University of Western Australia
WA

2016

Australian Literary Studies (ENGL4107) Semester 2
y separately published work icon Amnesia Peter Carey , Melbourne : Penguin , 2014 7180904 2014 single work novel thriller (taught in 1 units)

''It was a spring evening in Washington DC; a chilly autumn morning in Melbourne; it was exactly 22.00 Greenwich Mean Time when a worm entered the computerised control systems of hundreds of Australian prisons and released the locks in many places of incarceration, some of which the hacker could not have known existed. Because Australian prison security was, in the year 2010, mostly designed and sold by American corporations the worm immediately infected 117 US federal correctional facilities, 1,700 prisons, and over 3,000 county jails. Wherever it went, it traveled underground, in darkness, like a bushfire burning in the roots of trees. Reaching its destinations it announced itself: THE CORPORATION IS UNDER OUR CONTROL. THE ANGEL DECLARES YOU FREE.'

'Has a young Australian woman declared cyber war on the United States? Or was her Angel Worm intended only to open the prison doors of those unfortunates detained by Australia's harsh immigration policies? Did America suffer collateral damage? Is she innocent? Can she be saved? ' (Publication abstract)

y separately published work icon Gilgamesh : A Novel Joan London , Sydney : Pan Macmillan Australia , 2001 Z894113 2001 single work novel (taught in 4 units)

'Gilgamesh is the epic story of a mother's search for the father of her child - from Australia to Armenia via England and Mesopotamia - all under the shadow of the imminent, and soon to be very real, Second World War. Narrated in a clear, poetic voice, it is a portrayal of the different journeys we choose to take through life and what happens when ordinary people get caught up in extraordinary, seismic events.'

Source: Publisher's blurb (2018 ed.).

y separately published work icon A Guide to Berlin Gail Jones , North Sydney : Random House Australia , 2015 8588237 2015 single work novel (taught in 1 units)

'A Guide to Berlin” is the name of a short story written by Vladimir Nabokov in 1925, when he was a young man of 26, living in Berlin.

'A group of six international travellers, two Italians, two Japanese, an American and an Australian, meet in empty apartments in Berlin to share stories and memories. Each is enthralled in some way to the work of Vladimir Nabokov, and each is finding their way in deep winter in a haunted city. A moment of devastating violence shatters the group, and changes the direction of everyone's story.

'Brave and brilliant, A Guide to Berlin traces the strength and fragility of our connections through biographies and secrets. ' (Publication summary)

y separately published work icon Missing Up Pamela Brown , Sydney : Vagabond Press , 2015 9242764 2015 selected work poetry (taught in 1 units)

'These offbeat, fragmentary yet often discursive poems were written over three years up to spring 2015. In part, they epitomize the absurdities of contemporary materialism. Pam Brown's well-practised scepticism dismantles monumental intent and splices the remains into a shrewd melange of imagery and thoughtful lyric complemented by playfulness. For Pam writing poetry is a habit, a disorganised ritual. Her poetic inventories begin in everyday bricolage. Real things interrupt the poems the same way thoughts and phrases do. You know - the fridge over there, the bus stop, surf music on a radio, a raisin squashed against a floor tile - always backgrounding a connection to the 'social' as the poems make political and personal associative links. Though disquiet is present it is usually temporary - an optimistic wit plays through this idiosyncratic poetry as a kind of placebo. But, in the end, Pam Brown simply lets the language do the work.' (Publication summary)

y separately published work icon The Natural Way of Things Charlotte Wood , Crows Nest : Allen and Unwin , 2015 8719111 2015 single work novel (taught in 5 units)

'She hears her own thick voice deep inside her ears when she says, 'I need to know where I am.' The man stands there, tall and narrow, hand still on the doorknob, surprised. He says, almost in sympathy, 'Oh, sweetie. You need to know what you are.'

'Two women awaken from a drugged sleep to find themselves imprisoned in a broken-down property in the middle of a desert. Strangers to each other, they have no idea where they are or how they came to be there with eight other girls, forced to wear strange uniforms, their heads shaved, guarded by two inept yet vicious armed jailers and a 'nurse'. The girls all have something in common, but what is it? What crime has brought them here from the city? Who is the mysterious security company responsible for this desolate place with its brutal rules, its total isolation from the contemporary world? Doing hard labour under a sweltering sun, the prisoners soon learn what links them: in each girl's past is a sexual scandal with a powerful man. They pray for rescue - but when the food starts running out it becomes clear that the jailers have also become the jailed. The girls can only rescue themselves.

'The Natural Way of Things is a gripping, starkly imaginative exploration of contemporary misogyny and corporate control, and of what it means to hunt and be hunted. Most of all, it is the story of two friends, their sisterly love and courage.

'With extraordinary echoes of The Handmaid's Tale and Lord of the Flies, The Natural Way of Things is a compulsively readable, scarifying and deeply moving contemporary novel. It confirms Charlotte Wood's position as one of our most thoughtful, provocative and fearless truth-tellers, as she unflinchingly reveals us and our world to ourselves.' (Publication summary)

y separately published work icon Voss : A Novel Patrick White , London : Eyre and Spottiswoode , 1957 Z872480 1957 single work novel (taught in 33 units)

'Set in nineteenth-century Australia, Voss is the story of the secret passion between an explorer and a naïve young woman. Although they have met only a few times, Voss and Laura are joined by overwhelming, obsessive feelings for each other. Voss sets out to cross the continent. As hardships, mutiny and betrayal whittle away his power to endure and to lead, his attachment to Laura gradually increases. Laura, waiting in Sydney, moves through the months of separation as if they were a dream and Voss the only reality.

'From the careful delineation of Victorian society to the sensitive rendering of hidden love to the stark narrative of adventure in the Australian desert, Patrick White's novel is a work of extraordinary power and virtuosity.'

Source: Random House Books (Sighted 21/09/2012)

y separately published work icon The Golden Age Louis Nowra , s.l. : s.n. , 1980-1985 (Manuscript version)x401631 Z331846 1980 single work drama (taught in 9 units)
— Appears in: コシ. ゴールデン・エイジ 2006;

'In 1939, a lost tribe of Europeans was discovered in the Tasmanian wilderness. They were a band of outcasts who had escaped the torture of convict life, scratching out an existence at the forgotten edge of the island, alone for almost a century.

'Inspired by this true story, writer Louis Nowra (Cosi, Radiance) penned The Golden Age – an extraordinary play that blends historical fact, Australian folklore and poetic language to create a post-colonial myth for our times. Nowra’s outcasts have developed a culture and dialect all of their own, but their bodies are failing them and their very existence is in danger. Brought back into the fold of Australian society, what fate awaits this band of exiles?'

Source: Sydney Theatre Company (2016 revival).

y separately published work icon Line of Sight David Whish-Wilson , Camberwell : Viking , 2010 Z1721720 2010 single work novel crime (taught in 1 units)

'When a brothel madam is shot on a Perth golf course in 1975 it should be a routine murder enquiry. But it isn't. In fact there's barely an investigation at all, and Superintendent Swann thinks he knows why. Heroin is the new drug in town and the money is finding its way into some very respectable hands.

'It's the brave or the foolish who accuse their fellow cops of corruption, and sometimes not even Swann is sure which he is. Especially when those he's pointing the finger at have mates in every stronghold of power in the state - big business, organised crime, the government. He might have won the first round by forcing a royal commission, but the judge is an ailing patsy and the outcome seems predetermined. If that's not enough to contend with, Swann's teenage daughter has disappeared, he doesn't know whether she's alive or not, and the word on the street is he's a dead man walking.

'Line of Sight is classic crime noir, a tale of dark corruption set in a city of sun and heat.'

y separately published work icon My Brilliant Career Miles Franklin , Edinburgh London : William Blackwood , 1901 Z161522 1901 single work novel (taught in 56 units)

'My Brilliant Career was written by Stella Franklin (1879-1954) when she was just nineteen years old. The novel struggled to find an Australian publisher, but was published in London and Edinburgh in 1901 after receiving an endorsement from Henry Lawson. Although Franklin wrote under the pseudonym 'Miles Franklin', Lawson’s preface makes it clear that Franklin is, as Lawson puts it 'a girl.'

'The novel relates the story of Sybylla Melvyn, a strong-willed young woman of the 1890s growing up in the Goulburn area of New South Wales and longing to be a writer.' (Publication summary)

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)

y separately published work icon Swallow the Air Dust on Waterglass Tara June Winch , 2003 St Lucia : University of Queensland Press , 2006 Z1265164 2003 selected work short story (taught in 33 units)

Swallow the Air follows the life of 15-year-old May Gibson, an Aboriginal girl from New South Wales whose mother commits suicide. May and her brother go to live with their aunt, but eventually May travels further afield, first to Redfern's Block in Sydney, then to the Northern Territory, and finally into central New South Wales. She travels to escape, but also in pursuit of a sense of her own history, family, and identity.

y separately published work icon Voss : A Novel Patrick White , London : Eyre and Spottiswoode , 1957 Z872480 1957 single work novel (taught in 33 units)

'Set in nineteenth-century Australia, Voss is the story of the secret passion between an explorer and a naïve young woman. Although they have met only a few times, Voss and Laura are joined by overwhelming, obsessive feelings for each other. Voss sets out to cross the continent. As hardships, mutiny and betrayal whittle away his power to endure and to lead, his attachment to Laura gradually increases. Laura, waiting in Sydney, moves through the months of separation as if they were a dream and Voss the only reality.

'From the careful delineation of Victorian society to the sensitive rendering of hidden love to the stark narrative of adventure in the Australian desert, Patrick White's novel is a work of extraordinary power and virtuosity.'

Source: Random House Books (Sighted 21/09/2012)

y separately published work icon Burning In Mireille Juchau , Artarmon : Giramondo Publishing , 2007 Z1432957 2007 single work novel (taught in 2 units) In her late twenties, Martine Hartmann moves from Sydney to New York to pursue her career as a photographer, leaving behind her mother Lotte, a Holocaust survivor. Nine years later, Martine's daughter Ruby goes missing in Central Park. Ruby's disappearance throws Martine into an emotional struggle which threatens to overwhelm her, but which also, in time, brings her to understand Lotte's anxieties and inhibitions, and to discover the act of abandonment at their heart. - back cover
y separately published work icon Sixty Lights Gail Jones , London : Harvill Press , 2004 Z1136231 2004 single work novel historical fiction (taught in 15 units)

'Sixty Lights is the captivating chronicle of Lucy Strange, an independent girl growing up in the Victorian world. From her childhood in Australia through to her adolescence in England and Bombay and finally to London, Lucy is fascinated by light and by the new photographic technology. Her perception of the world is passionate and moving, revealed in a series of frozen images captured in the camera of her mind's eye showing her feelings about love, life and loss. In this confident, finely woven and intricate novel Jones has created an unforgettable character in Lucy; visionary, gifted and exuberant, she touches the lives of all who know her.' (Publication summary)

y separately published work icon The Arrival Shaun Tan , Shaun Tan (illustrator), South Melbourne : Lothian , 2006 Z1285263 2006 single work graphic novel children's (taught in 16 units)

"The Arrival is a migrant story told as a series of wordless images that might seem to come from a long forgotten time. A man leaves his wife and child in an impoverished town, seeking better prospects in an unknown country on the other side of a vast ocean. He eventually finds himself in a bewildering city of foreign customs, peculiar animals, curious floating objects and indecipherable languages. With nothing more than a suitcase and a handful of currency, the immigrant must find a place to live, food to eat and some kind of gainful employment. He is helped along the way by sympathetic strangers, each carrying their own unspoken history: stories of struggle and survival in a world of incomprehensible violence, upheaval and hope." (Source: Shaun Tan website)

y separately published work icon That Deadman Dance Kim Scott , Sydney : Picador , 2010 Z1728528 2010 single work novel historical fiction (taught in 43 units)

Big-hearted, moving and richly rewarding, That Deadman Dance is set in the first decades of the 19th century in the area around what is now Albany, Western Australia. In playful, musical prose, the book explores the early contact between the Aboriginal Noongar people and the first European settlers.

'The novel's hero is a young Noongar man named Bobby Wabalanginy. Clever, resourceful and eager to please, Bobby befriends the new arrivals, joining them hunting whales, tilling the land, exploring the hinterland and establishing the fledgling colony. He is even welcomed into a prosperous local white family where he falls for the daughter, Christine, a beautiful young woman who sees no harm in a liaison with a native.

'But slowly - by design and by accident - things begin to change. Not everyone is happy with how the colony is developing. Stock mysteriously start to disappear; crops are destroyed; there are "accidents" and injuries on both sides. As the Europeans impose ever stricter rules and regulations in order to keep the peace, Bobby's Elders decide they must respond in kind. A friend to everyone, Bobby is forced to take sides: he must choose between the old world and the new, his ancestors and his new friends. Inexorably, he is drawn into a series of events that will forever change not just the colony but the future of Australia...' (From the publisher's website.)

2015

Australia and Home (ENGL2701) Semester 1
y separately published work icon 1788 1788 : the Birth of a Nation, Comprising A Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay and An Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson; Watkin Tench's 1788 Watkin Tench , Tim Flannery (editor), Melbourne : Text Publishing , 1996 8267005 1996 single work single work biography (taught in 1 units)

'Watkin Tench stepped ashore at Botany Bay with the First Fleet in January 1788. He was in his late twenties, a captain of the marines, and on the adventure of his life. Insatiably curious, with a natural genius for storytelling, Tench wrote two enthralling accounts of the infant colony - A Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay and A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson. Tench brings to life the legendary figures of Bennelong, Arabanoo and Governor Phillip, and records the voices of convicts trying to make new lives in their new country.'(Source: Goodreads website)

y separately published work icon 26 Views of the Starburst World : William Dawes at Sydney Cove 1788-91 Twenty Six Views of the Starburst World Ross Gibson , Crawley : UWA Publishing , 2012 Z1901719 2012 single work biography (taught in 4 units)

'When Lieutenant William Dawes came to Botany Bay with the First Fleet Marines in January 1788 he delved into the world of a small group of Indigenous people from around Sydney Harbour. Dawes called his collaborators 'the Eora'. They told him it was their word for 'people', and it might have been the first thing they watched him write down.

'Chasing the fascinations that thrilled the Lieutenant during his disorienting time in Eora country, 26 Views of the Starburst World captures the wonder that shone for Dawes and rearranged him at Sydney Cove, amplified and illuminated, engulfed by language, stars and landscape.' (Publisher's website)

y separately published work icon The Children's Bach Helen Garner , Melbourne : McPhee Gribble , 1984 Z371975 1984 single work novella (taught in 6 units)

Athena and Dexter lead an enclosed family life, innocent of fashion and bound towards a disturbed child. Their comfortable rut is disrupted by the arrival of Elizabeth, a tough nut from Dexter's past. With her three charming, chaotic hangers-on, she draws the couple out into a world whose casual egotism they had barely dreamed of. How can they get home again? (Source: publisher's website)

y separately published work icon The Lieutenant Kate Grenville , Melbourne : Text Publishing , 2008 Z1515910 2008 single work novel historical fiction (taught in 1 units)

'Daniel Rooke, soldier and astronomer, was always an outsider. As a young lieutenant of marines he arrives in New South Wales on the First Fleet in 1788 and sees his chance. He sets up his observatory away from the main camp, and begins the scientific work that he hopes will make him famous.

'Aboriginal people soon start to visit his isolated promontory, and a child named Tagaran begins to teach him her language. With meticulous care he records their conversations. An extraordinary friendship forms, and Rooke has almost forgotten he is a soldier when a man is fatally wounded in the infant colony. The lieutenant faces a decision that will define not only who he is but the course of his entire life.

'In this profoundly moving novel Kate Grenville returns to the landscape of her much-loved bestseller The Secret River. Inspired by the notebooks of William Dawes, The Lieutenant is a compelling story about friendship and self-discovery by a writer at the peak of her powers.' (Publisher's blurb)

y separately published work icon The Roving Party Rohan Wilson , Crows Nest : Allen and Unwin , 2011 Z1775364 2011 single work novel historical fiction (taught in 5 units)

'1829, Tasmania.

'John Batman, ruthless, singleminded; four convicts, the youngest still only a stripling; Gould, a downtrodden farmhand; two free black trackers; and powerful, educated Black Bill, brought up from childhood as a white man. This is the roving party and their purpose is massacre. With promises of freedom, land grants and money, each is willing to risk his life for the prize.

'Passing over many miles of tortured country, the roving party searches for Aborigines, taking few prisoners and killing freely, Batman never abandoning the visceral intensity of his hunt. And all the while, Black Bill pursues his personal quarry, the much-feared warrior, Manalargena.

'A surprisingly beautiful evocation of horror and brutality, The Roving Party is a meditation on the intricacies of human nature at its most raw.' (From the publisher's website.)

y separately published work icon The Tall Man : Death and Life on Palm Island Chloe Hooper , Camberwell : Hamish Hamilton , 2008 Z1483259 2008 single work prose (taught in 11 units) In November 2004, in the small township of Palm Island in the far north of Queensland, Detective Hurley arrested Cameron Doomadgee for swearing at him. Doomadgee was drunk. A few hours later he died in a watch-house cell. According to the inquest, his liver was so badly damaged it was almost severed. (Source: Trove)
Australian Literary Studies (ENGL4107) Semester 1
y separately published work icon Gilgamesh : A Novel Joan London , Sydney : Pan Macmillan Australia , 2001 Z894113 2001 single work novel (taught in 4 units)

'Gilgamesh is the epic story of a mother's search for the father of her child - from Australia to Armenia via England and Mesopotamia - all under the shadow of the imminent, and soon to be very real, Second World War. Narrated in a clear, poetic voice, it is a portrayal of the different journeys we choose to take through life and what happens when ordinary people get caught up in extraordinary, seismic events.'

Source: Publisher's blurb (2018 ed.).

y separately published work icon Goad Omen Corey Wakeling , Artarmon : Giramondo Publishing , 2013 Z1923757 2013 selected work poetry (taught in 1 units)

'Goad Omen is Corey Wakeling's first full-length collection of poems, a vibrant and witty interplay of depths and resurfacings, portraying a world littered with grim foreshadowings and kitschy memorabilia alike.' (Publisher's blurb)

y separately published work icon Shadow Lines Stephen Kinnane , Fremantle : Fremantle Press , 2003 Z1051216 2003 single work biography (taught in 5 units) 'The story of Jessie Argyle, born in the remote East Kimberley and taken from her Aboriginal family at the age of five, and Edward Smith, a young Englishman escaping the rigid structures of London. In a society deeply divided on racial lines, Edward and Jessie met, fell in love and, against strong opposition, eventually married. Despite unrelenting surveillance and harassment the Smith home was a centre for Aboriginal cultural and social life for over thirty years.' (Source: back cover, 2003 edition)
y separately published work icon Truth Peter Temple , Melbourne : Text Publishing , 2009 Z1594714 2009 single work novel crime thriller (taught in 2 units)

'Stephen Villani is the acting head of the Victoria Police homicide squad. But his first months on the job have not gone well: two Aboriginal teenagers shot dead in a botched operation he authorised in the provincial city of Cromarty; and, no progress on the killing of a man in front of his daughter outside a private girls' school.

Now five men are found dead in horrifying circumstances on the outskirts of the city. Villani's superiors and the media are baying for arrests. To add to his woes, some of the country's richest people are alarmed by the baffling killing of a young woman in the high-security tower where they live.

Villani, a man who has built his life around his work, begins to find the certainties of both crumbling. As the pressure mounts, he finds that he must contemplate things formerly unthinkable. Truth is a novel about murder, corruption, family, friends, honour, honesty, deceit, love, betrayal and truth.' (from Quercus website)

Australian Textual Cultures (ENGL5501) Semester 1
y separately published work icon Gilgamesh : A Novel Joan London , Sydney : Pan Macmillan Australia , 2001 Z894113 2001 single work novel (taught in 4 units)

'Gilgamesh is the epic story of a mother's search for the father of her child - from Australia to Armenia via England and Mesopotamia - all under the shadow of the imminent, and soon to be very real, Second World War. Narrated in a clear, poetic voice, it is a portrayal of the different journeys we choose to take through life and what happens when ordinary people get caught up in extraordinary, seismic events.'

Source: Publisher's blurb (2018 ed.).

y separately published work icon Shadow Lines Stephen Kinnane , Fremantle : Fremantle Press , 2003 Z1051216 2003 single work biography (taught in 5 units) 'The story of Jessie Argyle, born in the remote East Kimberley and taken from her Aboriginal family at the age of five, and Edward Smith, a young Englishman escaping the rigid structures of London. In a society deeply divided on racial lines, Edward and Jessie met, fell in love and, against strong opposition, eventually married. Despite unrelenting surveillance and harassment the Smith home was a centre for Aboriginal cultural and social life for over thirty years.' (Source: back cover, 2003 edition)
y separately published work icon Sorry Gail Jones , Milsons Point : Vintage Australia , 2007 Z1380261 2007 single work novel (taught in 9 units)

'In the remote outback of Western Australia during World War II, English anthropologist Nicholas Keene and his wife, Stella, raise a lonely child, Perdita. Her upbringing is far from ordinary: in a shack in the wilderness, with a distant father burying himself in books and an unstable mother whose knowledge of Shakespeare forms the backbone of the girl's limited education.

'Emotionally adrift, Perdita becomes friends with a deaf and mute boy, Billy, and an Aboriginal girl, Mary. Perdita and Mary come to call one another sister and to share a very special bond. They are content with life in this remote corner of the globe, until a terrible event lays waste to their lives.' (Publisher's blurb)

y separately published work icon Truth Peter Temple , Melbourne : Text Publishing , 2009 Z1594714 2009 single work novel crime thriller (taught in 2 units)

'Stephen Villani is the acting head of the Victoria Police homicide squad. But his first months on the job have not gone well: two Aboriginal teenagers shot dead in a botched operation he authorised in the provincial city of Cromarty; and, no progress on the killing of a man in front of his daughter outside a private girls' school.

Now five men are found dead in horrifying circumstances on the outskirts of the city. Villani's superiors and the media are baying for arrests. To add to his woes, some of the country's richest people are alarmed by the baffling killing of a young woman in the high-security tower where they live.

Villani, a man who has built his life around his work, begins to find the certainties of both crumbling. As the pressure mounts, he finds that he must contemplate things formerly unthinkable. Truth is a novel about murder, corruption, family, friends, honour, honesty, deceit, love, betrayal and truth.' (from Quercus website)

y separately published work icon The Young Desire It : A Novel Seaforth MacKenzie , London : Jonathan Cape , 1937 Z182314 1937 single work novel (taught in 1 units)

'In the late afternoon of a day in February, that hottest of Australian summer months, when a brutal sun stood bronze above the river flats which you may see from the dormitory windows of Chatterton, Charles came to the school with his mother, walking from the railway station to the gates by a private path across a burnt, untidy field, overhung with Cape lilacs that still drooped, dusty and melancholy…In the lower part of his belly fear kicked and pulsed like a child in the womb, ready to be born.

'Fifteen-year-old Charles Fox is sent away to boarding school, innocent, alone and afraid. There one of his masters develops an intense attachment to him. But when Charles meets Margaret, a girl staying at a nearby farm for the holidays, he is besotted, and a passionate, unforgettable romance begins. ' (Publication summary : Text Classics)

y separately published work icon Burning In Mireille Juchau , Artarmon : Giramondo Publishing , 2007 Z1432957 2007 single work novel (taught in 2 units) In her late twenties, Martine Hartmann moves from Sydney to New York to pursue her career as a photographer, leaving behind her mother Lotte, a Holocaust survivor. Nine years later, Martine's daughter Ruby goes missing in Central Park. Ruby's disappearance throws Martine into an emotional struggle which threatens to overwhelm her, but which also, in time, brings her to understand Lotte's anxieties and inhibitions, and to discover the act of abandonment at their heart. - back cover
y separately published work icon Sixty Lights Gail Jones , London : Harvill Press , 2004 Z1136231 2004 single work novel historical fiction (taught in 15 units)

'Sixty Lights is the captivating chronicle of Lucy Strange, an independent girl growing up in the Victorian world. From her childhood in Australia through to her adolescence in England and Bombay and finally to London, Lucy is fascinated by light and by the new photographic technology. Her perception of the world is passionate and moving, revealed in a series of frozen images captured in the camera of her mind's eye showing her feelings about love, life and loss. In this confident, finely woven and intricate novel Jones has created an unforgettable character in Lucy; visionary, gifted and exuberant, she touches the lives of all who know her.' (Publication summary)

Contemporary Writing (ENGL5502) Semester 1
y separately published work icon Gilgamesh : A Novel Joan London , Sydney : Pan Macmillan Australia , 2001 Z894113 2001 single work novel (taught in 4 units)

'Gilgamesh is the epic story of a mother's search for the father of her child - from Australia to Armenia via England and Mesopotamia - all under the shadow of the imminent, and soon to be very real, Second World War. Narrated in a clear, poetic voice, it is a portrayal of the different journeys we choose to take through life and what happens when ordinary people get caught up in extraordinary, seismic events.'

Source: Publisher's blurb (2018 ed.).

y separately published work icon Ransom David Malouf , North Sydney : Knopf Australia , 2009 Z1529380 2009 single work novel (taught in 20 units) 'With learning worn lightly and in his own lyrical language, David Malouf revisits Homer's Iliad. Focusing on the unbreakable bonds between men - Priam and Hector, Patroclus and Achilles, Priam and the cart-driver hired to retrieve Hector's body. Pride, grief, brutality, love and neighbourliness are explored.' (Publisher's blurb)
Poetry and Poetics (ENGL3001) Semester 2
y separately published work icon The Monkey's Mask Dorothy Porter , South Melbourne : Hyland House , 1994 Z528794 1994 single work novel crime (taught in 31 units)
y separately published work icon It's Raining in Mango : Pictures from the Family Album Thea Astley , New York (City) : G. P. Putnam's Sons , 1987 Z355929 1987 selected work short story (taught in 2 units)

Wresting his family from the easy living of nineteenth-century Sydney, Cornelius Laffey takes them to northern Queensland where thousands of hopefuls are digging for gold in the mud. They confront the horror of Aboriginal dispossession, and Cornelius is sacked for reporting the slaughter. This is an unforgettable tale of the other side of Australia's heritage.

Source: Penguin Random House Australia.

(https://penguin.com.au/books/its-raining-in-mango-popular-penguins-9780143204749)

y separately published work icon Jam Tree Gully : Poems John Kinsella , New York (City) : W. W. Norton , 2012 Z1823469 2012 selected work poetry (taught in 1 units) 'In this daring new collection, Australia's preeminent environmental poet confronts the legacy of Thoreau's Walden. With Walden as his inspiration, John Kinsella moved with his family back to rural Australia, where he wrote the poems in this original collection exploring the nature of our responsibility and connection to the land.' (Publisher's blurb)
y separately published work icon Journey to the Stone Country Alex Miller , Crows Nest : Allen and Unwin , 2002 Z982836 2002 single work novel (taught in 3 units) 'Betrayed by her husband, Annabelle Beck retreats from Melbourne to her old family home in tropical North Queensland where she meets Bo Rennie, one of the Jangga tribe. Intrigued by Bo's claim that he holds the key to her future, Annabelle sets out with him on a path of recovery that leads back to her childhood and into the Jangga's ancient heartland, where their grandparents' lives begin to yield secrets that will challenge the possibility of their happiness together.' - Publisher's blurb.
y separately published work icon The Sound of One Hand Clapping Richard Flanagan , Sydney : Pan Macmillan Australia , 1997 Z366585 1997 single work novel (taught in 4 units) 'In the winter of 1954, in a construction camp in the remote Tasmanian wilderness, when Sonja Buloh was three years old and her father was drinking too much, Sonja's mother walked into a blizzard never to return. Some thirty-five years later, when Sonja visits Tasmania and her drunkard father, the shadows of the past begin to intrude into the present - changing forever his living death and her ordered life.' (Source: Libraries Australia).

2014

Australian Literary Studies (ENGL4107) Semester 2
y separately published work icon All the Birds, Singing Evie Wyld , North Sydney : Random House Australia , 2013 Z1929805 2013 single work novel mystery (taught in 4 units)

'Who or what is watching Jake Whyte from the woods?

'Jake Whyte is the sole resident of an old farmhouse on an unnamed island, a place of ceaseless rains and battering winds. It's just her, her untamed companion, Dog, and a flock of sheep. Which is how she wanted it to be. But something is coming for the sheep - every few nights it picks one off, leaves it in rags.

'It could be anything. There are foxes in the woods, a strange boy and a strange man, rumours of an obscure, formidable beast. And there is Jake's unknown past, perhaps breaking into the present, a story hidden thousands of miles away and years ago, in a landscape of different colour and sound, a story held in the scars that stripe her back.

'Set between Australia and a remote English island, All the Birds, Singing is the story of one how one woman's present comes from a terrible past. It is the second novel from the award-winning author of After the Fire, A Still Small Voice.' (Publisher's blurb)

y separately published work icon The Broken Shore Peter Temple , Melbourne : Text Publishing , 2005 Z1207328 2005 single work novel crime (taught in 9 units)

'Joe Cashin was different once. He moved easily then; was surer and less thoughtful. But there are consequences when you've come so close to dying. For Cashin, they included a posting away from the world of Homicide to the quiet place on the coast where he grew up. Now all he has to do is play the country cop and walk the dogs. And sometimes think about how he was before.

'Then prominent local Charles Bourgoyne is bashed and left for dead. Everything seems to point to three boys from the nearby Aboriginal community; everyone seems to want it to. But Cashin is unconvinced. And as tragedy unfolds relentlessly into tragedy, he finds himself holding onto something that might be better let go.'
Source: Publisher's website (Sighted 22/8/11)

y separately published work icon In the Shade of the Shady Tree : Stories of Wheatbelt Australia John Kinsella , Athens : Swallow Press Ohio University Press , 2012 Z1853424 2012 selected work short story (taught in 1 units)

'In the Shade of the Shady Tree is a collection of stories set in the Western Australian wheatbelt, a vast grain-growing area that ranges across the southwestern end of the immense Australian interior. Kinsella's stories offer glimpses into the lives of the people who call this area home.

Cast against a backdrop of indigenous dispossession, settler migration, and the destructive impact of land-clearing and monocultural farming methods, the stories offer moments of connection with the inhabitants, ranging from the matter-of-fact to the bizarre and inexplicable. Something about the nature of the place wrestles with all human interactions and affects their outcomes. The land itself is a dominant character, with dust, gnarled scrubland, and the need for rain underpinning human endeavour.

Inflected with both contemporary ideas of short fiction and the "everyman" tradition of Australian storytelling, this collection will introduce many readers to a new landscape and unforgettable characters' (Publisher's blurb).

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 That Deadman Dance Kim Scott , Sydney : Picador , 2010 Z1728528 2010 single work novel historical fiction (taught in 43 units)

Big-hearted, moving and richly rewarding, That Deadman Dance is set in the first decades of the 19th century in the area around what is now Albany, Western Australia. In playful, musical prose, the book explores the early contact between the Aboriginal Noongar people and the first European settlers.

'The novel's hero is a young Noongar man named Bobby Wabalanginy. Clever, resourceful and eager to please, Bobby befriends the new arrivals, joining them hunting whales, tilling the land, exploring the hinterland and establishing the fledgling colony. He is even welcomed into a prosperous local white family where he falls for the daughter, Christine, a beautiful young woman who sees no harm in a liaison with a native.

'But slowly - by design and by accident - things begin to change. Not everyone is happy with how the colony is developing. Stock mysteriously start to disappear; crops are destroyed; there are "accidents" and injuries on both sides. As the Europeans impose ever stricter rules and regulations in order to keep the peace, Bobby's Elders decide they must respond in kind. A friend to everyone, Bobby is forced to take sides: he must choose between the old world and the new, his ancestors and his new friends. Inexorably, he is drawn into a series of events that will forever change not just the colony but the future of Australia...' (From the publisher's 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 Ransom David Malouf , North Sydney : Knopf Australia , 2009 Z1529380 2009 single work novel (taught in 20 units) 'With learning worn lightly and in his own lyrical language, David Malouf revisits Homer's Iliad. Focusing on the unbreakable bonds between men - Priam and Hector, Patroclus and Achilles, Priam and the cart-driver hired to retrieve Hector's body. Pride, grief, brutality, love and neighbourliness are explored.' (Publisher's blurb)
y separately published work icon The Man Who Loved Children Christina Stead , New York (City) : Simon and Schuster , 1940 Z462160 1940 single work novel (taught in 19 units)

'Set in Washington during the 1930s, Sam and Henny Pollit are a warring husband and wife. Their tempestuous marriage, aggravated by too little money, lies at the centre of Stead's satirical and brilliantly observed novel about the relations between husbands and wives, and parents and children.

'Sam, a scientist, uses words as weapons of attack and control on his children and is prone to illusions of power and influence that fail to extend beyond his family. His wife Henny, who hails from a wealthy Baltimore family, is disastrously impractical and enmeshed in her own fantasies of romance and vengeance. Much of the care of their six children is left to Louisa, Sam's 14-year-old daughter from his first marriage. Within this psychological battleground, Louisa must attempt to make a life of her own.'

Source: Publisher's blurb (MUP).

y separately published work icon Monkey Grip Helen Garner , Melbourne : McPhee Gribble , 1977 Z115661 1977 single work novel (taught in 12 units)

Set in inner suburban 1970s Melbourne, Monkey Grip describes the fluid relationships of a community of friends who are living and loving in new ways. Single parent Nora falls in love with Javo, a heroin addict, and together they try to make sense of their lives and the choices they have made.

y separately published work icon My Brilliant Career Miles Franklin , Edinburgh London : William Blackwood , 1901 Z161522 1901 single work novel (taught in 56 units)

'My Brilliant Career was written by Stella Franklin (1879-1954) when she was just nineteen years old. The novel struggled to find an Australian publisher, but was published in London and Edinburgh in 1901 after receiving an endorsement from Henry Lawson. Although Franklin wrote under the pseudonym 'Miles Franklin', Lawson’s preface makes it clear that Franklin is, as Lawson puts it 'a girl.'

'The novel relates the story of Sybylla Melvyn, a strong-willed young woman of the 1890s growing up in the Goulburn area of New South Wales and longing to be a writer.' (Publication summary)

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)

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.

Contemporary Writing (ENGL5502) Semester 1
y separately published work icon Benang : From the Heart Kim Scott , Fremantle : Fremantle Press , 1999 Z135862 1999 single work novel (taught in 31 units) 'Oceanic in its rhythms and understanding, brilliant in its use of language and image, moving in its largeness of spirit, compelling in its narrative scope and style, Benang is a novel of celebration and lament, of beginning and return, of obliteration and recovery, of silencing and of powerful utterance. Both tentative and daring, it speaks to the present and a possible future through stories, dreams, rhythms, songs, images and documents mobilised from the incompletely acknowledged and still dynamic past.' (Publisher's website)
y separately published work icon Burial Rites Hannah Kent , 2013 Sydney : Pan Macmillan Australia , 2013 Z1828606 2013 single work novel historical fiction (taught in 1 units)

'In northern Iceland, 1829, Agnes Magnusdottir is condemned to death for her part in the brutal murder of two men.

'Agnes is sent to wait out the time leading to her execution on the farm of District Officer Jon Jonsson, his wife and their two daughters. Horrified to have a convicted murderess in their midst, the family avoids speaking with Agnes. Only Toti, the young assistant reverend appointed as Agnes's spiritual guardian, is compelled to try to understand her, as he attempts to salvage her soul. As the summer months fall away to winter and the hardships of rural life force the household to work side by side, Agnes's ill-fated tale of longing and betrayal begins to emerge. And as the days to her execution draw closer, the question burns: did she or didn't she?

'Based on a true story, Burial Rites is a deeply moving novel about personal freedom: who we are seen to be versus who we believe ourselves to be, and the ways in which we will risk everything for love. In beautiful, cut-glass prose, Hannah Kent portrays Iceland's formidable landscape, where every day is a battle for survival, and asks, how can one woman hope to endure when her life depends upon the stories told by others?' (Publisher's blurb)

y separately published work icon Elizabeth Costello : Eight Lessons J. M. Coetzee , Milsons Point : Knopf , 2003 Z1064567 2003 single work novel (taught in 3 units)

In Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons, the eponymous protagonist is a retired author of international literary acclaim, who now spends her time giving guest lectures and interviews at scholarly events around the world. Old age has loosened, rather than reified, her ethical and literary convictions, and swelled her emotional reserves; rather than provide the staid academic wisdom expected of her, Costello offers provocative, unsettling opinions on issues such as animal rights, literary censorship, and the nature of belief - opinions she may or may not believe in herself. Profoundly aware of itself, Coetzee's novel is about human morality and mortality, but above all, about literature itself and the ethical responsibilities of writers and readers.

Meaning and Medium (ENGL1401) Semester 1
y separately published work icon The Arrival Shaun Tan , Shaun Tan (illustrator), South Melbourne : Lothian , 2006 Z1285263 2006 single work graphic novel children's (taught in 16 units)

"The Arrival is a migrant story told as a series of wordless images that might seem to come from a long forgotten time. A man leaves his wife and child in an impoverished town, seeking better prospects in an unknown country on the other side of a vast ocean. He eventually finds himself in a bewildering city of foreign customs, peculiar animals, curious floating objects and indecipherable languages. With nothing more than a suitcase and a handful of currency, the immigrant must find a place to live, food to eat and some kind of gainful employment. He is helped along the way by sympathetic strangers, each carrying their own unspoken history: stories of struggle and survival in a world of incomprehensible violence, upheaval and hope." (Source: Shaun Tan website)

y separately published work icon Different Hands : Seven Stories John Tranter , South Fremantle : Folio Fremantle Press , 1998 Z303139 1998 selected work prose (taught in 1 units)

Seven prose pieces written using 'BrekDown', a text analysis and text generation program written in Turbo Pascal for IBM-compatible personal computers, devised in 1985 by the San Francisco programmer Neil J. Rubenking. 'Brekdown' can also blend the styles of two or more texts, and reconstruct a text with the characteristics of this blended style.

'The stories . . . I got "Brekdown" to mix text samples by two different writers in a kind of conceptual blender, and produce a new text with the characteristics of both. I produced seven stories, about ten pages each. The drafts that Brekdown gave me needed a lot of reworking. The story "Howling Twins" was heavily reworked from a draft originating in a blend of two text samples, one from Allen Ginsberg's notorious poem "Howl", and one from a chapter of "The Bobbsey Twins on a Bicycle Trip." The piece titled "Lonely Chaps" began as a sample from Radclyffe Hall's febrile novel of pre-war middle-class lesbian passion, "The Well of Loneliness", blended with "Biggles Defies the Swastika."

Source: Interview with John Kinsella, August 1999, John Kinsella website, www.johnkinsella.org (sighted 14/10/2002)

y separately published work icon That Deadman Dance Kim Scott , Sydney : Picador , 2010 Z1728528 2010 single work novel historical fiction (taught in 43 units)

Big-hearted, moving and richly rewarding, That Deadman Dance is set in the first decades of the 19th century in the area around what is now Albany, Western Australia. In playful, musical prose, the book explores the early contact between the Aboriginal Noongar people and the first European settlers.

'The novel's hero is a young Noongar man named Bobby Wabalanginy. Clever, resourceful and eager to please, Bobby befriends the new arrivals, joining them hunting whales, tilling the land, exploring the hinterland and establishing the fledgling colony. He is even welcomed into a prosperous local white family where he falls for the daughter, Christine, a beautiful young woman who sees no harm in a liaison with a native.

'But slowly - by design and by accident - things begin to change. Not everyone is happy with how the colony is developing. Stock mysteriously start to disappear; crops are destroyed; there are "accidents" and injuries on both sides. As the Europeans impose ever stricter rules and regulations in order to keep the peace, Bobby's Elders decide they must respond in kind. A friend to everyone, Bobby is forced to take sides: he must choose between the old world and the new, his ancestors and his new friends. Inexorably, he is drawn into a series of events that will forever change not just the colony but the future of Australia...' (From the publisher's website.)

2012

The Drover's Wife Henry Lawson , 1892 single work short story (taught in 3 units)
— Appears in: Aus einer neuen Literatur : Australische Erzählungen und Plaudereien 1906; The Drover's Wife : A Celebration of a Great Australian Love Affair 2017; (p. 3-14)

— Appears in: The School Paper for Classes V and VI , August no. 143 1911; (p. 106-109) The School Paper for Grades VII and VIII , March no. 299 1925; (p. 18-21) The School Paper : Grades VII and VIII , February no. 309 1926; (p. 2-5) The School Paper : Grades VII and VIII , September no. 349 1929; (p. 122-125) Victorian Readers : Fifth Book 1930; (p. 24-29) Victorian Readers : Fifth Book 1940; (p. 22-27)

— Appears in: The Bulletin , 23 July vol. 12 no. 649 1892; (p. 21-22) Short Stories in Prose and Verse 1894; (p. 26-39) While the Billy Boils 1896; (p. 127-138) The Country I Come From 1901; (p. 72-84) The Bulletin Story Book : A Selection of Stories and Literary Sketches from 'The Bulletin' [1881-1901] 1901; (p. 75-83) The Observer , 17 April vol. 72 no. 5537 1915; (p. 4)

— Appears in: Cerita Dari Australia 1974; (p. 4-31)

— Appears in: Australische Erzähler von Marcus Clarke bis Patrick White 1984; (p. 36-44)

— Appears in: Crocevia : Scritture Straniere, Migranti e di Viaggio , Estate vol. 5/6 no. 2005; (p. 69-75)

First appearing in The Bulletin in 1892, Henry Lawson's short story 'The Drovers Wife' is today regarded as a seminal work in the Australian literary tradition. Noted for it's depiction of the bush as harsh, potentially threatening and both isolated and isolating, the story opens with a simple enough premise: an aggressive--and presumably deadly--snake disrupts the working life of a bushwoman and her young children. Brave but cautious, the woman resolves to protect her children since her husband is, characteristically, away from home and of no help. 

As time passes within the story, tension builds, and the snake's symbolic threat takes on layers of meaning as the sleepless heroine recalls previous challenges she faced while her husband was away. A series of flashbacks and recollections propel the story through the single night over which it takes place, and by the time the climax arrives--the confrontation with the snake--readers have learned much about the heroine's strengths and fears, most of the latter involving the loss of children and dark figures who encroach upon her small, vulnerable homestead. To be sure, this "darkness" is highly symbolic, and Lawson's use of imagery invokes Western notions of good and evil as well as gendered and racial stereotypes. 

Five Bells i "Time that is moved by little fidget wheels", Kenneth Slessor , 1939 single work poetry (taught in 2 units)
— Appears in: Five Bells : XX Poems 1939; (p. 15-20) One Hundred Poems : 1919-1939 1944; (p. 119-123) An Anthology of Australian Verse 1952; (p. 336-340) A Book of Australian Verse 1956; (p. 97-101) The Penguin Book of Australian Verse 1958; (p. 75-79) Australian Idiom : An Anthology of Contemporary Prose and Poetry 1963; (p. 199-202)

— Appears in: Meridian , vol. 17 no. 2 2000; (p. 93-105)
y separately published work icon The Jerilderie Letter Ned Kelly , 1879 (Manuscript version)x400813 Z855917 1879 single work correspondence (taught in 3 units)

'I have been wronged and my mother and four or five men lagged innocent and is my brothers and sisters and my mother not to be pitied also who has no alternative only to put up with the brutal and cowardly conduct of a parcel of big ugly fat-necked wombat headed big bellied magpie legged narrow hipped splaw-footed sons of Irish Bailiffs or english landlords which is better known as Officers of Justice or Victorian Police…

'Outlaw, murderer, self-proclaimed victim, Ned Kelly is an Australian icon. But who was he? Kelly’s extraordinary achievement is to have provided his own answer to that question. The Jerilderie Letter is his remarkable manifesto and a startling record of his voice.

'Kelly delivered his letter, which Joe Byrne had diligently written out, on Monday 10 February 1879, immediately after his gang had held up the Bank of New South Wales in Jerilderie. He gives an impassioned defence of his actions, condemns those who have wronged him, and sends a chilling warning to those who may yet defy him.

'This illustrated edition, transcribed from the manuscript now housed in the State Library of Victoria, includes a fascinating new introduction by the historian Alex McDermott. The Jerilderie Letter remains one of the most astonishing documents in Australian history.' (Publication summary)

y separately published work icon The Man from Snowy River i "There was movement at the station, for the word had passed around", A. B. Paterson , Brisbane : Jacaranda Press , 1967 Z84453 1890 single work poetry (taught in 1 units)
y separately published work icon The Man Who Loved Children Christina Stead , New York (City) : Simon and Schuster , 1940 Z462160 1940 single work novel (taught in 19 units)

'Set in Washington during the 1930s, Sam and Henny Pollit are a warring husband and wife. Their tempestuous marriage, aggravated by too little money, lies at the centre of Stead's satirical and brilliantly observed novel about the relations between husbands and wives, and parents and children.

'Sam, a scientist, uses words as weapons of attack and control on his children and is prone to illusions of power and influence that fail to extend beyond his family. His wife Henny, who hails from a wealthy Baltimore family, is disastrously impractical and enmeshed in her own fantasies of romance and vengeance. Much of the care of their six children is left to Louisa, Sam's 14-year-old daughter from his first marriage. Within this psychological battleground, Louisa must attempt to make a life of her own.'

Source: Publisher's blurb (MUP).

y separately published work icon My Brilliant Career Miles Franklin , Edinburgh London : William Blackwood , 1901 Z161522 1901 single work novel (taught in 56 units)

'My Brilliant Career was written by Stella Franklin (1879-1954) when she was just nineteen years old. The novel struggled to find an Australian publisher, but was published in London and Edinburgh in 1901 after receiving an endorsement from Henry Lawson. Although Franklin wrote under the pseudonym 'Miles Franklin', Lawson’s preface makes it clear that Franklin is, as Lawson puts it 'a girl.'

'The novel relates the story of Sybylla Melvyn, a strong-willed young woman of the 1890s growing up in the Goulburn area of New South Wales and longing to be a writer.' (Publication summary)

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)

y separately published work icon The Songmaster Di Morrissey , Sydney : Pan Macmillan Australia , 1997 Z527885 1997 single work novel (taught in 1 units)

'In Melbourne, a baby girl is found abandoned in the Victorian Art Gallery. She is wrapped in a shawl decorated with a motif that links her to ancient rock paintings in the Kimberley...In Los Angeles, a movie producer's dying daughter is haunted by nightmares after visiting the Kimberley...And it is to the Kimberley that ex-nun Beth Van Horton brings a disparate group of travellers whose lives will be changed forever.'

'The Kimberley - a land that cradles Australia's ancient treasures - is also home to a people whose powerful secrets could unlock the future for modern mankind.' (Source: Publishers 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 They're a Weird Mob Nino Culotta , Sydney : Ure Smith , 1957 Z54863 1957 single work novel humour (taught in 2 units)

'Who the hell’s Nino Culotta. That’s what you asked yourself when you first picked up this book, wasn’t it? Well I’m Nino Culotta. My father baptised me Giovanni—John—well Giovannino is like Johnny, and Nino is an easier way of saying it. Or a lazier way, if you like.

'Just off the boat from Italy—the north—Nino Culotta arrives in Sydney. He thought he spoke English but he’s never heard anything like the language these Australians are speaking.

'They’re a Weird Mob is an hilarious snapshot of the immigrant experience in Menzies-era Australia, by a writer with a brilliant ear for the Australian way with words.' (Publication summary : Text Classics)

After Post-Colonialism David Carter , 2007 single work criticism (taught in 1 units)
— Appears in: Meanjin , vol. 66 no. 2 2007; (p. 114-119)
'Examines the current state of Australian literary studies.'
Beyond the Colonial Present : Quantitative Analysis, 'Resourceful Reading' and Australian Literary Studies Katherine Bode , 2008 single work criticism (taught in 1 units)
— Appears in: JASAL , Special Issue 2008; (p. 184-197)
'The revival in cultural nationalism suggested by current debates about Australian history and literature represents (to borrow from Gillian Whitlock) both a potential pleasure and a danger for Australian literary studies. While the injection of funds augured by this shift in government policy could resuscitate and reinvigorate the discipline, at present, such funds seem to be contingent upon reviving a canonical approach to the teaching and researching of Australian literature. This situation places Australian literary studies at a crossroad. Rather than following the path of least resistance and reinstituting the canon, I advocate a move towards innovation: that is, an extension and realisation of the principles and insights of cultural materialism through quantitative methodologies and resourceful readings, as well as through eResearch more generally. This direction would propel Australian literary studies beyond its current crisis of confidence - by reinvigorating the discipline and offering it renewed institutional, political, social and critical relevance, and alternative funding opportunities - without reinvoking the canon, and hence rejecting the cultural materialism that has shaped and positioned Australian literary studies since the 1980s.' (Author's abstract)
A Book By Any Other Name? Towards a Social History of the Book in Aboriginal Australia Penny Van Toorn , 2009 single work criticism (taught in 1 units)
— Appears in: Australian Literary Studies , vol. 24 no. 2 2009; (p. 5-20)
Van Toorn traces the development of European book culture and indigenous communication and writing in Australia.
The Decline of the Literary Paradigm in Australian Publishing Mark Davis , 2005 single work criticism (taught in 1 units)
— Appears in: Heat , no. 12 (New Series) 2006; (p. 91-108) Making Books : Contemporary Australian Publishing 2007; (p. 116-131)
Davis examines the impact of popular fiction on Australian publishing trends during the period 1995-2005.
y separately published work icon A History of the Book in Australia, 1891-1945 : A National Culture in a Colonised Market Martyn Lyons (editor), John Arnold (editor), St Lucia : University of Queensland Press , 2001 Z921361 2001 anthology criticism (taught in 1 units) The first of a series of studies of Australian book production and consumption. The work is organised into four sections: 'Publishing and Printing', 'Bookshops and Libraries' (including histories of small and specialised libraries), 'Genres and Their Place in the Market' and 'Reading' (including accounts of reading groups and societies). Within each grouping are chapters on related subjects, in some cases accompanied by illustrative case studies.
y separately published work icon Paper Empires : A History of the Book in Australia 1946-2005 Craig Munro (editor), Robyn Sheahan-Bright (editor), St Lucia : University of Queensland Press , 2006 Z1275326 2006 anthology criticism (taught in 3 units) The second of a series of studies of Australian book production and consumption. The work is organised into three sections: 'The Rise of Publishing ', 'Book Business' and 'Reaching Readers'. Within each grouping are chapters on related subjects, in some cases accompanied by illustrative case studies.
Structures, Networks, Institutions : The New Empiricism, Book History and Literary History David Carter , 2009 single work criticism (taught in 1 units)
— Appears in: Resourceful Reading : The New Empiricism, eResearch and Australian Literary Culture 2009; (p. 31-52)
An overview of the different kinds of work on culture that are contained in the term 'the new empiricism'. Carter emphasises the status of the new empiricism as 'post-' rather than 'anti-theoretical'.
'Sweeping up the Ashes' : The Politics of Collecting Personal Papers Rachel Buchanan , 2011 single work essay (taught in 1 units)
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , December 2011-January 2012 no. 337 2011; (p. 40-52)
'Rachel Buchanan - recipient of the ABR Sidney Myer Fund Fellowship - investigates the purposes of collecting personal papers in the digital era, and asks whether we should preserve a broader range of archives than we presently do.' (Editor's abstract)
Honours Seminar 2 (English) (ENGL7482) Semester 1, Semester 2
Honours Seminar 4 (English) (ENGL7484) Semester 1, Semester 2

2010

y separately published work icon Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence Doris Pilkington Garimara , St Lucia : University of Queensland Press , 1996 Z126936 1996 single work biography (taught in 26 units)

'The film Rabbit-Proof Fence is based on this true account of Doris Nugi Garimara Pilkington's mother Molly, who as a young girl led her two sisters on an extraordinary 1,600 kilometre walk home. Under Western Australia's invidious removal policy of the 1930s, the girls were taken from their Aboriginal family at Jigalong on the edge of the Little Sandy Desert, and transported halfway across the state to the Native Settlement at Moore River, north of Perth...

The three girls - aged 8, 11 and 14 - managed to escape from the settlement's repressive conditions and brutal treatment. Barefoot without provisions or maps, they set out to find the rabbit-proof fence, knowing it passed near their home in the north. Tracked by native police and search planes, they hid in terror, surviving on bush tucker, desperate to return to the world they knew.

The journey to freedom - longer than many of the legendary walks of [the Australian nation's] explorer heroes... told from family recollections, letters between the authorities and the Aboriginal Protector, and ... newspaper reports of the runaway children.' Source: Publisher's blurb

form y separately published work icon Head On Andrew Bovell , Ana Kokkinos , Mira Robertson , ( dir. Ana Kokkinos ) Australia : Head On Productions , 1998 Z796585 1998 single work film/TV (taught in 6 units)

Set over the course of one night, Head On focuses on Ari, a handsome nineteen-year-old boy of Greek descent who finds himself torn between his traditional upbringing and his sexual identity. As he attempts to come to terms with where he fits in, Ari careens between hanging out with his friends and bickering with his family while also becoming involved in several heterosexual and homosexual encounters.

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 Monkey Grip Helen Garner , Melbourne : McPhee Gribble , 1977 Z115661 1977 single work novel (taught in 12 units)

Set in inner suburban 1970s Melbourne, Monkey Grip describes the fluid relationships of a community of friends who are living and loving in new ways. Single parent Nora falls in love with Javo, a heroin addict, and together they try to make sense of their lives and the choices they have made.

form y separately published work icon Monkey Grip Ken Cameron , Helen Garner , ( dir. Ken Cameron ) 1982 Australia : Pavilion Films , 1981 Z820614 1982 single work film/TV (taught in 1 units)

Set in inner Melbourne over two summers, Monkey Grip is a frank portrayal of a divorced mother who is attempting to cope with both her thirteen-year-old daughter and her own relationship with a drug addict, while also trying to get into the music business. As she battles to regain control of her life, we meet an array of talented and reckless musicians, actors, and writers, all of whom play a part in her world and most of whom refuse to live by society's rules.

form y separately published work icon Rabbit-Proof Fence Christine Olsen , ( dir. Phillip Noyce ) Australia : Rumbalara Films Olsen Levy Productions , 2002 Z919523 2002 single work film/TV (taught in 15 units)

Based on real life events that occurred in 1931, Rabbit-Proof Fence is the story of three mixed-race Aboriginal children who are forcibly abducted from their mothers by the Western Australian government. Molly (aged fourteen), her sister Daisy (aged eight), and their cousin Gracie (aged ten) are taken from their homes at Jigalong, situated in the Pilbara region of Western Australia, at the orders of the Protector of Aborigines, A.O. Neville, and sent to an institution at Moore River to be educated and trained as domestic servants. After a few days, Molly leads the other two girls in an escape. What ensues is an epic journey that tests the girls' will to survive and their hope of finding the rabbit-proof fence to guide them home.

Although they are pursued by the institution's Aboriginal tracker and the police, Molly knows enough about bush craft to help them hide their tracks. They head east in search of the world's longest fence - built to keep rabbits out - because Molly knows that this will lead them back to Jigalong. Over the course of nine weeks, the girls walk almost 2,400 kilometres before Gracie is captured attempting to catch a train. Molly and Daisy avoid capture but eventually collapse from exhaustion on the saltpans not far from Jigalong. When they wake, they see the spirit bird, an eagle, flying overhead. Its significance gives the girls the extra energy they need and they are able to make it back to their home.

y separately published work icon Wake in Fright Kenneth Cook , London : Michael Joseph , 1961 Z560904 1961 single work novel (taught in 9 units)

Wake in Fright is the harrowing story of a young schoolteacher, John Grant, who leaves his isolated outback school to go on holidays to Sydney (and civilization). Things start to go horribly wrong, however, when stays overnight in a rough outback mining town called Bundanyabba. After a drink fuelled night, in which he loses all his momey, Grant finds himself both broke and stuck in the town with means of escape. He subsequently descends into a cycle of hangovers, fumbling sexual encounters, and increasing self-loathing as he becomes more and more immersed in the grotesque and surreal nightmare that is 'the Yabba.'

form y separately published work icon Wake in Fright Outback Evan Jones , ( dir. Ted Kotcheff ) 1971 Australia United States of America (USA) : Group W Films NLT Productions , 1971 Z912048 1971 single work film/TV horror (taught in 7 units)

John Grant, a young Englishman, teaches in Tiboonda, a tiny railway junction on the far western plains of New South Wales. He sets off to spend his summer vacation in Sydney but doesn't make it beyond Bundanyabba, a nearby mining town known as 'the Yabba'. Stranded in town after losing all his money in a two-up game, he finds himself engulfed by the Yabba's claustrophobic, nightmarish, beer-fuelled stupor, an atmosphere compounded of repressed sexuality, squalid violence, and the sinister mateship of the locals. After being sexually assaulted by the town's alcoholic doctor, he attempts to hitchhike out of the town but is brought back by a truckie. In anger, he tries to shoot the doctor but ends up only shooting himself. After discharging himself from the hospital, Grant takes the train back to Tiboonda, resigned to another year of teaching.

Myself and the Aliens (ENGL2260) Semester 2
Postcolonial Literatures (ENGL2245) Semester 1

2009

Australia and Home (ENGL1116) Semester 2
12 Edmondstone Street David Malouf , 1985 single work prose autobiography (taught in 1 units)
— Appears in: 12 Edmondstone Street 1985; (p. 1-66)
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 The Cardboard Crown Martin Boyd , London : Cresset Press , 1952 Z501486 1952 single work novel (taught in 1 units) Dominic Langton dies, leaving the family home to his brother, Guy Langton. There, Guy's discovery of letters written by his grandmother, Alice, provokes him to tell his family's history, with Alice as the central figure, in a novel. As a writer, he sets himself the task of discovering, narrating, and creating from the remnants of the past. (Source: Sydney University Press)
y separately published work icon In the Winter Dark Tim Winton , Ringwood : McPhee Gribble , 1988 Z375616 1988 single work novel horror (taught in 2 units)

'Night falls. In a lonely valley called the Sink, four people prepare for a quiet evening. Then in his orchard, Murray Jaccob sees a moving shadow. Across the swamp, his neighbour Ronnie watches her lover leave and feels her baby roll inside her. And on the verandah of the Stubbses’ house, a small dog is torn screaming from its leash by something unseen. Nothing will ever be the same again. ' (Publication summary)

y separately published work icon The Magic Pudding : Being the Adventures of Bunyip Bluegum and His Friends Bill Barnacle and Sam Sawnoff Norman Lindsay , Sydney : Angus and Robertson , 1918 Z862346 1918 single work children's fiction children's humour satire (taught in 4 units) "The adventures of two koalas, a penguin, an old sailor and a cantankerous walking, talking pudding that is vulnerable to thieves."
form y separately published work icon The Proposition Nick Cave , ( dir. John Hillcoat ) Australia United Kingdom (UK) : Autonomous Jackie O Productions Pictures in Paradise Surefire Film Productions LLP , 2005 Z1216692 2005 single work film/TV thriller western crime (taught in 8 units)

'Set in the 1880s, [The Proposition] opens in the middle of a frenzied gunfight between the police and a gang of outlaws. Charlie Burns ... and his brother Mikey are captured by Captain Stanley... Together with their psychopathic brother Arthur, ... they are wanted for a brutal crime. Stanley makes Charlie a seemingly impossible proposition in an attempt to bring an end to the cycle of bloody violence.'


Source: Nick Cave's website (http://www.nickcaveandthebadseeds.com/)

Sighted: 20/09/2005

form y separately published work icon Romulus, My Father Nick Drake , ( dir. Richard Roxburgh ) Australia : Arenafilm , 2007 Z1308732 2007 single work film/TV (taught in 1 units)

Film adaptation of Raymond Gaita's biography.

y separately published work icon Benang : From the Heart Kim Scott , Fremantle : Fremantle Press , 1999 Z135862 1999 single work novel (taught in 31 units) 'Oceanic in its rhythms and understanding, brilliant in its use of language and image, moving in its largeness of spirit, compelling in its narrative scope and style, Benang is a novel of celebration and lament, of beginning and return, of obliteration and recovery, of silencing and of powerful utterance. Both tentative and daring, it speaks to the present and a possible future through stories, dreams, rhythms, songs, images and documents mobilised from the incompletely acknowledged and still dynamic past.' (Publisher's website)
y separately published work icon Hiam Eva Sallis , St Leonards : Allen and Unwin , 1998 Z804000 1998 single work novel (taught in 4 units)

"The world had changed. As far as the eye could see, the earth was red. It wasn't orange, or soil red, or brown red, or perhaps all of them at once. It was profound rich red, glittering deeply in the mid-morning light. She was vaguely aware of having known that somewhere in Australia the land was this colour but the reality of it was startling and stunning.'

Hiam is the story of a journey through both a psychic and geographic landscape, a journey through disintegration and loss. Hiam, an Arab migrant woman, abandons Adelaide to unravel her life and memories on the road North after her family and identity have been destroyed. In the course of the novel she weaves an identity out of past, present, stories, dreams and the Australian landscape with which she engages for the first time.

On one level, this is the story of a migrant's experience in a strange land, a novel which explores the pressures, fragilities and strengths of exiled communities. It is also a story of universal human grief, individual courage and the will, not only to survive, but to live fully in the world."

Source.

y separately published work icon Radiance : The Play + The Screenplay Louis Nowra , Sydney : Currency Press , 2000 Z668116 2000 selected work drama screenplay (taught in 6 units)
y separately published work icon The Red Thread Nicholas Jose , South Yarra : Hardie Grant Books , 2000 Z840486 2000 single work novel (taught in 1 units)

'A seductive love story set in contemporary Shanghai, The Red Thread intertwines the lives of two pairs of lovers across the centuries. Shen is a young, American-educated appraiser for an auction house. Ruth is a gifted Australian artist he meets, it seems, by chance. And Han is a beautiful, enigmatic woman who both facilitates and complicates their relationship. Yet all three lives mysteriously mirror characters described in a rare, eighteenth-century book that comes up for auction – a book that is missing its final chapters. As the characters in the original tale move toward an ominous, unknown end, Shen’s search for the missing pages goes from curiosity to desperation as he hopes to discover – and perhaps alter – his fated future with Ruth.'

Source: Author's blurb.

Honours Seminar 2 (English) (ENGL7482) Semester 1, Semester 2
y separately published work icon Body/Landscape Journals Margaret Somerville , North Melbourne : Spinifex Press , 1999 Z978863 1999 multi chapter work autobiography essay biography (taught in 1 units) 'Reading this book [sic] is like falling through a faultline, as we respond to poesis, both as poetry and as thought creation. The author [sic] entered the faultline at the 1984 Pine Gap Women's Peace Camp where urban women and Aboriginal women demonstrated agaist military bases. As she moved through the landscape of this and other very different places, she recorded her interactions: with Aboriginal women in the desert and in the mountains, and with white women in the tropics. It is a thoughtful challenge of all that we think. Margaret [sic] concludes with reflections on the architecture of love.' (Source: Backcover)
y separately published work icon No Road : (Bitumen all the Way) Stephen Muecke , South Fremantle : Fremantle Press , 1997 Z430923 1997 selected work prose extract travel (taught in 1 units) 'No Road is a nomadic travelogue; a personal journey through contemporary Australian landscape and culture. It is a book of stories told of the places we live in, visit and travel through, and of the ideas and imaginings that these stories and places reveal'. (Source: Publisher's blurb, 1999 edition)
Honours Seminar 4 (English) (ENGL7484) Semester 1, Semester 2
y separately published work icon Mavis Goes to Timor Angela Chaplin , Paola Kavisha Mazzella , Katherine Thomson , 2002 Sydney : Currency Press Playbox Theatre , 2003 Z1011419 2002 single work drama (taught in 1 units)

'The true story of Mavis, an 86 year old retired haberdasher from regional Victoria. Stung into action by the suffering of the East Timorese, Mavis took her sewing machines to Timor and set about making a practical contribution. Amid the destruction and buoyed by the people's overwhelming faith Mavis tackles the bureaucracy. This work is based on stories told by Mavis Taylor, Elwyn Taylor and the women of East Timor.' Libraries Australia record.

y separately published work icon The Memory Room Christopher Koch , Milsons Point : Vintage Australia , 2007 Z1438763 2007 single work novel (taught in 1 units) Vincent Austin thinks his devotion to secrecy for its own sake makes him a born spy. His childhood friend Erika Lange shares his fascination with the covert. Having graduated University Vincent is recruited by ASIS - Australia's overseas secret intelligence service. Erika eventually joins Foreign Affairs as a press officer. As the Cold War reaches its final peak, the fantasies of youth have become reality for Vincent and Erika, but they lead to a tragic climax. It is left to Vincent's university friend Bradley, who inherits Vincent's diaries, to contemplate their story. - from Back cover.
y separately published work icon Miss Tanaka John Romeril , Strawberry Hills Melbourne : Currency Press Playbox Theatre Centre, Monash University , 2001 Z819617 2001 single work drama (taught in 1 units)
— Appears in: ミス・タナカ : 心中 : ラブ・スーサイズ 2012;
y separately published work icon My Life as a Fake Peter Carey , Milsons Point : Random House Australia , 2003 Z1045776 2003 single work novel (taught in 8 units) Sarah Wode-Douglas is an aristocratic woman who has made her living as the editor of the poetry magazine "First Proof", until she impulsively follows a friend to Kuala Lumpur. She meets Christopher Chubb, an enigmatic wreck of a man whose terrible secrets Sarah is compelled to discover and pursue. (Source: Trove)
y separately published work icon Neem Dreams Inez Baranay , New Delhi : Rupa , 2003 Z1065345 2002 single work novel (taught in 1 units) 'Andy, an English lawyer looking for a miracle cure. Pandora, an Australian eco-scientist, looking for the perfect women's project. Meenakshi, author and co-ordinator of the project, returned to India to work for rural development. And Jade, an Australian working in New York, comes to buy neem skin care products to sell exclusively at a New York store. The past passions of each of the four brings to their meeting in India are revealed in a web-like plot, with the neem tree acting as a kind of crucible for each as the novel draws to a startling climax.' (Publication summary)
y separately published work icon Original Face Nicholas Jose , Artarmon : Giramondo Publishing , 2005 Z1219298 2005 single work novel thriller (taught in 1 units)

'The drama begins with a body dumped in south-western Sydney – skinned, with no face. Lewis Lin, taxi driver, photographer, recent arrival from Beijing, happens to be at the scene. With detectives Ginger Rogers and Shelley Swert in pursuit, Lin finds himself drawn into a deadly immigration racket, with a cast which includes a film-maker just in from LA, a Buddhist monk, a millionaire bachelor artist, a masseuse, a maniacal violinist, and a refugee assassin.

Part thriller, part ethnic noir, dark and comic by turns, Original Face offers a sensuous and highly coloured portrait of the jostling energies that make up life in the contemporary Australian city.

Drawing its title from an ancient Zen koan, the novel traces the complicated manoeuvres by which people mask their identities, and the accidental pathways by which these hidden selves come to light.'

Source: Author's website.

y separately published work icon Summer Was a Fast Train without Terminals Merlinda Bobis , North Melbourne : Spinifex Press , 1998 Z242127 1998 selected work poetry drama (taught in 1 units)
y separately published work icon The Travel Writer Simone Lazaroo , Sydney : Picador , 2006 Z1305845 2006 single work novel (taught in 7 units) London, late 1980s. Ghislaine de Sequeira lies in a hospital bed. Once an obituary writer in Malacca, she had practised eloquence in the face of death for years. But now she is dying, and it is her bereft daughter Isabelle's turn to articulate the meaning of a life at its end. Isabelle tries to find an anchor in this storm by telling her mother's story and by seeking solace in her writing tutor, as many years ago her mother sought solace with the travel writer after the death of her own mother, Mathilde. Seeking to understand her mother's past choices in war-torn Malacca in light of her own persistent desire for love, Isabelle spins a version of Ghislaine's passion for the travel writer, a man who would alter Ghislaine's life - and that of Isabelle - completely. (Publisher's blurb)
The Working Temple Shanghai i "Bulkhead doors give entry to", Caroline Caddy , 1997 single work poetry (taught in 1 units)
— Appears in: Working Temple : Poems 1997; (p. 29-30) Esperance : New and Selected Poems 2007; (p. 104-105)
y separately published work icon The Submerged Cathedral Charlotte Wood , Milsons Point : Vintage Australia , 2004 Z1099939 2004 single work novel (taught in 1 units)

‘Set me as a seal on your heart, for love is stronger than death.'

'Spanning many years, travelling across Australia's vast continent and through some of Europe's great cities, The Submerged Cathedral is a beguiling, heartbreaking story of paradise and the fall, of sacrifice and atonement, and of sisterly love and rivalry. Most of all, however, it is about an enduring and sacred love – a love stronger than death – and the journeys undertaken in its name. Written in spare, haunting prose, this novel is a work of the highest literary merit, as well as a timeless love story that will enthrall readers. The release of Charlotte Wood's acclaimed first novel, Pieces of a Girl, marked her as a young writer of great promise; The Submerged Cathedral thrillingly confirms that promise with astonishing assurance and lyricism.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

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 The Getting of Wisdom Henry Handel Richardson , London : Heinemann , 1910 Z901329 1910 single work novel (taught in 25 units)

'A coming-of-age story of a spontaneous heroine who finds herself ensconced in the rigidity of a turn-of-the-century boarding school. The clever and highly imaginative Laura has difficulty fitting in with her wealthy classmates and begins to compromise her ideals in her search for popularity and acceptance.' (From the publisher's website.)

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).

y separately published work icon The One Day of the Year : A Novel Alan Seymour , London : Souvenir Press , 1967 Z73558 1967 single work novel (taught in 1 units)
y separately published work icon The Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry John Kinsella (editor), Camberwell : Penguin , 2009 Z1553543 2009 anthology poetry (taught in 16 units)

'This is a comprehensive survey of Australian poetic achievement, ranging from early colonial and indigenous verse to contemporary work, from the major poets to those who deserve to be better recognised.' (Provided by the publisher).

form y separately published work icon Road to Nhill Alison Tilson , ( dir. Sue Brooks ) Australia : Gecko Films , 1996 Z1498385 1996 single work film/TV humour (taught in 1 units)

A comedy of accidents, life, death, the universe, and a bad corner on the road to Nhill, the story begins with three cars filled with women bowlers on their way home to the Victorian town of Pyramid Hill (population 550) after a tournament. When one of the cars and its four occupants don't return, the town embarks on a chaotic course of action to try to solve the mystery. Meanwhile, the four missing women bowlers, whose car has rolled on the deserted road, are coping fairly well--that is, until the local men and emergency services start trying to help.

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 Speaking from the Heart : Stories of Life, Family and Country Sally Morgan (editor), Tjalaminu Mia (editor), Blaze Kwaymullina (editor), North Fremantle : Fremantle Press , 2007 Z1386813 2007 anthology life story poetry (taught in 1 units) 'Eighteen Aboriginal Australians from across the country each share a powerful story which is central to their own lives, and to their family, community or country. Speaking from the Heart provides readers with a very personal picture of the history, culture and contemporary experience of Aboriginal Australia.' (Source: Publisher's blurb)
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