the creative eloquence of a society.

'Chosen by a team of expert editors, who have provided illuminating essays about their selections, and with more than 500 works from over 300 authors, it is an authoritative survey and a rich world of reading to be enjoyed.' (Publisher's blurb)

Allen and Unwin have a YouTube channel with a number of useful videos on the Anthology.

y separately published work icon The Secret River Kate Grenville , Melbourne : Text Publishing , 2005 Z1194031 2005 single work novel historical fiction (taught in 69 units)

'In 1806 William Thornhill, a man of quick temper and deep feelings, is transported from the slums of London to New South Wales for the term of his natural life. With his wife Sal and their children he arrives in a harsh land he cannot understand.

'But the colony can turn a convict into a free man. Eight years later Thornhill sails up the Hawkesbury to claim a hundred acres for himself.

'Aboriginal people already live on that river. And other recent arrivals - Thomas Blackwood, Smasher Sullivan and Mrs Herring - are finding their own ways to respond to them.

'Thornhill, a man neither better nor worse than most, soon has to make the most difficult choice of his life.

'Inspired by research into her own family history, Kate Grenville vividly creates the reality of settler life, its longings, dangers and dilemmas. The Secret River is a brilliantly written book, a groundbreaking story about identity, belonging and ownership.' (From the publisher's website.)

y separately published work icon The Slap Christos Tsiolkas , Crows Nest : Allen and Unwin , 2008 Z1739894 2008 single work novel (taught in 40 units)

'At a suburban barbecue, a man slaps a child who is not his own.

'This event has a shocking ricochet effect on a group of people, mostly friends, who are directly or indirectly influenced by the event.

'In this remarkable novel, Christos Tsiolkas turns his unflinching and all-seeing eye onto that which connects us all: the modern family and domestic life in the twenty-first century. The Slap is told from the points of view of eight people who were present at the barbecue. The slap and its consequences force them all to question their own families and the way they live, their expectations, beliefs and desires.

'What unfolds is a powerful, haunting novel about love, sex and marriage, parenting and children, and the fury and intensity - all the passions and conflicting beliefs - that family can arouse. In its clear-eyed and forensic dissection of the ever-growing middle class and its aspirations and fears, The Slap is also a poignant, provocative novel about the nature of loyalty and happiness, compromise and truth.' (Publisher's blurb)

Fairytales and Other Forms (CWR2001) Semester 1
Law and Literature (ENL3007) Semester 1
y separately published work icon True Country Kim Scott , Fremantle : Fremantle Press , 1993 Z165486 1993 single work novel (taught in 30 units) 'Billy is drifting, looking for a place to land. A young school teacher, he arrives in Australia's remote far north in search of his own history, his Aboriginality, and his future. He finds himself in a region of abundance and beauty but also of conflict, dispossession and dislocation. On the desperate frontier between cultures, Billy must find his place of belonging.' (Source: Fremantle Press website)
form y separately published work icon Jindabyne Beatrix Christian , ( dir. Ray Lawrence ) Australia : April Films , 2006 Z1281547 2006 single work film/TV thriller crime mystery (taught in 4 units)

'The story of a murder and a marriage. A powerful and original film about the things that haunt us.'

Source: Screen Australia. (Sighted: 2/8/2013)

Writing About People (CWR1002) Semester 2
Writing About Place (CWR2002) Semester 2
Writing Good Prose (CWR1001) Semester 1

2014

Australian Drama (THE2005) Semester 1
y separately published work icon The Cherry Pickers Kevin Gilbert , 1968 1968 (Manuscript version)x401069 Z245424 1968 single work drama (taught in 4 units)

"When the cold August wind abated in its final sigh of emergence from the lean, hard winter months into springtime, the People emerged from the cold, and often leaky shanties, and old discarded car-bodies, which were their home, to gather together their few ragged possessions and tie them in bundles ready for traveling to the cherry orchards, often many hundreds of miles away. Many would travel by bicycle with their swags swinging crazily from the frames; many traveled in old tattered caravans drawn by horses; many just walked beside the caravans through the red sandhill and mallee country, while the more daring 'jumped the rattler', the slow old steam train that chugged across the land.

Wherever the people gathered there too was a spirit of revival, of intense relief, for the "cherry season" meant a temporary release from near starvation. In a good season it could mean some old debts would be repaid. It meant food and toys for the children for the forthcoming Christmas season and, above all, it meant some independence, some freedom, from under the crucifying heels of the local police and the white 'station' managers; an escape from the refugee camps called 'Aboriginal Reserves'. The cherry season was the time for hope, for meeting old friends and relatives, for laughing and for making love. The Cherry Pickers tells it all.' Source: http://blackwebs.photoaccess.org.au/~kevingilbert/books/books.html (Sighted: 12/4/2009).

y separately published work icon Don's Party David Williamson , 1971 1971 (Manuscript version)x402002 Z1505961 1971 single work drama satire (taught in 17 units)
y separately published work icon Eating Ice Cream With Your Eyes Closed David Brown , 2002 Fortitude Valley : Playlab , 2004 Z1134746 2002 single work drama humour (taught in 2 units) A bus terminal in a country town in the middle of the night, where three unlikely companions are thrown together by circumstance. Macca, Dayne and Doug are as different as ... well, vanilla, strawberry and chocolate ice cream. But in one extraordinary night of drinking, talking and fighting, they find their common ground.
y separately published work icon The Female of the Species Joanna Murray-Smith , 2006 Strawberry Hills : Currency Press , 2008 Z1292339 2006 single work drama humour (taught in 3 units)

'Thirty years ago Margot Mason, pioneer of the 1970s Women's Liberation movement and fearless academic, wrote her groundbreaking work and numerous best-sellers followed. Now she has writer's block. Molly, an unannounced visitor and committed fan of Margot and her work, offers a potential solution - until Molly produces a gun and calmly informs Margot that she intends to kill her because she blames her for warping her mother's mind and ruining her life with her hit book The Cerebral Vagina.

'Joanna Murray-Smith's deliciously wicked comedy deftly walks the tightrope between satire and farce proving the female of the species is not only deadlier, but funnier than the male.

This play 'was inspired by Germaine Greer's experience of being held captive in her country house in Essex in 2000'. (Publisher's blurb)

y separately published work icon Inside the Island / The Precious Woman Louis Nowra , Sydney : Currency Press , 1981 Z239348 1981 selected work drama (taught in 2 units)
y separately published work icon Love Me Tender : Inspired by Euripides' Iphigenia in Aulis Tom Holloway , 2010 Sydney : Currency Press , 2010 Z1627311 2010 single work drama (taught in 2 units)

'On an expectant stage - a dreamscape of an Australian backyard - five actors tease out the story of a father and daughter. They question each other, they watch each other, they confess, they draw each other along. By the end of the story, modern life has been engulfed in fire, and a tale of pure love has become a tragedy of leadership and sacrifice.

'Love Me Tender is a play of beauty and emotional power. Inspired by Euripides' Iphigenia in Aulis, Tom Holloway has orchestrated a thrilling vision of contemporary Australia drawn from our experiences of the Black Saturday bushfires, of raunch culture and pre-teen sexuality, and of our domestic rituals. This is exquisite writing about our fears and expectations of fathers, about the extremities of love, and about the need for action when the world comes undone.'

Source: Belvoir Street Theatre website, http://www.belvoir.com.au/
Sighted: 22/09/2009

y separately published work icon Norm and Ahmed Straight White Male : Norm and Ahmed ; Radha and Ryan Alex Buzo , 1960-1968 (Manuscript version)x401337 Z342308 1960 single work drama (taught in 3 units)
— Appears in: ノームとアーメッド /​ アレクサンダー.ブ-ゾ 他 1993;

'A rather ocker, white Australian male encounters a well-mannered Pakistani student with revolutionary ambitions in a Sydney park at midnight. Buzo creates an image of race prejudice as a profoundly irrational force in the behaviour of ordinary Australians.' (Publication summary)

y separately published work icon Ruben Guthrie Brendan Cowell , 2005 Sydney : Currency Press , 2009 Z1608267 2005 single work drama humour (taught in 2 units)

'Ruben Guthrie is on fire. At only 29, he is Creative Director of a cutting edge advertising agency, lives with his Czech supermodel fiancé and drinks like he invented it. Ruben seems invincible, until one fated evening when he drinks so much vodka he thinks he can fly. Before Ruben knows it his fiancé has left him, his Mum is escorting him to AA meetings and his bottomless schooner of confidence has all but drained away. For the first time in his life, Ruben Guthrie is alone.'

Source: www.belvoir.com.au
Sighted: 22/04/2008

y separately published work icon The Seed Kate Mulvany , 2007 Strawberry Hills : Currency Press , 2008 Z1151825 2007 single work drama (taught in 4 units) 'Meet Rose Maloney. Her dad Danny went to Vietnam. Her grandfather Brian is ex-IRA. Today is their collective birthday. From this intimate reunion, The Seed opens itself up over and over again until a silent family battle becomes a national story about finding new life amongst the rubble of old wars. This play has a very special kind of honesty and humour to it which sorts the great lies we buy into from the reality we live through.' (Publisher's blurb)
y separately published work icon Selected Plays Jack Hibberd , Strawberry Hills : Currency Press , 2000 Z795032 2000 selected work drama (taught in 3 units)

Three landmark plays from the renaissance of Australian playwriting: 'White with Wire Wheels' was the first play to examine the insecurity inherent in the male culture of women and cars; 'Dimboola', a Rabelaisian account of a country wedding; Monk O'Neill, of 'A Stretch of the Imagination' has become an archetype of Australian character.

y separately published work icon The Serpent's Teeth : Two Plays Daniel Keene , Strawberry Hills : Currency Press , 2008 Z1491078 2008 selected work drama (taught in 2 units)

'Citizens is set at the dividing wall of an unspecified war-torn country where a series of unconnected exchanges between ordinary people transpire as they go about their day-to-day lives. A picture of life is revealed in the fragments of the interchanges between vulnerable people where the human spirit is carefully probed and laid bare.

'Soldiers is set in an air force hangar in Sydney, where family members gather to receive the bodies of their sons, brothers, husbands and friends lost in a conflict that they may not have supported.'

Source: Production blurbs (Kings Cross Theatre production).

y separately published work icon The Seven Stages of Grieving Wesley Enoch , Deborah Mailman , Hilary Beaton , 1995 Brisbane : Playlab , 1996 Z355402 1995 single work drama (taught in 14 units)
— Appears in: アボリジニ戯曲選 : ストールン; 嘆きの七段階 2001;

'This is a proud milestone in Australian theatre history; a contemporary Indigenous performance text from the highly acclaimed Kooemba Jdarra. Appropriating western forms whilst using traditional storytelling, it gives emotional insight into Murri life. This one-woman show follows the journey of an Aboriginal ‘Everywoman’ as she tells poignant and humorous stories of grief and reconciliation. A powerful, demanding and culturally profound text, The 7 Stages of Grieving is a celebration of Indigenous survival, an invitation to grieve publicly, a time to exorcize pain. It has a universal theme told through the personal experiences of one incredible character.'

Source: Publisher's blurb (Playlab).

y separately published work icon Songket [and] This Territory : Two Plays Noëlle Janaczewska , Strawberry Hills : Currency Press , 2008 Z1498016 2008 selected work drama (taught in 2 units)
y separately published work icon When the Rain Stops Falling Andrew Bovell , 2008 Strawberry Hills : Currency Press , 2009 Z1430823 2008 single work drama (taught in 8 units)

'It begins with a miracle. On a rainy day in Alice Springs in 2039 a fish falls like manna from heaven to bless the reunion of a father with his long lost son. Perhaps it's a sign that the pattern of betrayal and abandonment that began on another rainy day in London in 1959 will come to an end.

'Who'll stop the rain? Andrew Bovell's award-winning When the Rain Stops Falling is powerful storytelling in which the voices of our past echo into our future.' (Publisher's blurb)

Australian Stories (ENL1001) Semester 2
form y separately published work icon Crocodile Dundee Paul Hogan , Ken Shadie , John Cornell , ( dir. Peter Faiman ) 1985 Sydney : Rimfire Films , 1986 Z1612282 1985 single work film/TV (taught in 6 units)

Mick 'Crocodile' Dundee runs an outback adventure business with his trusted friend and self-proclaimed mentor Walter Reilly. When he survives a crocodile attack, the news travels well beyond the Northern Territory, and a glamorous New York journalist, Sue Charlton, arrives to interview him. He invites her to come with him to the place where he was attacked. When Sue herself is attacked by a croc, Mick saves her. This leads to an invitation for Mick to visit his first ever city: New York City. Mick finds the culture and life in New York City a lot different than his home.

y separately published work icon Home Larissa Behrendt , St Lucia : University of Queensland Press , 2004 Z1113719 2004 single work novel (taught in 10 units)

'A story of homecoming, this absorbing novel opens with a young, city-based lawyer setting out on her first visit to ancestral country. Candice arrives at "the place where the rivers meet", the camp of the Eualeyai where in 1918 her grandmother Garibooli was abducted. As Garibooli takes up the story of Candice's Aboriginal family, the twentieth century falls away.

Garibooli, renamed Elizabeth, is sent to work as a housemaid, but marriage soon offers escape from the terror of the master's night-time visits. Her displacement carries into the lives of her seven children - their stories witness to the impact of orphanage life and the consequences of having a dark skin in post-war Australia. Vividly rekindled, the lives of her family point the direction home for Candice.

Home is a ... novel from an author who understands both the capacity of language to suppress and the restorative potency of stories that bridge past and present.' (Source: Publisher's blurb)

y separately published work icon Loaded Christos Tsiolkas , Milsons Point : Vintage Australia , 1995 Z565443 1995 single work novel (taught in 40 units)

'Families can detonate. Some families are torn apart forever by one small act, one solitary mistake. In my family it was a series of small explosions; consistent, passionate, pathetic. Cruel words, crude threats... We spurred each other on till we reached a crescendo of pain and we retired exhausted to our rooms, in tears or in fury.

'Ari is nineteen, unemployed and a poofter who doesn't want to be gay. He is looking for something - anything - to take him away from his aimless existence in suburban Melbourne. He doesn't believe in anyone or anything, except the power of music. All he wants to do is dance, take drugs, have sex and change the world.

'For Ari, all the orthodoxies of family, sex, politics and work have collapsed. Caught between the traditional Greek world of his parents and friends and the alluring, destructive world of clubs, chemicals and anonymous sex, all Ari can do is ease his pain in the only ways he knows how.

'Written in stark, uncompromising prose, Loaded is a first novel of great passion and power.' (From the publisher's website.)

y separately published work icon Summer of the Seventeenth Doll Ray Lawler , 1955 London Sydney : Angus and Robertson , 1957 Z522838 1955 single work drama (taught in 56 units)

'The most famous Australian play and one of the best loved, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll is a tragicomic story of Roo and Barney, two Queensland sugar-cane cutters who go to Melbourne every year during the 'layoff' to live it up with their barmaid girl friends. The title refers to kewpie dolls, tawdry fairground souvenirs, that they brings as gifts and come, in some readings of the play, to represent adolescent dreams in which the characters seem to be permanently trapped. The play tells the story in traditional well-made, realistic form, with effective curtains and an obligatory scene. Its principal appeal – and that of two later plays with which it forms The Doll Trilogy – is the freshness and emotional warmth, even sentimentality, with which it deals with simple virtues of innocence and youthful energy that lie at the heart of the Australian bush legend.

'Ray Lawler’s play confronts that legend with the harsh new reality of modern urban Australia. The 17th year of the canecutters’ arrangement is different. There has been a fight on the canefields and Roo, the tough, heroic, bushman, has arrived with his ego battered and without money. Barney’s girl friend Nancy has left to get married and is replaced by Pearl, who is suspicious of the whole set-up and hopes to trap Barney into marriage. The play charts the inevitable failure of the dream of the layoff, the end of the men’s supremacy as bush heroes and, most poignantly, the betrayal of the idealistic self-sacrifice made by Roo’s girl friend Olive – the most interesting character – to keep the whole thing going. The city emerges victorious, but the emotional tone of the play vindicates the fallen bushman.'

Source: McCallum, John. 'Summer of the Seventeenth Doll.' Companion to Theatre in Australia. Ed. Philip Parson and Victoria Chance. Sydney: Currency Press , 1997: 564-656.

y separately published work icon Turning the Century : Writing of the 1890s Christopher Lee (editor), St Lucia : University of Queensland Press , 1999 Z397740 1999 anthology short story poetry extract prose (taught in 12 units) The works in this selection, all composed or published between 1885 and 1905, 'represent the way in which literary forms were used to respond to some of the important social, cultural and political preoccupations' of Australia during this period (Note on the Text, ix). The work is divided into the following six sections, each with a prefatory Editor's Note; Histories and Futures; Home and Away; Love and Other Catastrophes; Work and Play; Civilisation and its Discontents: Art and Society. There is also a List of Sources, pp. 374-381, and a bibliography, pp. 382-390.
Modern Drama (THE2008) Semester 2
y separately published work icon Robbery Under Arms Alfred Dampier , Garnet Walch , 1890 Paddington St Lucia : Currency Press Australasian Drama Studies , 1985 Z549990 1890 single work drama (taught in 3 units)
The Australian Novel (ENL3005) Semester 1
y separately published work icon Fly Away Peter The Bread of Time to Come David Malouf , 1982 London : Chatto and Windus , 1982 Z22123 1982 single work novella war literature (taught in 14 units) 'For three very different people brought together by their love for birds, life on the Queensland coast in 1914 is the timeless and idyllic world of sandpipers, ibises and kingfishers. In another hemisphere civilization rushes headlong into a brutal conflict. Life there is lived from moment to moment. Inevitably, the two young men - sanctuary owner and employee - are drawn to the war, and into the mud and horror of the trenches of Armentieres. Alone on the beach, their friend Imogen, the middle-aged wildlife photographer, must acknowledge for all three of them that the past cannot be held.' (Source: Publisher's website)
y separately published work icon A Fringe of Leaves Patrick White , London : Jonathan Cape , 1976 Z476217 1976 single work novel (taught in 8 units)

"Set in Australia in the 1840s, A FRINGE OF LEAVES combines dramatic action with a finely distilled moral vision. Returning home to England from Van Diemen's land, the Bristol Maid is shipwrecked on the Queensland coast and Mrs Roxburgh is taken prisoner by a tribe of aborigines, along with the rest of the passengers and crew. In the course of her escape, she is torn by conflicting loyalties - to her dead husband, to her rescuer, to her own and to her adoptive class."

Source: Goodreads
y separately published work icon The Hunter Julia Leigh , Ringwood : Penguin , 1999 Z129151 1999 single work novel (taught in 23 units)

'An unnamed man, M, arrives at a remote house on the fringe of a vast wilderness and soon disappears into a world of silence and stillness. His one mission: to find the last thylacine, the fabled Tasmanian tiger. She is said to have passed into myth but a sighting has been reported... Uncompromising and compelling, Julia Leigh's stunning first novel does not give up any of its secrets easily. The Hunter is a haunting tale of obsession that builds to an unforgettable conclusion.'

Source: Libraries Australia (Sighted 18/03/2011).


'While on his mission, the hunter lodges with a grief-ridden family of outcasts whose father has mysteriously vanished after sighting the Thylacine. The hunter succumbs more than he'd like to the family's scant charms and when tragedy strikes has to further purge his psyche to focus upon his elusive quarry. There is something tantalizing at large here as well as the mythical beast in this soul-stalking story about a group of doomed creatures whose unfortunate extinction is never really in doubt.' - Reviewed by Chris Packham, naturalist and broadcaster

Source: British Union Catalogue http://copac.ac.uk/search?rn=3&au=leigh&ti=hunter (Sighted 14/10/2011)

y separately published work icon Joe Cinque's Consolation Helen Garner , Sydney : Pan Macmillan Australia , 2004 Z1132428 2004 single work prose (taught in 26 units)

'In October 1997 a clever young law student at ANU made a bizarre plan to murder her devoted boyfriend after a dinner party at their house. Some of the dinner guests - most of them university students - had heard rumours of the plan. Nobody warned Joe Cinque. He died one Sunday, in his own bed, of a massive dose of rohypnol and heroin. His girlfriend and her best friend were charged with murder. Helen Garner followed the trials in the ACT Supreme Court. Compassionate but unflinching, this is a book about how and why Joe Cinque died. It probes the gap between ethics and the law; examines the helplessness of the courts in the face of what we think of as 'evil'; and explores conscience, culpability, and the battered ideal of duty of care.' (Source: Pan Macmillan website)

Garner takes 'a deliberately subjective and "literary" approach' to her material with an 'emphasis on a sympatheitic authorial persona as the source of the reader's perspective' (Susan Lever 'The Crimes of the Past: Anna Funder's Stasiland and Helen Garner's Joe Cinque's Consolation'. Paper delivered at the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL) conference 2006).

y separately published work icon The Secret River Kate Grenville , Melbourne : Text Publishing , 2005 Z1194031 2005 single work novel historical fiction (taught in 69 units)

'In 1806 William Thornhill, a man of quick temper and deep feelings, is transported from the slums of London to New South Wales for the term of his natural life. With his wife Sal and their children he arrives in a harsh land he cannot understand.

'But the colony can turn a convict into a free man. Eight years later Thornhill sails up the Hawkesbury to claim a hundred acres for himself.

'Aboriginal people already live on that river. And other recent arrivals - Thomas Blackwood, Smasher Sullivan and Mrs Herring - are finding their own ways to respond to them.

'Thornhill, a man neither better nor worse than most, soon has to make the most difficult choice of his life.

'Inspired by research into her own family history, Kate Grenville vividly creates the reality of settler life, its longings, dangers and dilemmas. The Secret River is a brilliantly written book, a groundbreaking story about identity, belonging and ownership.' (From the publisher's website.)

y separately published work icon True Country Kim Scott , Fremantle : Fremantle Press , 1993 Z165486 1993 single work novel (taught in 30 units) 'Billy is drifting, looking for a place to land. A young school teacher, he arrives in Australia's remote far north in search of his own history, his Aboriginality, and his future. He finds himself in a region of abundance and beauty but also of conflict, dispossession and dislocation. On the desperate frontier between cultures, Billy must find his place of belonging.' (Source: Fremantle Press website)
y separately published work icon True History of the Kelly Gang Peter Carey , St Lucia : University of Queensland Press , 2000 Z668312 2000 single work novel historical fiction (taught in 29 units)

'"I lost my own father at 12 yr. of age and know what it is to be raised on lies and silences my dear daughter you are presently too young to understand a word I write but this history is for you and will contain no single lie may I burn in Hell if I speak false."

'In TRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG, the legendary Ned Kelly speaks for himself, scribbling his narrative on errant scraps of paper in semi-literate but magically descriptive prose as he flees from the police. To his pursuers, Kelly is nothing but a monstrous criminal, a thief and a murderer. To his own people, the lowly class of ordinary Australians, the bushranger is a hero, defying the authority of the English to direct their lives. Indentured by his bootlegger mother to a famous horse thief (who was also her lover), Ned saw his first prison cell at 15 and by the age of 26 had become the most wanted man in the wild colony of Victoria, taking over whole towns and defying the law until he was finally captured and hanged. Here is a classic outlaw tale, made alive by the skill of a great novelist.' (From the publisher's website.)

y separately published work icon The White Earth Andrew McGahan , Crows Nest : Allen and Unwin , 2004 Z1113518 2004 single work novel (taught in 14 units)

'His father dead by fire and his mother plagued by demons of her own, William is cast upon the charity of his unknown uncle - an embittered old man encamped in the ruins of a once great station homestead, Kuran House. It's a baffling and sinister new world for the boy, a place of decay and secret histories. His uncle is obsessed by a long life of decline and by a dark quest for revival, his mother is desperate for a wealth and security she has never known, and all their hopes it seems come to rest upon William's young shoulders. But as the past and present of Kuran Station unravel and merge together, the price of that inheritance may prove to be the downfall of them all. The White Earth is a haunting, disturbing and cautionary tale.' (publisher's website)

y separately published work icon Amelia Dee and the Peacock Lamp Odo Hirsch , Crows Nest : Allen and Unwin , 2007 Z1434954 2007 single work children's fiction children's (taught in 1 units) "Amelia Dee lives in the green house on Marburg Street, where a rare bronze lamp hangs outside her bedroom door. No one knows where it came from or how it got there. Only she, Amelia thinks, knows the secret that the lamp contains. But she's wrong. When Mr Vishwanath introduces Amelia to the Princess Parvin Kha-Douri, the puzzle of the lamp becomes even deeper. Where has the princess seen it before? Why is she so bitter and angry? And most importantly, what should Amelia do about it? In solving the mystery, Amelia risks revealing a secret of her own." (Source: Publisher's website)
y separately published work icon Kumiko and the Dragon Briony Stewart , St Lucia : University of Queensland Press , 2007 Z1423101 2007 single work children's fiction children's fantasy adventure (taught in 1 units) 'Kumiko doesn't like going to bed. She can't sleep. The reason she can't sleep is the giant dragon that sits outside her bedroom window every single night. So one night she plucks up the courage to ask the dragon to leave, not knowing that the truth she is about to discover is more thrilling than anything she could ever have imagined.' (Publisher's blurb)
y separately published work icon Nanberry : Black Brother White Jackie French , Pymble : HarperCollins Australia , 2011 Z1797040 2011 single work children's fiction children's historical fiction (taught in 3 units)

'Two brothers -- one black, one white -- and a colony at the end of the world.

'It′s 1789, and as the new colony in Sydney Cove is established, Surgeon John White defies convention and adopts Nanberry, an Aboriginal boy, to raise as his son. Nanberry is clever and uses his unique gifts as an interpreter to bridge the two worlds he lives in. With his white brother, Andrew, he witnesses the struggles of the colonists to keep their precarious grip on a hostile wilderness. And yet he is haunted by the memories of the Cadigal warriors who will one day come to claim him as one of their own.

'This true story follows the brothers as they make their way in the world -- one as a sailor, serving in the Royal Navy, the other a hero of the Battle of Waterloo.

'No less incredible is the enduring love between the gentleman surgeon and the convict girl who was saved from the death penalty and became a great lady in her own right.' (From the publisher's website.)

y separately published work icon Sea Hearts Margo Lanagan , Crows Nest : Allen and Unwin , 2012 Z1836289 2012 single work novel fantasy young adult (taught in 4 units)

'On remote Rollrock Island, the sea-witch Misskaella discovers she can draw a girl from the heart of a seal. So, for a price, any man might buy himself a bride; an irresistibly enchanting sea-wife. But what cost will be borne by the people of Rollrock - the men, the women, the children - once Misskaella sets her heart on doing such a thing?'

Source: Publisher's website.

y separately published work icon Seven Little Australians Ethel Turner , London Melbourne : Ward, Lock and Bowden , 1894 Z863667 1894 single work children's fiction children's (taught in 25 units)

'Without doubt Judy was the worst of the seven, probably because she was the cleverest.'

'Her father, Captain Woolcot, found his vivacious, cheeky daughter impossible – but seven children were really too much for him and most of the time they ran wild at their rambling riverside home, Misrule.

'Step inside and meet them all – dreamy Meg, and Pip, daring Judy, naughty Bunty, Nell, Baby and the youngest, 'the General'. Come and share in their lives, their laughter and their tears.' (From the publisher's website.)

2012

Indigenous Cultural Identity (KNL1001) Semester 2
Indigenous Knowledge and Australian Heritage (KNL2001) Semester 1, Semester 2
Australian Drama (THE2005) Semester 1
y separately published work icon The Cherry Pickers Kevin Gilbert , 1968 1968 (Manuscript version)x401069 Z245424 1968 single work drama (taught in 4 units)

"When the cold August wind abated in its final sigh of emergence from the lean, hard winter months into springtime, the People emerged from the cold, and often leaky shanties, and old discarded car-bodies, which were their home, to gather together their few ragged possessions and tie them in bundles ready for traveling to the cherry orchards, often many hundreds of miles away. Many would travel by bicycle with their swags swinging crazily from the frames; many traveled in old tattered caravans drawn by horses; many just walked beside the caravans through the red sandhill and mallee country, while the more daring 'jumped the rattler', the slow old steam train that chugged across the land.

Wherever the people gathered there too was a spirit of revival, of intense relief, for the "cherry season" meant a temporary release from near starvation. In a good season it could mean some old debts would be repaid. It meant food and toys for the children for the forthcoming Christmas season and, above all, it meant some independence, some freedom, from under the crucifying heels of the local police and the white 'station' managers; an escape from the refugee camps called 'Aboriginal Reserves'. The cherry season was the time for hope, for meeting old friends and relatives, for laughing and for making love. The Cherry Pickers tells it all.' Source: http://blackwebs.photoaccess.org.au/~kevingilbert/books/books.html (Sighted: 12/4/2009).

y separately published work icon Don's Party David Williamson , 1971 1971 (Manuscript version)x402002 Z1505961 1971 single work drama satire (taught in 17 units)
y separately published work icon Eating Ice Cream With Your Eyes Closed David Brown , 2002 Fortitude Valley : Playlab , 2004 Z1134746 2002 single work drama humour (taught in 2 units) A bus terminal in a country town in the middle of the night, where three unlikely companions are thrown together by circumstance. Macca, Dayne and Doug are as different as ... well, vanilla, strawberry and chocolate ice cream. But in one extraordinary night of drinking, talking and fighting, they find their common ground.
y separately published work icon The Female of the Species Joanna Murray-Smith , 2006 Strawberry Hills : Currency Press , 2008 Z1292339 2006 single work drama humour (taught in 3 units)

'Thirty years ago Margot Mason, pioneer of the 1970s Women's Liberation movement and fearless academic, wrote her groundbreaking work and numerous best-sellers followed. Now she has writer's block. Molly, an unannounced visitor and committed fan of Margot and her work, offers a potential solution - until Molly produces a gun and calmly informs Margot that she intends to kill her because she blames her for warping her mother's mind and ruining her life with her hit book The Cerebral Vagina.

'Joanna Murray-Smith's deliciously wicked comedy deftly walks the tightrope between satire and farce proving the female of the species is not only deadlier, but funnier than the male.

This play 'was inspired by Germaine Greer's experience of being held captive in her country house in Essex in 2000'. (Publisher's blurb)

y separately published work icon Inside the Island / The Precious Woman Louis Nowra , Sydney : Currency Press , 1981 Z239348 1981 selected work drama (taught in 2 units)
y separately published work icon Love Me Tender : Inspired by Euripides' Iphigenia in Aulis Tom Holloway , 2010 Sydney : Currency Press , 2010 Z1627311 2010 single work drama (taught in 2 units)

'On an expectant stage - a dreamscape of an Australian backyard - five actors tease out the story of a father and daughter. They question each other, they watch each other, they confess, they draw each other along. By the end of the story, modern life has been engulfed in fire, and a tale of pure love has become a tragedy of leadership and sacrifice.

'Love Me Tender is a play of beauty and emotional power. Inspired by Euripides' Iphigenia in Aulis, Tom Holloway has orchestrated a thrilling vision of contemporary Australia drawn from our experiences of the Black Saturday bushfires, of raunch culture and pre-teen sexuality, and of our domestic rituals. This is exquisite writing about our fears and expectations of fathers, about the extremities of love, and about the need for action when the world comes undone.'

Source: Belvoir Street Theatre website, http://www.belvoir.com.au/
Sighted: 22/09/2009

y separately published work icon Myth, Propaganda and Disaster in Nazi Germany and Contemporary America : A Drama in 30 Scenes Stephen Sewell , Sydney Melbourne : Currency Press Playbox Theatre , 2003 Z1037273 2003 single work drama (taught in 3 units)
y separately published work icon Norm and Ahmed Straight White Male : Norm and Ahmed ; Radha and Ryan Alex Buzo , 1960-1968 (Manuscript version)x401337 Z342308 1960 single work drama (taught in 3 units)
— Appears in: ノームとアーメッド /​ アレクサンダー.ブ-ゾ 他 1993;

'A rather ocker, white Australian male encounters a well-mannered Pakistani student with revolutionary ambitions in a Sydney park at midnight. Buzo creates an image of race prejudice as a profoundly irrational force in the behaviour of ordinary Australians.' (Publication summary)

y separately published work icon Plays Alex Buzo , Jack Hibberd , John Romeril , Harmondsworth Ringwood : Penguin , 1970 Z826268 1970 anthology drama (taught in 1 units)
y separately published work icon Ruben Guthrie Brendan Cowell , 2005 Sydney : Currency Press , 2009 Z1608267 2005 single work drama humour (taught in 2 units)

'Ruben Guthrie is on fire. At only 29, he is Creative Director of a cutting edge advertising agency, lives with his Czech supermodel fiancé and drinks like he invented it. Ruben seems invincible, until one fated evening when he drinks so much vodka he thinks he can fly. Before Ruben knows it his fiancé has left him, his Mum is escorting him to AA meetings and his bottomless schooner of confidence has all but drained away. For the first time in his life, Ruben Guthrie is alone.'

Source: www.belvoir.com.au
Sighted: 22/04/2008

y separately published work icon The Seed Kate Mulvany , 2007 Strawberry Hills : Currency Press , 2008 Z1151825 2007 single work drama (taught in 4 units) 'Meet Rose Maloney. Her dad Danny went to Vietnam. Her grandfather Brian is ex-IRA. Today is their collective birthday. From this intimate reunion, The Seed opens itself up over and over again until a silent family battle becomes a national story about finding new life amongst the rubble of old wars. This play has a very special kind of honesty and humour to it which sorts the great lies we buy into from the reality we live through.' (Publisher's blurb)
y separately published work icon The Serpent's Teeth : Two Plays Daniel Keene , Strawberry Hills : Currency Press , 2008 Z1491078 2008 selected work drama (taught in 2 units)

'Citizens is set at the dividing wall of an unspecified war-torn country where a series of unconnected exchanges between ordinary people transpire as they go about their day-to-day lives. A picture of life is revealed in the fragments of the interchanges between vulnerable people where the human spirit is carefully probed and laid bare.

'Soldiers is set in an air force hangar in Sydney, where family members gather to receive the bodies of their sons, brothers, husbands and friends lost in a conflict that they may not have supported.'

Source: Production blurbs (Kings Cross Theatre production).

y separately published work icon The Seven Stages of Grieving Wesley Enoch , Deborah Mailman , Hilary Beaton , 1995 Brisbane : Playlab , 1996 Z355402 1995 single work drama (taught in 14 units)
— Appears in: アボリジニ戯曲選 : ストールン; 嘆きの七段階 2001;

'This is a proud milestone in Australian theatre history; a contemporary Indigenous performance text from the highly acclaimed Kooemba Jdarra. Appropriating western forms whilst using traditional storytelling, it gives emotional insight into Murri life. This one-woman show follows the journey of an Aboriginal ‘Everywoman’ as she tells poignant and humorous stories of grief and reconciliation. A powerful, demanding and culturally profound text, The 7 Stages of Grieving is a celebration of Indigenous survival, an invitation to grieve publicly, a time to exorcize pain. It has a universal theme told through the personal experiences of one incredible character.'

Source: Publisher's blurb (Playlab).

y separately published work icon Songket [and] This Territory : Two Plays Noëlle Janaczewska , Strawberry Hills : Currency Press , 2008 Z1498016 2008 selected work drama (taught in 2 units)
y separately published work icon When the Rain Stops Falling Andrew Bovell , 2008 Strawberry Hills : Currency Press , 2009 Z1430823 2008 single work drama (taught in 8 units)

'It begins with a miracle. On a rainy day in Alice Springs in 2039 a fish falls like manna from heaven to bless the reunion of a father with his long lost son. Perhaps it's a sign that the pattern of betrayal and abandonment that began on another rainy day in London in 1959 will come to an end.

'Who'll stop the rain? Andrew Bovell's award-winning When the Rain Stops Falling is powerful storytelling in which the voices of our past echo into our future.' (Publisher's blurb)

Introduction to Literature (ENL1000) Semester 1
y separately published work icon Seven Centuries of Poetry in English John Leonard (editor), South Melbourne : Oxford University Press , 2003 Z1058257 2003 anthology poetry (taught in 6 units) Contains poetry from twelve countries, including Australia, and spans the development of English poetry over seven centuries.
y separately published work icon A Fringe of Leaves Patrick White , London : Jonathan Cape , 1976 Z476217 1976 single work novel (taught in 8 units)

"Set in Australia in the 1840s, A FRINGE OF LEAVES combines dramatic action with a finely distilled moral vision. Returning home to England from Van Diemen's land, the Bristol Maid is shipwrecked on the Queensland coast and Mrs Roxburgh is taken prisoner by a tribe of aborigines, along with the rest of the passengers and crew. In the course of her escape, she is torn by conflicting loyalties - to her dead husband, to her rescuer, to her own and to her adoptive class."

Source: Goodreads
y separately published work icon The Hunter Julia Leigh , Ringwood : Penguin , 1999 Z129151 1999 single work novel (taught in 23 units)

'An unnamed man, M, arrives at a remote house on the fringe of a vast wilderness and soon disappears into a world of silence and stillness. His one mission: to find the last thylacine, the fabled Tasmanian tiger. She is said to have passed into myth but a sighting has been reported... Uncompromising and compelling, Julia Leigh's stunning first novel does not give up any of its secrets easily. The Hunter is a haunting tale of obsession that builds to an unforgettable conclusion.'

Source: Libraries Australia (Sighted 18/03/2011).


'While on his mission, the hunter lodges with a grief-ridden family of outcasts whose father has mysteriously vanished after sighting the Thylacine. The hunter succumbs more than he'd like to the family's scant charms and when tragedy strikes has to further purge his psyche to focus upon his elusive quarry. There is something tantalizing at large here as well as the mythical beast in this soul-stalking story about a group of doomed creatures whose unfortunate extinction is never really in doubt.' - Reviewed by Chris Packham, naturalist and broadcaster

Source: British Union Catalogue http://copac.ac.uk/search?rn=3&au=leigh&ti=hunter (Sighted 14/10/2011)

y separately published work icon Joe Cinque's Consolation Helen Garner , Sydney : Pan Macmillan Australia , 2004 Z1132428 2004 single work prose (taught in 26 units)

'In October 1997 a clever young law student at ANU made a bizarre plan to murder her devoted boyfriend after a dinner party at their house. Some of the dinner guests - most of them university students - had heard rumours of the plan. Nobody warned Joe Cinque. He died one Sunday, in his own bed, of a massive dose of rohypnol and heroin. His girlfriend and her best friend were charged with murder. Helen Garner followed the trials in the ACT Supreme Court. Compassionate but unflinching, this is a book about how and why Joe Cinque died. It probes the gap between ethics and the law; examines the helplessness of the courts in the face of what we think of as 'evil'; and explores conscience, culpability, and the battered ideal of duty of care.' (Source: Pan Macmillan website)

Garner takes 'a deliberately subjective and "literary" approach' to her material with an 'emphasis on a sympatheitic authorial persona as the source of the reader's perspective' (Susan Lever 'The Crimes of the Past: Anna Funder's Stasiland and Helen Garner's Joe Cinque's Consolation'. Paper delivered at the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL) conference 2006).

y separately published work icon Remembering Babylon David Malouf , London Milsons Point : Chatto and Windus Random House , 1993 Z452447 1993 single work novel historical fiction (taught in 48 units)

'In the mid-1840s, a thirteen-year-old boy, Gemmy Fairley, is cast ashore in the far north of Australia and taken in by Aborigines. Sixteen years later, when settlers reach the area, he moves back into the world of Europeans, men and women who are staking out their small patch of home in an alien place, hopeful and yet terrified of what it might do to them.

Given shelter by the McIvors, the family of the children who originally made contact with him, Gemmy seems at first to be guaranteed a secure role in the settlement, but there are currents of fear and mistrust in the air. To everyone he meets - from George Abbot, the romantically aspiring young teacher, to Mr Frazer, the minister, whose days are spent with Gemmy recording the local flora; from Janet McIvor, just coming to adulthood and discovering new versions of the world, to the eccentric Governor of Queensland himself - Gemmy stands as a different kind of challenge, as a force which both fascinates and repels. And Gemmy himself finds his own whiteness as unsettling in this new world as the knowledge he brings with him of the savage, the Aboriginal.' - Publisher's blurb (Chatto & Windus, 1993).

y separately published work icon The Secret River Kate Grenville , Melbourne : Text Publishing , 2005 Z1194031 2005 single work novel historical fiction (taught in 69 units)

'In 1806 William Thornhill, a man of quick temper and deep feelings, is transported from the slums of London to New South Wales for the term of his natural life. With his wife Sal and their children he arrives in a harsh land he cannot understand.

'But the colony can turn a convict into a free man. Eight years later Thornhill sails up the Hawkesbury to claim a hundred acres for himself.

'Aboriginal people already live on that river. And other recent arrivals - Thomas Blackwood, Smasher Sullivan and Mrs Herring - are finding their own ways to respond to them.

'Thornhill, a man neither better nor worse than most, soon has to make the most difficult choice of his life.

'Inspired by research into her own family history, Kate Grenville vividly creates the reality of settler life, its longings, dangers and dilemmas. The Secret River is a brilliantly written book, a groundbreaking story about identity, belonging and ownership.' (From the publisher's website.)

y separately published work icon True Country Kim Scott , Fremantle : Fremantle Press , 1993 Z165486 1993 single work novel (taught in 30 units) 'Billy is drifting, looking for a place to land. A young school teacher, he arrives in Australia's remote far north in search of his own history, his Aboriginality, and his future. He finds himself in a region of abundance and beauty but also of conflict, dispossession and dislocation. On the desperate frontier between cultures, Billy must find his place of belonging.' (Source: Fremantle Press website)
y separately published work icon True History of the Kelly Gang Peter Carey , St Lucia : University of Queensland Press , 2000 Z668312 2000 single work novel historical fiction (taught in 29 units)

'"I lost my own father at 12 yr. of age and know what it is to be raised on lies and silences my dear daughter you are presently too young to understand a word I write but this history is for you and will contain no single lie may I burn in Hell if I speak false."

'In TRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG, the legendary Ned Kelly speaks for himself, scribbling his narrative on errant scraps of paper in semi-literate but magically descriptive prose as he flees from the police. To his pursuers, Kelly is nothing but a monstrous criminal, a thief and a murderer. To his own people, the lowly class of ordinary Australians, the bushranger is a hero, defying the authority of the English to direct their lives. Indentured by his bootlegger mother to a famous horse thief (who was also her lover), Ned saw his first prison cell at 15 and by the age of 26 had become the most wanted man in the wild colony of Victoria, taking over whole towns and defying the law until he was finally captured and hanged. Here is a classic outlaw tale, made alive by the skill of a great novelist.' (From the publisher's website.)

y separately published work icon The White Earth Andrew McGahan , Crows Nest : Allen and Unwin , 2004 Z1113518 2004 single work novel (taught in 14 units)

'His father dead by fire and his mother plagued by demons of her own, William is cast upon the charity of his unknown uncle - an embittered old man encamped in the ruins of a once great station homestead, Kuran House. It's a baffling and sinister new world for the boy, a place of decay and secret histories. His uncle is obsessed by a long life of decline and by a dark quest for revival, his mother is desperate for a wealth and security she has never known, and all their hopes it seems come to rest upon William's young shoulders. But as the past and present of Kuran Station unravel and merge together, the price of that inheritance may prove to be the downfall of them all. The White Earth is a haunting, disturbing and cautionary tale.' (publisher's website)

2011

Indigenous Knowledge and Australian Heritage (KNL2001) Semester 1, Semester 2
Australian Stories (ENL1001) Semester 2
y separately published work icon Bobbin Up : A Novel Dorothy Hewett , Melbourne : Australasian Book Society , 1959 Z813008 1959 single work novel (taught in 7 units) A classic novel about urban working-class life in 1950s Australia, combining the shifting narrative viewpoint pioneered by Modernism with a relentless realist mode. The book abounds with portraits of working women, married and unmarried, middle-aged and young, zestful and tired. These varied existences form the collective hero of the novel whose social message has lost nothing of its urgency. (Source: Trove)
form y separately published work icon Bush Mechanics David Batty , Francis Jupurrula Kelly , ( dir. David Batty ) Lindfield Yuendumu Australia : Film Australia Warlpiri Media Association ABC Television , 1998 Z1662471 1998 series - publisher film/TV humour (taught in 4 units)

'This off-beat series follows the exploits of the Bush Mechanics, a group of engaging Aboriginal characters, as they travel through central Australia.

'In each episode, the Bush Mechanics from the remote Warlpiri community of Yuendumu are presented with a new set of challenges - catching a car thief, getting a nephew out of jail, racing to an outback rock concert and travelling thousands of miles to gather pearl shells for a rainmaking ceremony. As they travel through the desert in their clapped-out vehicles, they solve multiple car problems with wacky and inventive bush repair techniques.'

Source: ABC TV Documentaries (http://www.abc.net.au/tv/documentaries/stories/s359476.htm). (Sighted: 12/10/2012)

form y separately published work icon Crocodile Dundee Paul Hogan , Ken Shadie , John Cornell , ( dir. Peter Faiman ) 1985 Sydney : Rimfire Films , 1986 Z1612282 1985 single work film/TV (taught in 6 units)

Mick 'Crocodile' Dundee runs an outback adventure business with his trusted friend and self-proclaimed mentor Walter Reilly. When he survives a crocodile attack, the news travels well beyond the Northern Territory, and a glamorous New York journalist, Sue Charlton, arrives to interview him. He invites her to come with him to the place where he was attacked. When Sue herself is attacked by a croc, Mick saves her. This leads to an invitation for Mick to visit his first ever city: New York City. Mick finds the culture and life in New York City a lot different than his home.

y separately published work icon Home Larissa Behrendt , St Lucia : University of Queensland Press , 2004 Z1113719 2004 single work novel (taught in 10 units)

'A story of homecoming, this absorbing novel opens with a young, city-based lawyer setting out on her first visit to ancestral country. Candice arrives at "the place where the rivers meet", the camp of the Eualeyai where in 1918 her grandmother Garibooli was abducted. As Garibooli takes up the story of Candice's Aboriginal family, the twentieth century falls away.

Garibooli, renamed Elizabeth, is sent to work as a housemaid, but marriage soon offers escape from the terror of the master's night-time visits. Her displacement carries into the lives of her seven children - their stories witness to the impact of orphanage life and the consequences of having a dark skin in post-war Australia. Vividly rekindled, the lives of her family point the direction home for Candice.

Home is a ... novel from an author who understands both the capacity of language to suppress and the restorative potency of stories that bridge past and present.' (Source: Publisher's blurb)

y separately published work icon Loaded Christos Tsiolkas , Milsons Point : Vintage Australia , 1995 Z565443 1995 single work novel (taught in 40 units)

'Families can detonate. Some families are torn apart forever by one small act, one solitary mistake. In my family it was a series of small explosions; consistent, passionate, pathetic. Cruel words, crude threats... We spurred each other on till we reached a crescendo of pain and we retired exhausted to our rooms, in tears or in fury.

'Ari is nineteen, unemployed and a poofter who doesn't want to be gay. He is looking for something - anything - to take him away from his aimless existence in suburban Melbourne. He doesn't believe in anyone or anything, except the power of music. All he wants to do is dance, take drugs, have sex and change the world.

'For Ari, all the orthodoxies of family, sex, politics and work have collapsed. Caught between the traditional Greek world of his parents and friends and the alluring, destructive world of clubs, chemicals and anonymous sex, all Ari can do is ease his pain in the only ways he knows how.

'Written in stark, uncompromising prose, Loaded is a first novel of great passion and power.' (From the publisher's website.)

y separately published work icon Turning the Century : Writing of the 1890s Christopher Lee (editor), St Lucia : University of Queensland Press , 1999 Z397740 1999 anthology short story poetry extract prose (taught in 12 units) The works in this selection, all composed or published between 1885 and 1905, 'represent the way in which literary forms were used to respond to some of the important social, cultural and political preoccupations' of Australia during this period (Note on the Text, ix). The work is divided into the following six sections, each with a prefatory Editor's Note; Histories and Futures; Home and Away; Love and Other Catastrophes; Work and Play; Civilisation and its Discontents: Art and Society. There is also a List of Sources, pp. 374-381, and a bibliography, pp. 382-390.
Introduction to Literature (ENL1000) Semester 1
y separately published work icon Seven Centuries of Poetry in English John Leonard (editor), South Melbourne : Oxford University Press , 2003 Z1058257 2003 anthology poetry (taught in 6 units) Contains poetry from twelve countries, including Australia, and spans the development of English poetry over seven centuries.
y separately published work icon A Fringe of Leaves Patrick White , London : Jonathan Cape , 1976 Z476217 1976 single work novel (taught in 8 units)

"Set in Australia in the 1840s, A FRINGE OF LEAVES combines dramatic action with a finely distilled moral vision. Returning home to England from Van Diemen's land, the Bristol Maid is shipwrecked on the Queensland coast and Mrs Roxburgh is taken prisoner by a tribe of aborigines, along with the rest of the passengers and crew. In the course of her escape, she is torn by conflicting loyalties - to her dead husband, to her rescuer, to her own and to her adoptive class."

Source: Goodreads
y separately published work icon The Hunter Julia Leigh , Ringwood : Penguin , 1999 Z129151 1999 single work novel (taught in 23 units)

'An unnamed man, M, arrives at a remote house on the fringe of a vast wilderness and soon disappears into a world of silence and stillness. His one mission: to find the last thylacine, the fabled Tasmanian tiger. She is said to have passed into myth but a sighting has been reported... Uncompromising and compelling, Julia Leigh's stunning first novel does not give up any of its secrets easily. The Hunter is a haunting tale of obsession that builds to an unforgettable conclusion.'

Source: Libraries Australia (Sighted 18/03/2011).


'While on his mission, the hunter lodges with a grief-ridden family of outcasts whose father has mysteriously vanished after sighting the Thylacine. The hunter succumbs more than he'd like to the family's scant charms and when tragedy strikes has to further purge his psyche to focus upon his elusive quarry. There is something tantalizing at large here as well as the mythical beast in this soul-stalking story about a group of doomed creatures whose unfortunate extinction is never really in doubt.' - Reviewed by Chris Packham, naturalist and broadcaster

Source: British Union Catalogue http://copac.ac.uk/search?rn=3&au=leigh&ti=hunter (Sighted 14/10/2011)

y separately published work icon Joe Cinque's Consolation Helen Garner , Sydney : Pan Macmillan Australia , 2004 Z1132428 2004 single work prose (taught in 26 units)

'In October 1997 a clever young law student at ANU made a bizarre plan to murder her devoted boyfriend after a dinner party at their house. Some of the dinner guests - most of them university students - had heard rumours of the plan. Nobody warned Joe Cinque. He died one Sunday, in his own bed, of a massive dose of rohypnol and heroin. His girlfriend and her best friend were charged with murder. Helen Garner followed the trials in the ACT Supreme Court. Compassionate but unflinching, this is a book about how and why Joe Cinque died. It probes the gap between ethics and the law; examines the helplessness of the courts in the face of what we think of as 'evil'; and explores conscience, culpability, and the battered ideal of duty of care.' (Source: Pan Macmillan website)

Garner takes 'a deliberately subjective and "literary" approach' to her material with an 'emphasis on a sympatheitic authorial persona as the source of the reader's perspective' (Susan Lever 'The Crimes of the Past: Anna Funder's Stasiland and Helen Garner's Joe Cinque's Consolation'. Paper delivered at the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL) conference 2006).

y separately published work icon Remembering Babylon David Malouf , London Milsons Point : Chatto and Windus Random House , 1993 Z452447 1993 single work novel historical fiction (taught in 48 units)

'In the mid-1840s, a thirteen-year-old boy, Gemmy Fairley, is cast ashore in the far north of Australia and taken in by Aborigines. Sixteen years later, when settlers reach the area, he moves back into the world of Europeans, men and women who are staking out their small patch of home in an alien place, hopeful and yet terrified of what it might do to them.

Given shelter by the McIvors, the family of the children who originally made contact with him, Gemmy seems at first to be guaranteed a secure role in the settlement, but there are currents of fear and mistrust in the air. To everyone he meets - from George Abbot, the romantically aspiring young teacher, to Mr Frazer, the minister, whose days are spent with Gemmy recording the local flora; from Janet McIvor, just coming to adulthood and discovering new versions of the world, to the eccentric Governor of Queensland himself - Gemmy stands as a different kind of challenge, as a force which both fascinates and repels. And Gemmy himself finds his own whiteness as unsettling in this new world as the knowledge he brings with him of the savage, the Aboriginal.' - Publisher's blurb (Chatto & Windus, 1993).

y separately published work icon The Secret River Kate Grenville , Melbourne : Text Publishing , 2005 Z1194031 2005 single work novel historical fiction (taught in 69 units)

'In 1806 William Thornhill, a man of quick temper and deep feelings, is transported from the slums of London to New South Wales for the term of his natural life. With his wife Sal and their children he arrives in a harsh land he cannot understand.

'But the colony can turn a convict into a free man. Eight years later Thornhill sails up the Hawkesbury to claim a hundred acres for himself.

'Aboriginal people already live on that river. And other recent arrivals - Thomas Blackwood, Smasher Sullivan and Mrs Herring - are finding their own ways to respond to them.

'Thornhill, a man neither better nor worse than most, soon has to make the most difficult choice of his life.

'Inspired by research into her own family history, Kate Grenville vividly creates the reality of settler life, its longings, dangers and dilemmas. The Secret River is a brilliantly written book, a groundbreaking story about identity, belonging and ownership.' (From the publisher's website.)

y separately published work icon True Country Kim Scott , Fremantle : Fremantle Press , 1993 Z165486 1993 single work novel (taught in 30 units) 'Billy is drifting, looking for a place to land. A young school teacher, he arrives in Australia's remote far north in search of his own history, his Aboriginality, and his future. He finds himself in a region of abundance and beauty but also of conflict, dispossession and dislocation. On the desperate frontier between cultures, Billy must find his place of belonging.' (Source: Fremantle Press website)
y separately published work icon True History of the Kelly Gang Peter Carey , St Lucia : University of Queensland Press , 2000 Z668312 2000 single work novel historical fiction (taught in 29 units)

'"I lost my own father at 12 yr. of age and know what it is to be raised on lies and silences my dear daughter you are presently too young to understand a word I write but this history is for you and will contain no single lie may I burn in Hell if I speak false."

'In TRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG, the legendary Ned Kelly speaks for himself, scribbling his narrative on errant scraps of paper in semi-literate but magically descriptive prose as he flees from the police. To his pursuers, Kelly is nothing but a monstrous criminal, a thief and a murderer. To his own people, the lowly class of ordinary Australians, the bushranger is a hero, defying the authority of the English to direct their lives. Indentured by his bootlegger mother to a famous horse thief (who was also her lover), Ned saw his first prison cell at 15 and by the age of 26 had become the most wanted man in the wild colony of Victoria, taking over whole towns and defying the law until he was finally captured and hanged. Here is a classic outlaw tale, made alive by the skill of a great novelist.' (From the publisher's website.)

y separately published work icon The White Earth Andrew McGahan , Crows Nest : Allen and Unwin , 2004 Z1113518 2004 single work novel (taught in 14 units)

'His father dead by fire and his mother plagued by demons of her own, William is cast upon the charity of his unknown uncle - an embittered old man encamped in the ruins of a once great station homestead, Kuran House. It's a baffling and sinister new world for the boy, a place of decay and secret histories. His uncle is obsessed by a long life of decline and by a dark quest for revival, his mother is desperate for a wealth and security she has never known, and all their hopes it seems come to rest upon William's young shoulders. But as the past and present of Kuran Station unravel and merge together, the price of that inheritance may prove to be the downfall of them all. The White Earth is a haunting, disturbing and cautionary tale.' (publisher's website)

2010

Indigenous Cultural Identity (KNL1001) Semester 2
Indigenous Knowledge and Australian Heritage (KNL2001) Semester 1, Semester 2
Australian Drama (THE2005) Semester 1
y separately published work icon Australian Women's Drama : Texts and Feminisms Peta Tait (editor), Elizabeth Schafer (editor), Paddington : Currency Press , 1997 Z69253 1997 anthology drama (taught in 6 units)
y separately published work icon Box the Pony Leah Purcell , Scott Rankin , 1997 Sydney : Hodder Headline , 1999 Z114430 1997 single work drama (taught in 4 units)

One-woman play, written by and for Leah Purcell, which draws on her experiences growing up, her relationship with her mother, and the contrast between her country upbringing and city life.

y separately published work icon The Cherry Pickers Kevin Gilbert , 1968 1968 (Manuscript version)x401069 Z245424 1968 single work drama (taught in 4 units)

"When the cold August wind abated in its final sigh of emergence from the lean, hard winter months into springtime, the People emerged from the cold, and often leaky shanties, and old discarded car-bodies, which were their home, to gather together their few ragged possessions and tie them in bundles ready for traveling to the cherry orchards, often many hundreds of miles away. Many would travel by bicycle with their swags swinging crazily from the frames; many traveled in old tattered caravans drawn by horses; many just walked beside the caravans through the red sandhill and mallee country, while the more daring 'jumped the rattler', the slow old steam train that chugged across the land.

Wherever the people gathered there too was a spirit of revival, of intense relief, for the "cherry season" meant a temporary release from near starvation. In a good season it could mean some old debts would be repaid. It meant food and toys for the children for the forthcoming Christmas season and, above all, it meant some independence, some freedom, from under the crucifying heels of the local police and the white 'station' managers; an escape from the refugee camps called 'Aboriginal Reserves'. The cherry season was the time for hope, for meeting old friends and relatives, for laughing and for making love. The Cherry Pickers tells it all.' Source: http://blackwebs.photoaccess.org.au/~kevingilbert/books/books.html (Sighted: 12/4/2009).

y separately published work icon The Jack Manning Trilogy David Williamson , Strawberry Hills : Currency Press , 2002 Z966803 2002 selected work drama (taught in 1 units)
y separately published work icon Modern Short Plays Leslie Rees (editor), Sydney : Angus and Robertson , 1951 Z498819 1951 anthology drama (taught in 1 units) Contains: The Land of Heart's Desire / by W. B. Yeats - Riders To the Sea / by J. M. Synge - The Proposal / by Anton Chekhov - Interior / by Maurice Maeterlinck - Birds of a Feather / by J. O. Francis - The Drovers / by Louis Esson - The Carrier Pigeon / by Eden Phillpotts - Royal Favour / by Laurence Housman - Campbell of Kilmhor / by J. A. Ferguson - Ile / by Eugene O'Neill - The Odyssey of Runyon Jones / by Norman Corwin - Spoiled Darlings / by Edmund Barclay - Great Inheritance / by Gwen Meredith.
y separately published work icon Myth, Propaganda and Disaster in Nazi Germany and Contemporary America : A Drama in 30 Scenes Stephen Sewell , Sydney Melbourne : Currency Press Playbox Theatre , 2003 Z1037273 2003 single work drama (taught in 3 units)
y separately published work icon Norm and Ahmed Straight White Male : Norm and Ahmed ; Radha and Ryan Alex Buzo , 1960-1968 (Manuscript version)x401337 Z342308 1960 single work drama (taught in 3 units)
— Appears in: ノームとアーメッド /​ アレクサンダー.ブ-ゾ 他 1993;

'A rather ocker, white Australian male encounters a well-mannered Pakistani student with revolutionary ambitions in a Sydney park at midnight. Buzo creates an image of race prejudice as a profoundly irrational force in the behaviour of ordinary Australians.' (Publication summary)

y separately published work icon The One Day of the Year Alan Seymour , 1960 (Manuscript version)x400866 Z525120 1960 single work drama (taught in 11 units)

'Undoubtedly one of Australia's favourite plays, the One Day of the Year explores the universal theme of father-son conflict against the background of the beery haze and the heady, nostalgic sentimentality of Anzac Day. It is a play to make us question a standard institution - Anzac Day, the sacred cow among Australian annual celebrations - but it is the likeability and genuineness of the characters that give the play its memorable qualities: Alf, the nobody who becomes a somebody on this day of days; Mum, the anchor of the family; Hughie, their son, with all the uncertainties and rebelliousness of youth; and Wacka, the Anzac, with his simple, healing wisdom.'

(Description from publishers website)

y separately published work icon Plays of the 60s : Volume 1 Katharine Brisbane (editor), Sydney : Currency Press , 1998 Z1174230 1998 anthology drama (taught in 2 units)

'This collection includes: The Well (1960) by Jack McKinney, a rustic comedy in the Steele Rudd tradition set in Queensland; Burst of Summer (1960) by Oriel Gray is a realist play dealing with racial prejudice and is based on the brief success of the Aboriginal actress Ngarla Kunoth, who played Jedda in the Chauvel film; The Season at Sarsaparilla (1962), Patrick White's poetic satire examining the inevitable cycle of birth, copulation and death; White called it a 'charade of suburbia'; and The Promised Woman by Theodore Patrikareas which had its first stage production in Sydney in 1963 and is possibly the first play by a post-war immigrant staged in Australia. The play portrays migrants adapting to their new country and finding new identities and was adapted for the screen in 1974. (1 act, 2 women)' (Publication summary)

y separately published work icon Summer of the Seventeenth Doll Ray Lawler , 1955 London Sydney : Angus and Robertson , 1957 Z522838 1955 single work drama (taught in 56 units)

'The most famous Australian play and one of the best loved, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll is a tragicomic story of Roo and Barney, two Queensland sugar-cane cutters who go to Melbourne every year during the 'layoff' to live it up with their barmaid girl friends. The title refers to kewpie dolls, tawdry fairground souvenirs, that they brings as gifts and come, in some readings of the play, to represent adolescent dreams in which the characters seem to be permanently trapped. The play tells the story in traditional well-made, realistic form, with effective curtains and an obligatory scene. Its principal appeal – and that of two later plays with which it forms The Doll Trilogy – is the freshness and emotional warmth, even sentimentality, with which it deals with simple virtues of innocence and youthful energy that lie at the heart of the Australian bush legend.

'Ray Lawler’s play confronts that legend with the harsh new reality of modern urban Australia. The 17th year of the canecutters’ arrangement is different. There has been a fight on the canefields and Roo, the tough, heroic, bushman, has arrived with his ego battered and without money. Barney’s girl friend Nancy has left to get married and is replaced by Pearl, who is suspicious of the whole set-up and hopes to trap Barney into marriage. The play charts the inevitable failure of the dream of the layoff, the end of the men’s supremacy as bush heroes and, most poignantly, the betrayal of the idealistic self-sacrifice made by Roo’s girl friend Olive – the most interesting character – to keep the whole thing going. The city emerges victorious, but the emotional tone of the play vindicates the fallen bushman.'

Source: McCallum, John. 'Summer of the Seventeenth Doll.' Companion to Theatre in Australia. Ed. Philip Parson and Victoria Chance. Sydney: Currency Press , 1997: 564-656.

y separately published work icon These People Ben Ellis , 2003 Strawberry Hills : Currency Press , 2004 Z1050214 2003 single work drama (taught in 1 units)
y separately published work icon The Touch of Silk Betty M. Davies , 1928 (Manuscript version)x401235 Z968576 1928 single work drama (taught in 4 units)
— Appears in: The Touch of Silk [and] Granite Peak 1988; (p. 1-83)

A poignant drama centred on Jeanne, a homesick French war bride and her shell-shocked husband battling hardship and prejudice in a drought-stricken Mallee town.

Australian Stories (ENL1001) Semester 2
y separately published work icon Bobbin Up : A Novel Dorothy Hewett , Melbourne : Australasian Book Society , 1959 Z813008 1959 single work novel (taught in 7 units) A classic novel about urban working-class life in 1950s Australia, combining the shifting narrative viewpoint pioneered by Modernism with a relentless realist mode. The book abounds with portraits of working women, married and unmarried, middle-aged and young, zestful and tired. These varied existences form the collective hero of the novel whose social message has lost nothing of its urgency. (Source: Trove)
form y separately published work icon Bush Mechanics David Batty , Francis Jupurrula Kelly , ( dir. David Batty ) Lindfield Yuendumu Australia : Film Australia Warlpiri Media Association ABC Television , 1998 Z1662471 1998 series - publisher film/TV humour (taught in 4 units)

'This off-beat series follows the exploits of the Bush Mechanics, a group of engaging Aboriginal characters, as they travel through central Australia.

'In each episode, the Bush Mechanics from the remote Warlpiri community of Yuendumu are presented with a new set of challenges - catching a car thief, getting a nephew out of jail, racing to an outback rock concert and travelling thousands of miles to gather pearl shells for a rainmaking ceremony. As they travel through the desert in their clapped-out vehicles, they solve multiple car problems with wacky and inventive bush repair techniques.'

Source: ABC TV Documentaries (http://www.abc.net.au/tv/documentaries/stories/s359476.htm). (Sighted: 12/10/2012)

form y separately published work icon Crocodile Dundee Paul Hogan , Ken Shadie , John Cornell , ( dir. Peter Faiman ) 1985 Sydney : Rimfire Films , 1986 Z1612282 1985 single work film/TV (taught in 6 units)

Mick 'Crocodile' Dundee runs an outback adventure business with his trusted friend and self-proclaimed mentor Walter Reilly. When he survives a crocodile attack, the news travels well beyond the Northern Territory, and a glamorous New York journalist, Sue Charlton, arrives to interview him. He invites her to come with him to the place where he was attacked. When Sue herself is attacked by a croc, Mick saves her. This leads to an invitation for Mick to visit his first ever city: New York City. Mick finds the culture and life in New York City a lot different than his home.

y separately published work icon Home Larissa Behrendt , St Lucia : University of Queensland Press , 2004 Z1113719 2004 single work novel (taught in 10 units)

'A story of homecoming, this absorbing novel opens with a young, city-based lawyer setting out on her first visit to ancestral country. Candice arrives at "the place where the rivers meet", the camp of the Eualeyai where in 1918 her grandmother Garibooli was abducted. As Garibooli takes up the story of Candice's Aboriginal family, the twentieth century falls away.

Garibooli, renamed Elizabeth, is sent to work as a housemaid, but marriage soon offers escape from the terror of the master's night-time visits. Her displacement carries into the lives of her seven children - their stories witness to the impact of orphanage life and the consequences of having a dark skin in post-war Australia. Vividly rekindled, the lives of her family point the direction home for Candice.

Home is a ... novel from an author who understands both the capacity of language to suppress and the restorative potency of stories that bridge past and present.' (Source: Publisher's blurb)

y separately published work icon Loaded Christos Tsiolkas , Milsons Point : Vintage Australia , 1995 Z565443 1995 single work novel (taught in 40 units)

'Families can detonate. Some families are torn apart forever by one small act, one solitary mistake. In my family it was a series of small explosions; consistent, passionate, pathetic. Cruel words, crude threats... We spurred each other on till we reached a crescendo of pain and we retired exhausted to our rooms, in tears or in fury.

'Ari is nineteen, unemployed and a poofter who doesn't want to be gay. He is looking for something - anything - to take him away from his aimless existence in suburban Melbourne. He doesn't believe in anyone or anything, except the power of music. All he wants to do is dance, take drugs, have sex and change the world.

'For Ari, all the orthodoxies of family, sex, politics and work have collapsed. Caught between the traditional Greek world of his parents and friends and the alluring, destructive world of clubs, chemicals and anonymous sex, all Ari can do is ease his pain in the only ways he knows how.

'Written in stark, uncompromising prose, Loaded is a first novel of great passion and power.' (From the publisher's website.)

y separately published work icon Turning the Century : Writing of the 1890s Christopher Lee (editor), St Lucia : University of Queensland Press , 1999 Z397740 1999 anthology short story poetry extract prose (taught in 12 units) The works in this selection, all composed or published between 1885 and 1905, 'represent the way in which literary forms were used to respond to some of the important social, cultural and political preoccupations' of Australia during this period (Note on the Text, ix). The work is divided into the following six sections, each with a prefatory Editor's Note; Histories and Futures; Home and Away; Love and Other Catastrophes; Work and Play; Civilisation and its Discontents: Art and Society. There is also a List of Sources, pp. 374-381, and a bibliography, pp. 382-390.
Australian Stories (ENL1001) Semester 2
y separately published work icon Bobbin Up : A Novel Dorothy Hewett , Melbourne : Australasian Book Society , 1959 Z813008 1959 single work novel (taught in 7 units) A classic novel about urban working-class life in 1950s Australia, combining the shifting narrative viewpoint pioneered by Modernism with a relentless realist mode. The book abounds with portraits of working women, married and unmarried, middle-aged and young, zestful and tired. These varied existences form the collective hero of the novel whose social message has lost nothing of its urgency. (Source: Trove)
y separately published work icon Home Larissa Behrendt , St Lucia : University of Queensland Press , 2004 Z1113719 2004 single work novel (taught in 10 units)

'A story of homecoming, this absorbing novel opens with a young, city-based lawyer setting out on her first visit to ancestral country. Candice arrives at "the place where the rivers meet", the camp of the Eualeyai where in 1918 her grandmother Garibooli was abducted. As Garibooli takes up the story of Candice's Aboriginal family, the twentieth century falls away.

Garibooli, renamed Elizabeth, is sent to work as a housemaid, but marriage soon offers escape from the terror of the master's night-time visits. Her displacement carries into the lives of her seven children - their stories witness to the impact of orphanage life and the consequences of having a dark skin in post-war Australia. Vividly rekindled, the lives of her family point the direction home for Candice.

Home is a ... novel from an author who understands both the capacity of language to suppress and the restorative potency of stories that bridge past and present.' (Source: Publisher's blurb)

y separately published work icon Loaded Christos Tsiolkas , Milsons Point : Vintage Australia , 1995 Z565443 1995 single work novel (taught in 40 units)

'Families can detonate. Some families are torn apart forever by one small act, one solitary mistake. In my family it was a series of small explosions; consistent, passionate, pathetic. Cruel words, crude threats... We spurred each other on till we reached a crescendo of pain and we retired exhausted to our rooms, in tears or in fury.

'Ari is nineteen, unemployed and a poofter who doesn't want to be gay. He is looking for something - anything - to take him away from his aimless existence in suburban Melbourne. He doesn't believe in anyone or anything, except the power of music. All he wants to do is dance, take drugs, have sex and change the world.

'For Ari, all the orthodoxies of family, sex, politics and work have collapsed. Caught between the traditional Greek world of his parents and friends and the alluring, destructive world of clubs, chemicals and anonymous sex, all Ari can do is ease his pain in the only ways he knows how.

'Written in stark, uncompromising prose, Loaded is a first novel of great passion and power.' (From the publisher's website.)

y separately published work icon Summer of the Seventeenth Doll Ray Lawler , 1955 London Sydney : Angus and Robertson , 1957 Z522838 1955 single work drama (taught in 56 units)

'The most famous Australian play and one of the best loved, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll is a tragicomic story of Roo and Barney, two Queensland sugar-cane cutters who go to Melbourne every year during the 'layoff' to live it up with their barmaid girl friends. The title refers to kewpie dolls, tawdry fairground souvenirs, that they brings as gifts and come, in some readings of the play, to represent adolescent dreams in which the characters seem to be permanently trapped. The play tells the story in traditional well-made, realistic form, with effective curtains and an obligatory scene. Its principal appeal – and that of two later plays with which it forms The Doll Trilogy – is the freshness and emotional warmth, even sentimentality, with which it deals with simple virtues of innocence and youthful energy that lie at the heart of the Australian bush legend.

'Ray Lawler’s play confronts that legend with the harsh new reality of modern urban Australia. The 17th year of the canecutters’ arrangement is different. There has been a fight on the canefields and Roo, the tough, heroic, bushman, has arrived with his ego battered and without money. Barney’s girl friend Nancy has left to get married and is replaced by Pearl, who is suspicious of the whole set-up and hopes to trap Barney into marriage. The play charts the inevitable failure of the dream of the layoff, the end of the men’s supremacy as bush heroes and, most poignantly, the betrayal of the idealistic self-sacrifice made by Roo’s girl friend Olive – the most interesting character – to keep the whole thing going. The city emerges victorious, but the emotional tone of the play vindicates the fallen bushman.'

Source: McCallum, John. 'Summer of the Seventeenth Doll.' Companion to Theatre in Australia. Ed. Philip Parson and Victoria Chance. Sydney: Currency Press , 1997: 564-656.

y separately published work icon Turning the Century : Writing of the 1890s Christopher Lee (editor), St Lucia : University of Queensland Press , 1999 Z397740 1999 anthology short story poetry extract prose (taught in 12 units) The works in this selection, all composed or published between 1885 and 1905, 'represent the way in which literary forms were used to respond to some of the important social, cultural and political preoccupations' of Australia during this period (Note on the Text, ix). The work is divided into the following six sections, each with a prefatory Editor's Note; Histories and Futures; Home and Away; Love and Other Catastrophes; Work and Play; Civilisation and its Discontents: Art and Society. There is also a List of Sources, pp. 374-381, and a bibliography, pp. 382-390.
Introduction to Literature (ENL1000) Semester 1
y separately published work icon Seven Centuries of Poetry in English John Leonard (editor), South Melbourne : Oxford University Press , 2003 Z1058257 2003 anthology poetry (taught in 6 units) Contains poetry from twelve countries, including Australia, and spans the development of English poetry over seven centuries.
Popular Fiction (ENL3002) Semester 1
y separately published work icon The Life and Crimes of Harry Lavender Marele Day , North Sydney : Allen and Unwin , 1988 Z211688 1988 single work novel crime (taught in 3 units) A Claudia Valentine mystery. Mark Bannister is writing 'the bestseller of the century'. But when he's found dead at his computer he seems to be the victim of a murder so perfect that Claudia Valentine smells a rat - and wants it caught. Witty, wry and fast-paced, The Life and Crimes of Harry Lavender is a thriller with a twist and a crime novel which brilliantly evokes the sleaze beneath the surface of a city's glittering facade.

2009

Indigenous Australian Cultures and Communities (KNL3001) Semester 1, Semester 2
Indigenous Cultural Identity (KNL1001) Semester 2
Indigenous Knowledge and Australian Heritage (KNL2001) Semester 1, Semester 2
Australian Stories (ENL1001) Semester 2
y separately published work icon Bobbin Up : A Novel Dorothy Hewett , Melbourne : Australasian Book Society , 1959 Z813008 1959 single work novel (taught in 7 units) A classic novel about urban working-class life in 1950s Australia, combining the shifting narrative viewpoint pioneered by Modernism with a relentless realist mode. The book abounds with portraits of working women, married and unmarried, middle-aged and young, zestful and tired. These varied existences form the collective hero of the novel whose social message has lost nothing of its urgency. (Source: Trove)
form y separately published work icon Bush Mechanics David Batty , Francis Jupurrula Kelly , ( dir. David Batty ) Lindfield Yuendumu Australia : Film Australia Warlpiri Media Association ABC Television , 1998 Z1662471 1998 series - publisher film/TV humour (taught in 4 units)

'This off-beat series follows the exploits of the Bush Mechanics, a group of engaging Aboriginal characters, as they travel through central Australia.

'In each episode, the Bush Mechanics from the remote Warlpiri community of Yuendumu are presented with a new set of challenges - catching a car thief, getting a nephew out of jail, racing to an outback rock concert and travelling thousands of miles to gather pearl shells for a rainmaking ceremony. As they travel through the desert in their clapped-out vehicles, they solve multiple car problems with wacky and inventive bush repair techniques.'

Source: ABC TV Documentaries (http://www.abc.net.au/tv/documentaries/stories/s359476.htm). (Sighted: 12/10/2012)

form y separately published work icon Crocodile Dundee Paul Hogan , Ken Shadie , John Cornell , ( dir. Peter Faiman ) 1985 Sydney : Rimfire Films , 1986 Z1612282 1985 single work film/TV (taught in 6 units)

Mick 'Crocodile' Dundee runs an outback adventure business with his trusted friend and self-proclaimed mentor Walter Reilly. When he survives a crocodile attack, the news travels well beyond the Northern Territory, and a glamorous New York journalist, Sue Charlton, arrives to interview him. He invites her to come with him to the place where he was attacked. When Sue herself is attacked by a croc, Mick saves her. This leads to an invitation for Mick to visit his first ever city: New York City. Mick finds the culture and life in New York City a lot different than his home.

y separately published work icon Home Larissa Behrendt , St Lucia : University of Queensland Press , 2004 Z1113719 2004 single work novel (taught in 10 units)

'A story of homecoming, this absorbing novel opens with a young, city-based lawyer setting out on her first visit to ancestral country. Candice arrives at "the place where the rivers meet", the camp of the Eualeyai where in 1918 her grandmother Garibooli was abducted. As Garibooli takes up the story of Candice's Aboriginal family, the twentieth century falls away.

Garibooli, renamed Elizabeth, is sent to work as a housemaid, but marriage soon offers escape from the terror of the master's night-time visits. Her displacement carries into the lives of her seven children - their stories witness to the impact of orphanage life and the consequences of having a dark skin in post-war Australia. Vividly rekindled, the lives of her family point the direction home for Candice.

Home is a ... novel from an author who understands both the capacity of language to suppress and the restorative potency of stories that bridge past and present.' (Source: Publisher's blurb)

y separately published work icon Loaded Christos Tsiolkas , Milsons Point : Vintage Australia , 1995 Z565443 1995 single work novel (taught in 40 units)

'Families can detonate. Some families are torn apart forever by one small act, one solitary mistake. In my family it was a series of small explosions; consistent, passionate, pathetic. Cruel words, crude threats... We spurred each other on till we reached a crescendo of pain and we retired exhausted to our rooms, in tears or in fury.

'Ari is nineteen, unemployed and a poofter who doesn't want to be gay. He is looking for something - anything - to take him away from his aimless existence in suburban Melbourne. He doesn't believe in anyone or anything, except the power of music. All he wants to do is dance, take drugs, have sex and change the world.

'For Ari, all the orthodoxies of family, sex, politics and work have collapsed. Caught between the traditional Greek world of his parents and friends and the alluring, destructive world of clubs, chemicals and anonymous sex, all Ari can do is ease his pain in the only ways he knows how.

'Written in stark, uncompromising prose, Loaded is a first novel of great passion and power.' (From the publisher's website.)

y separately published work icon Turning the Century : Writing of the 1890s Christopher Lee (editor), St Lucia : University of Queensland Press , 1999 Z397740 1999 anthology short story poetry extract prose (taught in 12 units) The works in this selection, all composed or published between 1885 and 1905, 'represent the way in which literary forms were used to respond to some of the important social, cultural and political preoccupations' of Australia during this period (Note on the Text, ix). The work is divided into the following six sections, each with a prefatory Editor's Note; Histories and Futures; Home and Away; Love and Other Catastrophes; Work and Play; Civilisation and its Discontents: Art and Society. There is also a List of Sources, pp. 374-381, and a bibliography, pp. 382-390.
Introduction to Literature (ENL1000) Semester 1
y separately published work icon Seven Centuries of Poetry in English John Leonard (editor), South Melbourne : Oxford University Press , 2003 Z1058257 2003 anthology poetry (taught in 6 units) Contains poetry from twelve countries, including Australia, and spans the development of English poetry over seven centuries.
Popular Fiction (ENL3002) Semester 1
y separately published work icon The Life and Crimes of Harry Lavender Marele Day , North Sydney : Allen and Unwin , 1988 Z211688 1988 single work novel crime (taught in 3 units) A Claudia Valentine mystery. Mark Bannister is writing 'the bestseller of the century'. But when he's found dead at his computer he seems to be the victim of a murder so perfect that Claudia Valentine smells a rat - and wants it caught. Witty, wry and fast-paced, The Life and Crimes of Harry Lavender is a thriller with a twist and a crime novel which brilliantly evokes the sleaze beneath the surface of a city's glittering facade.
y separately published work icon Crossing the Boundaries Geoff Bull (editor), Michele Anstey (editor), Frenchs Forest : Pearson Education Australia , 2002 Z988055 2002 anthology essay criticism (taught in 4 units)
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