University of Adelaide
SA

Works Taught at This Institution

y separately published work icon Animal People Charlotte Wood , Crows Nest : Allen and Unwin , 2011 Z1799698 2011 single work novel (taught in 2 units) '"He could not find one single more word to say. I just want to be free. He could not say those words. They had already withered in his mind, turned to dust. He did not even know, he marvelled now, what the hell those words had meant."

'Acclaimed novelist Charlotte Wood takes a character from her bestselling book The Children and turns her unflinching gaze on him and his world in her extraordinary novel, Animal People. Set in Sydney over a single day, Animal People traces a watershed day in the life of Stephen, aimless, unhappy, unfulfilled - and without a clue as to how to make his life better.

'His dead-end job, his demanding family, his oppressive feelings for Fiona and the pitiless city itself ... the great weight of it all threatens to come crashing down on him. The day will bring untold surprises and disasters, but will also show him - perhaps too late - that only love can set him free.

'Sharply observed, hilarious, tender and heartbreaking, Animal People is a portrait of urban life, a meditation on the conflicted nature of human-animal relationships, and a masterpiece of storytelling. Filled with shocks of recognition and revelation, it shows a writer of great depth and compassion at work. (From the publisher's website.)
y separately published work icon Auntie Rita Rita Cynthia Huggins , Jackie Huggins , Canberra : Aboriginal Studies Press , 1994 Z126649 1994 single work biography (taught in 9 units)

"Most people call me Auntie Rita, whites as well as Aboriginal people. Auntie is a term of respect of our older women folk. You don't have to be blood-related or anything. Everyone is kin. That's a beautiful thing because in this way no one is ever truly alone, they always have someone they can turn to."

Rita Huggins told her memories to her daughter Jackie, and some of their conversation is in this book. We witness their intimacy, their similarities and their differences, the '"fighting with their tongues". Two voices, two views on a shared life.' (Source: Publisher's blurb)

form y separately published work icon Australia Baz Luhrmann , Stuart Beattie , Ronald Harwood , Richard Flanagan , ( dir. Baz Luhrmann ) Sydney : Bazmark Films , 2008 Z1531345 2008 single work film/TV (taught in 8 units)

At the beginning of World War II, Lady Sarah Ashley travels from her home in England to Northern Australia to confront her husband, whom she believes is having an affair. He is in the country to oversee the selling of his enormous cattle station, Faraway Downs. Her husband sends Drover, an independent stockman, to transport her to Faraway Downs. When Lady Sarah arrives at the station, however, she finds that her husband has been murdered (allegedly by King George, an Aboriginal elder) and that cattle station manager Neil Fletcher is trying to gain control of Faraway Downs, so that Lesley 'King' Carney will have a complete cattle monopoly in the Northern Territory.

Lady Sarah is captivated by Nullah (King George's grandson) son of an Aboriginal mother and an unknown white father. When Nullah tells her that he has seen her cattle being driven onto Carney's land, Fletcher beats him. Lady Sarah fires Fletcher, deciding to try to run the cattle station herself. To save the property from Carney, she enlists the aid of Drover; together, they drive 2,000 head of cattle across hundreds of miles of the country's most unforgiving land. In the course of the journey, she falls in love with both Drover and the Australian landscape.

Lady Sarah, Nullah, and Drover live together happily at Faraway Downs for two years, while Fletcher (the actual murderer of Lady Sarah's husband and very likely the father of Nullah) kills Carney, marries his daughter, and takes over Carney's cattle empire. When the authorities send Nullah to live on Mission Island with the other half-Aboriginal children, Lady Sarah is devastated. In the meantime, she works as a radio operator in Darwin.

When the Japanese attack the island and Darwin in 1942, Lady Sarah fears that Nullah has been killed and Drover, who had quarrelled with Lady Sarah and left the station, believes Lady Sarah has been killed. Learning of Nullah's abduction to Mission Island, however, he sets out to rescue him. Lady Sarah decides to sell Faraway Downs to Fletcher and return to England. Drover and Nulla sail back into port at Darwin as Lady Sarah is about to depart, and the three are reunited. Fletcher, distraught at the death of his wife, attempts to shoot Nullah, but is speared by King George and dies.

y separately published work icon The Best Australian Stories 2008 Delia Falconer (editor), Melbourne : Black Inc. , 2008 Z1535129 2008 anthology short story (taught in 1 units) 'Australian short fiction is where the action is: outward-looking, exciting, filled with surprises and joyful life. Delia Falconer In The Best Australian Stories 2008, Delia Falconer brings together the year's most exciting short fiction. Featuring established masters as well as fresh new voices, this is a perfect book for summer and an ideal introduction to Australia's best contemporary writing. 'As a reader,' Delia Falconer writes, 'I crave what the short story is most suited to deliver: a glimpse into the unpredictability of life, a quick burst of tone and voice, a bittersweet balance of surprising layers.' By turns global and domestic, subversively funny and wrenchingly sad, this year's Best Australian Stories delivers this, and more.' (Publication summary)
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 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 Carpentaria Alexis Wright , Artarmon : Giramondo Publishing , 2006 Z1184902 2006 single work novel (taught in 47 units) Carpentaria's portrait of life in the precariously settled coastal town of Desperance centres on the powerful Phantom family, whose members are the leaders of the Pricklebush people, and their battles with old Joseph Midnight's tearaway Eastend mob on the one hand, and the white officials of Uptown and the neighbouring Gurfurrit mine on the other. Wright's storytelling is operatic and surreal: a blend of myth and scripture, politics and farce. The novel is populated by extraordinary characters - Elias Smith the outcast saviour, the religious zealot Mozzie Fishman, leader of the holy Aboriginal pilgrimage, the murderous mayor Stan Bruiser, the ever-vigilant Captain Nicoli Finn, the activist and prodigal son Will Phantom, and above all, Angel Day the queen of the rubbish-dump, and her sea-faring husband Normal Phantom, the fish-embalming king of time - figures that stand like giants in this storm-swept world. (Backcover)
y separately published work icon Coonardoo : The Well in the Shadow Katharine Susannah Prichard , 1928 Z1081769 1928 single work novel (taught in 39 units) Set in North-West of Western Australia, it describes life on cattle stations and the relationship between the white owner of the station and Coonardoo, an Aboriginal woman.
y separately published work icon Disgrace J. M. Coetzee , London : Secker and Warburg , 1999 6173241 1999 single work novel (taught in 11 units)

After years teaching Romantic poetry at the Technical University of Cape Town, David Lurie, middle-aged and twice divorced, has an impulsive affair with a student. The affair sours; he is denounced and summoned before a committee of inquiry. Willing to admit his guilt, but refusing to yield to pressure to repent publicly, he resigns and retreats to his daughter Lucy's isolated smallholding. For a time, his daughter's influence and the natural rhythms of the farm promise to harmonise his discordant life. But the balance of power in the country is shifting. He and Lucy become victims of a savage and disturbing attack which brings into relief all the faultlines in their relationship.' (Publisher's blurb)

y separately published work icon Dispossession, Dreams & Diversity: Issues in Australian Studies David Carter , Frenchs Forest : Pearson Education Australia , 2006 Z1258484 2006 multi chapter work criticism (taught in 12 units) This work introduces key topics and questions about Australia as a society, a culture and a nation. It contains a useful chapter on Australian modernities, which deals in part with literature in the early to mid 20th century.
y separately published work icon End of the Night Girl Amy T. Matthews , 2007 single work novel (taught in 2 units)
— Appears in: End of the Night Girl : A Novel 2007; (p. v.1)
'Molly, a sassy Australian waitress, is haunted by the ghost of a murdered Polish Jew. The two young women's stories, each a compelling page-turner, combine teasingly in one as End of the Night Girl explores shadows cast by the Holocaust across decades, continents and cultures.' (From the publisher's website.)
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 An Imaginary Life : A Novel David Malouf , New York (City) : George Braziller , 1978 Z828578 1978 single work novel (taught in 8 units)

'In prose that is both elegant and lyrical, David Malouf departs from the little-known facts of Ovid's exile beyond the pale of civilization to create a deeply moving novel of extraordinary beauty. An outcast in a vast wasteland at the edge of the Black Sea, Ovid discovers a feral child. As he teaches the boy to speak the language of the civilized world, the child tutors him in his own tongue, the language of nature, and the once barren landscape begins to resonate with meaning.' (Publisher's blurb)

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

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

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

y separately published work icon The Little Red Writing Book Mark Tredinnick , Sydney : University of New South Wales Press , 2006 Z1324216 2006 single work prose (taught in 16 units) 'A book on technique, style, craft and manners for everyone who writes and wants to do it better. It is a manual of good diction, composition, sentence craft, paragraph design, structure and planning.' (Publisher's blurb)
y separately published work icon Loaded Christos Tsiolkas , Milsons Point : Vintage Australia , 1995 Z565443 1995 single work novel (taught in 40 units)

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

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

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

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

y separately published work icon Making Australian History : Perspectives on the Past Since 1788 Deborah Gare (editor), David Ritter (editor), South Melbourne : Cengage Learning , 2008 Z1601730 2008 anthology non-fiction (taught in 5 units)

Making Australian History: Perspectives on the Past since 1788 is an exciting new text that meets an unusual gap in the literature of Australian history. It presents students with an in-depth, multi authored collection of articles, documents and short essays that are structured around the major themes discussed in most history courses.

Each theme in Making Australian History contains a collection of primary and secondary sources, including chapters by current leading scholars, reprints of publications from previous decades that have proven seminal in the historiographical debate or research of each theme, photographs or artwork, and short feature articles on matters of human interest.

Making Australian History gives students the unique opportunity to study a range of articles and commentary on such themes as the Anzac legend, the convict stain, gold and federation, white Australia, Australians at war, myth, environmentalism and sustainability, ideology and politics. Publisher's blurb.

y separately published work icon Mazin' Grace Dylan Coleman , 2011 St Lucia : University of Queensland Press , 2012 Z1804070 2011 single work novel (taught in 1 units) 'Growing up on the Mission isn't easy for clever Grace Oldman. When her classmates tease her for not having a father, she doesn't know what to say. Pappa Neddy says her dad is the Lord God in Heaven, but that doesn't help when the Mission kids call her a bastard. As Grace slowly pieces together clues that might lead to answers, she struggles to find a place in a community that rejects her for reasons she doesn't understand.'
Source: Publisher's website
y separately published work icon The Mint Lawn Gillian Mears , North Sydney : Allen and Unwin , 1991 Z61573 1991 single work novel (taught in 1 units) ' North coast, New South Wales. Clementine is twenty-five and still living in the place where she grew up, rooted there by memories and her own inability to make changes until she has understood her past. That past is dominated by memories of her mother, and her mother's attempts to dramatise and enrich small-town life and the perceptions of her three clever , receptive daughters.' Publisher's blurb. Inside of front cover.
y separately published work icon New Australian Stories Aviva Tuffield (editor), Carlton North : Scribe , 2009 Z1547254 2009 anthology short story (taught in 2 units)
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