Flinders University
SA

2016

Introduction to Script Writing (SCME2071) Semester 1
Drama 1B: Bodies of Work (DRAM1002) Semester 2
y separately published work icon The Man from Mukinupin : A Musical Play in Two Acts Dorothy Hewett , Fremantle Sydney : Fremantle Press Currency Press , 1979 Z513811 1979 single work musical theatre (taught in 5 units)

Described by Dorothy Hewett in her 1979 Hecate article as 'a romantic comedy, written around the principles of celebration and reconciliation... with love and the realisation of love... central to the story' (78), The Man From Mukinupin also deals with the juxtaposition of surface aspects of life and those which lie beneath the surface. The narrative concerns the courtship and eventual marriage of Polly and Jack, along with their doubles Lily and Harry. The two couples lives, played out in the mythical Western Australia wheat belt town of Mukinupin, are starkly contrasted. Jack and Polly belong to the seemingly respectable and conventional daytime society. Polly, is a double figure - an "about to be disappointed in love an life girl" but for whom everything does come out roses. Her other self is Lily (Touch-of-the-Tar), represents the outsider and outcast. Although Lily and Harry roam the dark netherworld of night-time Mukinupin, she too is able to realise her dream, to escape from the narrow little bush town with her lover. In contrast to these four are the grotesque characters, Widow Tuesday, the Black Widow of Mukinupin who delights in death and destruction; and Edie Perkins, the old lady who recites snatches of Victorian poetry. In discussing the role of her female characters Hewett indicates that the thematic struggle mostly lies within the range of the women : 'They are the most aware of the predicament and are the most violently affected by it' ('Creating Heroines', p79).

Advanced Literary Studies (ENGL7712) Semester 1
y separately published work icon Illywhacker Peter Carey , St Lucia : University of Queensland Press , 1985 Z359598 1985 single work novel (taught in 2 units) In Australian slang, an illywhacker is a country fair con man, an unprincipled seller of fake diamonds and dubious tonics. And Herbert Badgery, may be the king of them all. Vagabond and charlatan, aviator and car salesman, seducer and patriarch, Badgery is a walking embodiment of the Australian national character. (Source: Trove)
Approaches to Creative Writing (CREA1021) Semester 1
Creative Arts Theory and Practice (CREA2106) Semester 1 & 2
Creative Writing Workshop (CREA1022) Semester 1
y separately published work icon Ghost Wife : A Memoir of Love and Defiance Michelle Dicinoski , Collingwood : Black Inc. , 2013 Z1910742 2013 single work autobiography (taught in 1 units)

'Michelle Dicinoski has found the love of her life, and now she just wants to get married and live happily ever after. The only problem is, she's in love with an American woman, Heather, and neither Australia nor America recognises same-sex marriage. What to do when love and the law collide? For Michelle, the answer is clear: go to Canada and get hitched there.

'Ghost Wife is the deep, funny, heartwarming and brave story of that trip. Along the way, Michelle reflects on why anyone would want to get married anyway, on the power of acceptance, and on the startling stories she uncovers in her family's past. She investigates the hidden worlds of people who live their lives outside social norms, sometimes illegally. Michelle doesn't want to disappear, not from her family and not from society. But living in Australia, will she always be a ghost wife?' (Publisher's blurb)

The Craft of Writing Workshop (CREA2100) Semester 1
LIterary Interpretations (ENGL1102) Semester 2
y separately published work icon The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith Thomas Keneally , Sydney : Angus and Robertson , 1972 Z559274 1972 single work novel historical fiction (taught in 4 units)

'When Jimmie Blacksmith marries a white woman, the backlash from both Jimmie's tribe and white society initiates a series of dramatic events. As Jimmie tries to survive between two cultures, tensions reach a head when the Newbys, Jimmie's white employers, try to break up his marriage. The Newby women are murdered and Jimmie flees, pursued by police and vigilantes. The hunt intensifies as further murders are committed, and concludes with tragic results.'

Source: Publisher's blurb (HarperCollins ed.)

Life Writing (CREA2141) Semester 2
y separately published work icon The Family Law Benjamin Law , Melbourne : Black Inc. , 2010 Z1696437 2010 selected work autobiography prose humour (taught in 1 units) 'Meet the Law family – eccentric, endearing and hard to resist. Your guide: Benjamin, the third of five children and a born humorist. Join him as he tries to answer some puzzling questions: Why won’t his Chinese dad wear made-in-China underpants? Why was most of his extended family deported in the 1980s? Will his childhood dreams of Home and Away stardom come to nothing? What are his chances of finding love?' (From the publisher's website.)
y separately published work icon Joe Cinque's Consolation Helen Garner , Sydney : Pan Macmillan Australia , 2004 Z1132428 2004 single work prose (taught in 26 units)

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

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

Prose Fiction Writing A (CREA3101) 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 Eyrie Tim Winton , Melbourne : Penguin Books , 2013 6008228 2013 single work novel (taught in 2 units)

'Eyrie tells the story of Tom Keely, a man who’s lost his bearings in middle age and is now holed up in a flat at the top of a grim highrise, looking down on the world he’s fallen out of love with. He’s cut himself off, until one day he runs into some neighbours: a woman he used to know when they were kids, and her introverted young boy. The encounter shakes him up in a way he doesn’t understand. Despite himself, Keely lets them in. What follows is a heart-stopping, groundbreaking novel for our times – funny, confronting, exhilarating and haunting – populated by unforgettable characters. It asks how, in an impossibly compromised world, we can ever hope to do the right thing..' (Publisher's blurb)

y separately published work icon The Narrow Road to the Deep North Richard Flanagan , Sydney : Random House , 2013 Z1928536 2013 single work novel historical fiction (taught in 5 units)

'A novel of the cruelty of war, and tenuousness of life and the impossibility of love.

'August, 1943. In the despair of a Japanese POW camp on the Thai-Burma death railway, Australian surgeon Dorrigo Evans is haunted by his love affair with his uncle's young wife two years earlier. Struggling to save the men under his command from starvation, from cholera, from beatings, he receives a letter that will change his life forever.

'This savagely beautiful novel is a story about the many forms of love and death, of war and truth, as one man comes of age, prospers, only to discover all that he has lost.' (Publisher's blurb)

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 The Night Guest Fiona McFarlane , Melbourne : Penguin , 2013 6012414 2013 single work novel (taught in 2 units)

'The debut of a major Australian writer, The Night Guest is a mesmerising novel about trust, love, dependence, and the fear that the things you think you know may become the things you're least sure about.

One morning an elderly widow called Ruth wakes thinking a tiger has been in her seaside house. Later that day a formidable woman called Frida arrives, looking as if she's blown in from the sea, but who has in fact come to care for Ruth.

Frida and the tiger: both are here to stay, and neither is what they seem. How far can Ruth trust them? And as memories of childhood in Fiji press upon her with increasing urgency, how far can she trust herself?

The Night Guest, Fiona McFarlane's hypnotic first novel, is no simple tale of a crime committed and a mystery solved. This is a tale that soars above its own suspense to tell us, with exceptional grace and beauty, about ageing, love, power and perception; about how the past can colonise the present, and about things (and people) in places they shouldn't be. Above all, it's a brilliantly involving story about two very particular women.' (Publisher's blurb)

Reading and Writing Poetry (CREA2122) Semester 2

2015

Approaches to Creative Writing (ENGL2143) Semester 1
Approaches to Literature (ENGL1101) Semester 1
y separately published work icon Romulus, My Father Raimond Gaita , Melbourne : Text Publishing , 1998 Z827978 1998 single work biography (taught in 3 units)

'Romulus Gaita fled his home in his native Yugoslavia at the age of thirteen, and came to Australia with his young wife Christina and their infant son Raimond soon after the end of World War II.

'Tragic events were to overtake the boy’s life, but Raimond Gaita has an extraordinary story to tell about growing up with his father amid the stony paddocks and flowing grasses of country Australia.

'Written simply and movingly, Romulus, My Father is about how a compassionate and honest man taught his son the meaning of living a decent life. It is about passion, betrayal and madness, about friendship and the joy and dignity of work, about character and fate, affliction and spirituality.'

Source: Publisher's blurb (Text Publishing).

Creative Writing Workshop (ENGL2145) Semester 2
Drama 1A: First Stages (DRAM1001) Semester 1
y separately published work icon Contemporary Indigenous Plays Windmill Baby, Rainbow's End, King Hit, Bitin' Back, Black Medea Larissa Behrendt (editor), Vivienne Cleven (editor), Strawberry Hills : Currency Press , 2007 Z1366759 2007 anthology drama (taught in 12 units)

'Five plays from around the country which illustrate that the rich tradition of indigenous storytelling is flourishing in contemporary Australian theatre.' (Source: Australianplays.org)

y separately published work icon The Best Australian Essays 2014 Robert Manne (editor), Collingwood : Black Inc. , 2014 7989115 2014 anthology criticism essay (taught in 2 units)

'In The Best Australian Essays 2014, Robert Manne assembles his picks of contemporary non-fiction writing. Tim Winton reflects on the impact of landscape on the Australian character; Helen Garner remembers her mother with a raw and stirring poignancy; Christos Tsiolkas wonders how the Left forgot their origins; Tim Flannery traces the history of the Great Barrier Reef and fears its destruction. With essays traversing madness, liberty under the rule of Tony Abbott, the enslaving of horses and the legacy of Doris Lessing, this sharp collection offers lucid insight, shrewd understanding and heartbreaking empathy.' (Publication summary)

y separately published work icon Into the Woods : The Battle for Tasmania's Forests Anna Krien , Collingwood : Black Inc. , 2010 Z1752662 2010 single work autobiography travel (taught in 2 units)

'For many years, the Tasmanian wilderness has been the site of a fierce struggle. At stake is the future of old-growth forests. Loggers and police face off with protesters deep in the forest, while savage political games are played in the courts and parliaments.

'In Into the Woods, Anna Krien, armed with a notebook, a sleeping bag and a rusty sedan, ventures behind the battlelines to see what it is like to risk everything for a cause. She speaks to ferals and premiers, sawmillers and whistle-blowers. She investigates personalities and convictions, methods and motives. This is a book about a company that wanted its way and the resistance that eventually forced it to change.

'Updated with a new afterword, Into the Woods is intimate, intrepid reporting by a fearless new voice.' (Publication summary)

y separately published work icon Sister Girl : The Writings of Aboriginal Activist and Historian Jackie Huggins Jackie Huggins , St Lucia : University of Queensland Press , 1998 Z215395 1998 selected work prose interview essay biography (taught in 4 units) The articles in this collection 'represent a decade of writing by Aboriginal historian and activist Jackie Huggins. These essays and interviews combine both the public and the personal in a bold trajectory tracing one Murri woman's journey towards self-discovery and human understanding...Sister Girl examines many topics, including community action, political commitment, the tradition and value of oral history, and government intervention in Aboriginal lives. It challenges accepted notions of the appropriateness of mainstream feminism in Aboriginal society and of white historians writing Indigenous history. Closer to home, there are accounts of personal achievement and family experience as she revisits the writing of Auntie Rita with her mother Rita Huggins - the inspiration for her lifework.' (Source: Back cover, 1998 UQP edition)
y separately published work icon Contemporary Indigenous Plays Windmill Baby, Rainbow's End, King Hit, Bitin' Back, Black Medea Larissa Behrendt (editor), Vivienne Cleven (editor), Strawberry Hills : Currency Press , 2007 Z1366759 2007 anthology drama (taught in 12 units)

'Five plays from around the country which illustrate that the rich tradition of indigenous storytelling is flourishing in contemporary Australian theatre.' (Source: Australianplays.org)

Prose Fiction Writing (ENGL3210/CREA3101) Semester 1
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 Eyrie Tim Winton , Melbourne : Penguin Books , 2013 6008228 2013 single work novel (taught in 2 units)

'Eyrie tells the story of Tom Keely, a man who’s lost his bearings in middle age and is now holed up in a flat at the top of a grim highrise, looking down on the world he’s fallen out of love with. He’s cut himself off, until one day he runs into some neighbours: a woman he used to know when they were kids, and her introverted young boy. The encounter shakes him up in a way he doesn’t understand. Despite himself, Keely lets them in. What follows is a heart-stopping, groundbreaking novel for our times – funny, confronting, exhilarating and haunting – populated by unforgettable characters. It asks how, in an impossibly compromised world, we can ever hope to do the right thing..' (Publisher's blurb)

y separately published work icon The Narrow Road to the Deep North Richard Flanagan , Sydney : Random House , 2013 Z1928536 2013 single work novel historical fiction (taught in 5 units)

'A novel of the cruelty of war, and tenuousness of life and the impossibility of love.

'August, 1943. In the despair of a Japanese POW camp on the Thai-Burma death railway, Australian surgeon Dorrigo Evans is haunted by his love affair with his uncle's young wife two years earlier. Struggling to save the men under his command from starvation, from cholera, from beatings, he receives a letter that will change his life forever.

'This savagely beautiful novel is a story about the many forms of love and death, of war and truth, as one man comes of age, prospers, only to discover all that he has lost.' (Publisher's blurb)

y separately published work icon The Night Guest Fiona McFarlane , Melbourne : Penguin , 2013 6012414 2013 single work novel (taught in 2 units)

'The debut of a major Australian writer, The Night Guest is a mesmerising novel about trust, love, dependence, and the fear that the things you think you know may become the things you're least sure about.

One morning an elderly widow called Ruth wakes thinking a tiger has been in her seaside house. Later that day a formidable woman called Frida arrives, looking as if she's blown in from the sea, but who has in fact come to care for Ruth.

Frida and the tiger: both are here to stay, and neither is what they seem. How far can Ruth trust them? And as memories of childhood in Fiji press upon her with increasing urgency, how far can she trust herself?

The Night Guest, Fiona McFarlane's hypnotic first novel, is no simple tale of a crime committed and a mystery solved. This is a tale that soars above its own suspense to tell us, with exceptional grace and beauty, about ageing, love, power and perception; about how the past can colonise the present, and about things (and people) in places they shouldn't be. Above all, it's a brilliantly involving story about two very particular women.' (Publisher's blurb)

Reading and Writing Poetry (ENGL2122) Semester 2
Theorising Creative Writing (CREA7718) Semester 1
y separately published work icon Searching for the Secret River Kate Grenville , Melbourne : Text Publishing , 2006 Z1293134 2006 single work criticism (taught in 4 units)

'Searching for the Secret River is the extraordinary story of how Kate Grenville came to write her award-winning novel, [The Secret River].

'It all begins with her ancestor Solomon Wiseman, transported to New South Wales for the term of his natural life, who later became a wealthy man and built his colonial mansion on the Hawkesbury. Increasingly obsessed with his story, Grenville pursues him from Sydney to London and back, and then up the Hawkesbury itself. Slowly she begins to realise she must write about him, and begins to discover what kind of book she will write. Grenville opens the door and invites the reader into her writing room, and tells us about how this novel was formed, the research she did, the false starts she made and the frustrations she experienced.' (Publisher's blurb)

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 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)

2014

Approaches to Literature (ENGL1101) Semester 1
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 Australian Aboriginal Words in English : Their Origin and Meaning R. M. W. Dixon (editor), Mandy Thomas (editor), W. S. Ramson (editor), Melbourne : Oxford University Press , 1990 Z808369 1990 single work non-fiction (taught in 1 units)
y separately published work icon Unna You Fullas Glenys Ward , Broome : Magabala Books , 1991 Z367660 1991 single work autobiography (taught in 1 units) About Aboriginal children looking out for each other as they struggle to conform to the Good Christian Way. It captures their laughter, their tears, their wisdom, and the pranks that helped them survive this ironic clash of culture, religion and personality. (Source: Libraries Australia record).
Australian Studies Identities (AUST1001) Semester 1
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.
Drama First Stages (DRAM1001) Semester 1
y separately published work icon Contemporary Indigenous Plays Windmill Baby, Rainbow's End, King Hit, Bitin' Back, Black Medea Larissa Behrendt (editor), Vivienne Cleven (editor), Strawberry Hills : Currency Press , 2007 Z1366759 2007 anthology drama (taught in 12 units)

'Five plays from around the country which illustrate that the rich tradition of indigenous storytelling is flourishing in contemporary Australian theatre.' (Source: Australianplays.org)

Prose Fiction (ENGL3210 / CREA3101) Semester 1
y separately published work icon Things We Didn't See Coming Steven Amsterdam , Collingwood : Sleepers Publishing , 2009 Z1564576 2009 selected work short story (taught in 3 units)

Nine connected stories, ' Things We Didn't See Coming follows a man over three decades as he tries to survive - and to retain his humanity - in a world savaged by successive cataclysmic events.

Opening on the eve of the millennium, when the world as we know it is still recognisable, we meet the then nine-year-old narrator fleeing the city with his parents, just ahead of a Y2K breakdown of the grid which signals the world's transformation and decline. In the wake of this develop strange, sometimes horrific, sometimes unexpectedly funny circumstances as he goes about the no longer simple act of survival: trying to protect squatters against floods in a place where the rains never stop; harassed (and possibly infected) by a man wracked with plague; functioning as a salaried embezzler of 'the state'; escorting the gravely ill on adventure trips.

Yet despite the violence and brutality of these days, we learn that even as the world is spinning out of control essential human impulses still hold sway - that we never entirely escape our parents, envy the success of those around us and, chiefly, that we crave love' (Harvill Secker website).

Publishing and Editing (CREA2134) Semester 1
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.
Theorising Creative Writing (CREA7718) Semester 1
y separately published work icon Searching for the Secret River Kate Grenville , Melbourne : Text Publishing , 2006 Z1293134 2006 single work criticism (taught in 4 units)

'Searching for the Secret River is the extraordinary story of how Kate Grenville came to write her award-winning novel, [The Secret River].

'It all begins with her ancestor Solomon Wiseman, transported to New South Wales for the term of his natural life, who later became a wealthy man and built his colonial mansion on the Hawkesbury. Increasingly obsessed with his story, Grenville pursues him from Sydney to London and back, and then up the Hawkesbury itself. Slowly she begins to realise she must write about him, and begins to discover what kind of book she will write. Grenville opens the door and invites the reader into her writing room, and tells us about how this novel was formed, the research she did, the false starts she made and the frustrations she experienced.' (Publisher's blurb)

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 Into the Woods : The Battle for Tasmania's Forests Anna Krien , Collingwood : Black Inc. , 2010 Z1752662 2010 single work autobiography travel (taught in 2 units)

'For many years, the Tasmanian wilderness has been the site of a fierce struggle. At stake is the future of old-growth forests. Loggers and police face off with protesters deep in the forest, while savage political games are played in the courts and parliaments.

'In Into the Woods, Anna Krien, armed with a notebook, a sleeping bag and a rusty sedan, ventures behind the battlelines to see what it is like to risk everything for a cause. She speaks to ferals and premiers, sawmillers and whistle-blowers. She investigates personalities and convictions, methods and motives. This is a book about a company that wanted its way and the resistance that eventually forced it to change.

'Updated with a new afterword, Into the Woods is intimate, intrepid reporting by a fearless new voice.' (Publication summary)

Life Writing (ENGL2141) Semester 2
y separately published work icon Joe Cinque's Consolation Helen Garner , Sydney : Pan Macmillan Australia , 2004 Z1132428 2004 single work prose (taught in 26 units)

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

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

2012

y separately published work icon The Best Australian Stories 2011 Cate Kennedy (editor), Melbourne : Black Inc. , 2011 Z1812773 2011 anthology short story (taught in 3 units) 'In The Best Australian Stories 2011, Cate Kennedy selects the year’s most outstanding short fiction. Featuring much loved masters as well as exciting new voices, this book is a perfect introduction to Australia’s best contemporary fiction.' (From the publisher's website.)
y separately published work icon The End of the World Paddy O'Reilly , St Lucia : University of Queensland Press , 2007 Z1358524 2007 selected work short story (taught in 1 units)
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 Sleepers Almanac : No. 7 Zoe Dattner (editor), Louise Swinn (editor), Collingwood : Sleepers Publishing , 2011 Z1829659 2011 anthology poetry short story (taught in 1 units)
y separately published work icon Things We Didn't See Coming Steven Amsterdam , Collingwood : Sleepers Publishing , 2009 Z1564576 2009 selected work short story (taught in 3 units)

Nine connected stories, ' Things We Didn't See Coming follows a man over three decades as he tries to survive - and to retain his humanity - in a world savaged by successive cataclysmic events.

Opening on the eve of the millennium, when the world as we know it is still recognisable, we meet the then nine-year-old narrator fleeing the city with his parents, just ahead of a Y2K breakdown of the grid which signals the world's transformation and decline. In the wake of this develop strange, sometimes horrific, sometimes unexpectedly funny circumstances as he goes about the no longer simple act of survival: trying to protect squatters against floods in a place where the rains never stop; harassed (and possibly infected) by a man wracked with plague; functioning as a salaried embezzler of 'the state'; escorting the gravely ill on adventure trips.

Yet despite the violence and brutality of these days, we learn that even as the world is spinning out of control essential human impulses still hold sway - that we never entirely escape our parents, envy the success of those around us and, chiefly, that we crave love' (Harvill Secker website).

y separately published work icon Thought Crimes Tim Richards , Collingwood : Black Inc. , 2011 Z1797440 2011 selected work short story humour (taught in 1 units) 'In Thought Crimes, Tim Richards takes the reader on a mind-bending ride through a world where nothing is quite as it seems. The lives these stories describe are almost ordinary - but an ambush lurks around every corner.

'A novice teacher accepts a job at an unconventional high school where students take 'self-expression' to odd and disturbing lengths.

'In a trendy beachside suburb, suspiciously perfect babies start appearing on young couples' doorsteps.

'A visitor from the future shakes the life out of a small Australian town.

'Blackly funny and irresistibly twisted, these stories peek behind the everyday appearance of things to explore unspoken fears and desires. Destined to become a cult classic, Thought Crimes is a one-way trip through the looking glass.' (From the publisher's website.)

2011

Drama Bodies of Work (DRAM1002) Semester 2
y separately published work icon When the Rain Stops Falling Andrew Bovell , 2008 Strawberry Hills : Currency Press , 2009 Z1430823 2008 single work drama (taught in 8 units)

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

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

Introduction to Creative Writing (CREA1021 ) Semester 1
Life Writing (CREA2141) Semester 1
The Craft of Writing Workshop (CREA2100) Semester 1
Writing for Children (CREA2132) Semester 2
Australian Studies: Identities (AUST1001) Semester 1
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 Art, History, Place Christine Nicholls , Kingswood : Working Title Press , 2003 Z1109480 2003 single work information book children's (taught in 4 units)
y separately published work icon Art, Land, Story Christine Nicholls , Kingswood : Working Title Press , 2003 Z1211618 2003 single work non-fiction children's (taught in 4 units)

'Indigenous Australian art today is recognised throughout Australia and the world for its strength and vitality. 

'In her book Art, Land, Story, Christine Nicholls looks at some of the traditions this art has come from and emphasises the continuous links between Indigenous art, place and The Dreaming the central core of Indigenous law and religion. 

'Sections on body painting, art from the central and western deserts and bark painting from Arnhem Land, highlight the extraordinary diversity that is and always has been a hallmark of Indigenous Australian art.' (Publication summary)

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)
Creative Writing Workshop (ENGL2145) Semester 2
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 Griffith Review The Annual Fiction Edition no. 30 Summer 2010 Z1738846 2010 periodical issue (taught in 1 units)
y separately published work icon Things We Didn't See Coming Steven Amsterdam , Collingwood : Sleepers Publishing , 2009 Z1564576 2009 selected work short story (taught in 3 units)

Nine connected stories, ' Things We Didn't See Coming follows a man over three decades as he tries to survive - and to retain his humanity - in a world savaged by successive cataclysmic events.

Opening on the eve of the millennium, when the world as we know it is still recognisable, we meet the then nine-year-old narrator fleeing the city with his parents, just ahead of a Y2K breakdown of the grid which signals the world's transformation and decline. In the wake of this develop strange, sometimes horrific, sometimes unexpectedly funny circumstances as he goes about the no longer simple act of survival: trying to protect squatters against floods in a place where the rains never stop; harassed (and possibly infected) by a man wracked with plague; functioning as a salaried embezzler of 'the state'; escorting the gravely ill on adventure trips.

Yet despite the violence and brutality of these days, we learn that even as the world is spinning out of control essential human impulses still hold sway - that we never entirely escape our parents, envy the success of those around us and, chiefly, that we crave love' (Harvill Secker website).

2010

Popular Genres (SCRN 2008) Semester 2
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.
Contemporary Australian Drama (DRAM7516) Semester 1
y separately published work icon Blak Inside : 6 Indigenous Plays from Victoria John Harding , Tammy Anderson , Tracey Rigney , Maryanne Sam , Jadah Milroy , Richard Frankland , Playbox Theatre , Strawberry Hills : Currency Press Playbox Theatre , 2002 Z950463 2002 anthology drama (taught in 1 units)

Contains six plays.

Enuff by John Harding is a frightening and funny play about an Australian future where black patience has run out. A violent uprising is planned for Reconciliation Day – will retribution or forgiveness prevail?

I Don't wanna Play House by Tammy Anderson is the moving story of her childhood. A truly remarkable account of the triumph of the human spirit.

Belonging by Tracey Rigney recounts the taunts and temptations of a school girl, and her personal struggle to remain true to her culture, and herself.

Casting Doubts by Maryanne Sam is a funny, and at times heart-wrenching, play about an actors' casting agency with more colour charts than a paint shop, and the problems that Indigenous actors face.

Crowfire by Jadah Milroy is the story of a young, urban Indigenous Australian woman, and a man from a desert community lured into the city. The moving story of a search for identity and the need for reconciliation.

Conservations with the Dead by Richard J Frankland is a poetic and savage play that takes you into the aching sorrow of deaths in custody.

y separately published work icon The First Play Collection Duong Le Quy , Strawberry Hills : Currency Press , 2002 Z991171 2002 selected work drama (taught in 1 units)
y separately published work icon Half and Half Daniel Keene , Sydney Melbourne : Currency Press Playbox Theatre , 2002 Z970007 2002 single work drama (taught in 1 units)
y separately published work icon Holy Day The Red Sea Andrew Bovell , Sydney : Currency Press Playbox Theatre , 2001 Z900872 2001 single work drama (taught in 2 units)

'On the white frontier in mid-nineteenth century Australia, a lone, bloodied woman arrives at a traveller's rest in the midst of a violent desert storm with a shocking story to tell. Aborigines have allegedly murdered her husband and stolen her infant child. But an Aboriginal woman has a different story to tell. What would cause a missionary's wife to lie? What chance does the word of an Aboriginal woman have against hers? A chilling mystery that draws together the lives of four extraordinary women and their men, all struggling to survive in a hostile and misunderstood landscape. (1 act, 4 male, 4 female).' (Publication summary)

y separately published work icon Love Patricia Cornelius , 2003 Hobart : Australian Script Centre , 2004 Z1226600 2003 single work drama (taught in 1 units) 'Tanya, Annie and Lorenzo are on the bottom of the heap. They're young but already the youth has been wrung out of them. They've been abused, they're abusive, and they're difficult to like let alone to love. But it is love in all its distorted and mutated forms that holds them together. Annie and Tanya make a pact; their love will protect them from an unloving world and it will endure. Even the dreadful and charming Lorenzo will not threaten it. Only doubt in each other's love can put a wedge between them.' (Back cover, Currency Press, 2006)
y separately published work icon The Seven Stages of Grieving Wesley Enoch , Deborah Mailman , Hilary Beaton , 1995 Brisbane : Playlab , 1996 Z355402 1995 single work drama (taught in 14 units)
— Appears in: アボリジニ戯曲選 : ストールン; 嘆きの七段階 2001;

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

Source: Publisher's blurb (Playlab).

y separately published work icon Still Angela Jenny Kemp , Sydney : Currency Press Playbox Theatre , 2002 Z957751 2002 single work drama (taught in 8 units)
y separately published work icon Up the Ladder Roger Bennett , Brisbane : Playlab , 1997 Z449855 1997 single work drama (taught in 1 units)
— Appears in: アップザラダ; レイディアンス 2003;
y separately published work icon Wonderlands Katherine Thomson , 2003 (Manuscript version)x401384 Z1151063 2003 single work drama (taught in 1 units)
Fiction for Young Readers (ENGL2302) Semester 2
y separately published work icon Fox Margaret Wild , Ron Brooks (illustrator), St Leonards : Allen and Unwin , 2000 Z820936 2000 single work picture book children's (taught in 2 units) "An injured magpie and a one-eyed dog live happily together in the forest until a jealous fox arrives to teach them what it means to be alone." (Source: Google Books)
John Brown, Rose and the Midnight Cat Jenny Wagner , Ron Brooks (illustrator), Harmondsworth : Kestrel , 1977 Z830203 1977 single work picture book children's (taught in 6 units)
— Appears in: The Macquarie Bedtime Story Book 1987; (p. 190-192)
'Rose and her Old English Sheepdog, John Brown, live contentedly together. They need only each other. When the midnight cat appears outside their home, John Brown refuses even to admit its existence. But he comes to realise that the cat is important to Rose and to allow it in the house, even though it makes him sad.' (From the publisher's website.)
y separately published work icon Lockie Leonard, Human Torpedo Tim Winton , South Yarra : McPhee Gribble , 1990 Z362664 1990 single work novel young adult humour (taught in 6 units)

'Lockie Leonard, hot surf-rat, is in love. The human torpedo is barely settled into his new school, and already he's got a girl on his mind. And not just any girl: it has to be Vicki Streeton, the smartest, prettiest, richest girl in the class. What chance have you got when your dad's a cop, your mum's a frighteningly understanding parent, your brother wets the bed and the teachers take an instant dislike to you and then you fall in love at twelve-and-three-quarter years old? It can only mean trouble, worry, mega-embarrassment and some wild, wild times ' (Publication summary)

y separately published work icon The Lost Thing Shaun Tan , Shaun Tan (illustrator), Port Melbourne : Lothian , 2000 Z668356 2000 single work picture book children's (taught in 11 units) 'A boy discovers a bizarre looking creature while out collecting bottle tops at the beach. Realising it is lost, he tries to find out who owns it or where it belongs, but is met with indifference from everyone else, who barely notice its presence, each unwilling to entertain this uninvited interruption to their day to day lives. For reasons he does not explain, the boy empathises with the creature, and sets out to find a 'place' for it.'
(Source: The Lost Thing website)
y separately published work icon My Place : The Story of Australia from Now to Then My Place Nadia Wheatley , Donna Rawlins , Donna Rawlins (illustrator), Blackburn : Collins Dove , 1987 Z795146 1987 single work picture book children's historical fiction (taught in 7 units)

'My Place, the classic Australian picture book, is a "time machine" which takes the reader back into the past. It depicts the history of one particular piece of land in Sydney from 1788 to 1988 through the stories of the various children who have lived there. It aims to teach the reader about the history of Australia, about families, settlers, multiculturalism, and the traditional owners of the land. Each child's story covers a decade in time, showing their particular dress, customs and family life.

'The book also features maps that the successive generations of children have 'drawn' which demonstrate the things that have changed - as well as the things that have remained constant. My Place ultimately aims to show "that everyone is part of History" and that "every place has a story as old as the earth".' -- Provided by publisher (2008 ed.)

y separately published work icon Nips XI Ruth Starke , Port Melbourne : Lothian , 2000 Z797033 2000 single work children's fiction children's (taught in 2 units) If white boys can't jump, can Asian kids play cricket? Lan's fed up with being called a nip. He wants to be a true-blue Aussie. What better way than by playing the greatest Anglo game of all? Lan gathers a team together and defiantly gives it a name: NIPS XI. Now all they have to do is get some equipment, find a coach, get themselves a sponsor and learn the rules of the game. Then it's time to challenge the best cricket team in the district. (Libraries Australia)
y separately published work icon The Pangkarlangu and the Lost Child : A Dreaming Narrative Belonging to Molly Tasman Napurrurla Molly Tasman Napurrurla , Christine Nicholls (editor), Lajamanu Community Education Centre (illustrator), Kingswood : Working Title Press , 2002 Z969653 2002 single work picture book children's Indigenous story (taught in 2 units)

'When a small boy ignores his parents’ advice and follows them out hunting, he meets a huge, wild-eyed, knotty-haired monster known as the Pangkarlangu! ' (Publisher's blurb)

y separately published work icon Possum Magic Mem Fox , Julie Vivas (illustrator), Adelaide : Omnibus Books , 1983 Z831721 1983 single work picture book children's (taught in 2 units) Two Australian possums go in search of the magic that will make the invisible one of them visible.
y separately published work icon The Spotted Cat The Spotted Cat : A Dreaming Narrative Belonging to Molly Tasman Napurrurla Molly Tasman Napurrurla , Christine Nicholls (editor), Kingswood : Working Title Press , 2003 Z1016481 2003 single work picture book children's dreaming story (taught in 1 units)

'An evil monster is terrorising the land. The Spotted Cat must act quickly.

But how will he do it when he is so small and the monster is so big.' (Publisher's blurb)

y separately published work icon Two Weeks With the Queen Morris Gleitzman , London : Blackie , 1989 Z509661 1989 single work novel humour young adult (taught in 3 units) "Sent to live with relatives in England when his younger brother develops a rare form of cancer, Colin tries to see the Queen to help find a cure for his brother." (Source: Trove)
y separately published work icon Unreal! : Eight Surprising Stories Paul Jennings , Ringwood : Penguin , 1985 Z668486 1985 selected work children's fiction children's humour (taught in 3 units)
— Appears in: Absolut unheimlich! 2006;
A ghost that haunts the outside dunny, a mix of manure that makes hair fall out, two musical ghosts who try to save a lighthouse - these are spooky stories with a surprise ending every time. (Source: Trove)
y separately published work icon The Watertower Gary Crew , Steven Woolman (illustrator), Adelaide : Era Publications , 1994 Z282128 1994 single work picture book mystery children's (taught in 5 units) On a scorching hot summer day in Preston, Australia, Spike and Bubba go for a swim in the old water tower which casts a long dark shadow across everything in the area.
y separately published work icon Where the Forest Meets the Sea Jeannie Baker , Jeannie Baker (illustrator), New York (City) : Greenwillow Books , 1987 Z823665 1987 single work picture book children's (taught in 2 units)

'A boy and his father travel in their boat, ‘Time Machine’ to a stretch of beach beside a primordial tropical rainforest. As the boy walks among the trees he imagines the forest as it might have been in the past. Dinosaurs emerge, barely perceptible, from a tangle of trunks and vines; the faint outlines of an aboriginal child melt into a background of trees and in the final haunting scene the unspoiled vista readers have toured is overlaid with translucent images of a possible future civilisation..' (Source: Author's website)

y separately published work icon Window Jeannie Baker , Jeannie Baker (illustrator), London : Julia MacRae Books , 1991 Z834244 1991 single work picture book children's (taught in 5 units) Through a house window the view gradually changes over the passage of time to show how the environment changes, not necessarily for the better.
y separately published work icon Joe Cinque's Consolation Helen Garner , Sydney : Pan Macmillan Australia , 2004 Z1132428 2004 single work prose (taught in 26 units)

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

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

y separately published work icon Black Chicks Talking Leah Purcell (interviewer), Sydney : Hodder Headline , 2002 Z966800 2002 anthology interview (taught in 1 units)

A series of nine interviews conducted by Leah Purcell with Indigenous Australian women. Each woman is separately interviewed about her experience of growing up, her family life (particularly her relationship with her mother), her sense of Aboriginality and her career. The collection closes with a record of the collective conversation between the women during a meal at Sydney's Edna's Table II restaurant which serves 'Australia's finest Aboriginal cuisine'.

y separately published work icon Blacklines : Contemporary Critical Writing by Indigenous Australians Michèle Grossman (editor), Carlton : Melbourne University Press , 2003 Z1072525 2003 anthology criticism essay (taught in 11 units)
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 Drawing the Global Colour Line : White Men’s Countries and the Question of Racial Equality Henry Reynolds , Marilyn Lake , Carlton : Melbourne University Press , 2008 Z1509124 2008 single work non-fiction (taught in 1 units)

'[This] is a pioneering account of the transnational production of whiteness in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A work remarkable both for its international breadth and for its sensitivity to local particularity, it is a model for the new global history.

Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds expertly and imaginatively reconstruct how leading white intellectuals and politicians in Australia, South Africa, the United States, and Great Britain fought demands for racial equality and jointly invented new doctrines of racial superiority to justify the maintenance and, in some cases, the reinvigoration of white privilege in every part of the world that Britain either controlled or in which it had once deposited its settlers.

A powerful and sobering history, incisively and elegantly told.' Gary Gerstle, author of American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century

y separately published work icon Looking for Blackfellas' Point : An Australian History of Place Mark McKenna , Sydney : University of New South Wales Press , 2002 Z1035628 2002 single work non-fiction (taught in 1 units)

'Blackfellas' Point' lies on the Towamba River in south-eastern New South Wales. As the river descends rapidly from its source on the Monaro plains, it winds its way through state forest, national park and farming land. Around twenty-five kilometres before it reaches the sea, just south of Eden, it passes through Towamba, the small village in which Mark McKenna now owns eight acres of land. Mark's land looks across the river to Blackfellas' Point , once an Aboriginal camping ground and meeting place.'

Looking for Blackfellas' Point is a history that begins by looking across the river to arc of bush that is Blackfellas' Point. From there, Mark McKenna's gaze pans out - from the history of one place he knows intimately, to the history of one region and, ultimately, to the history of Australia's quest for reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.'

y separately published work icon Nowhere People : How International Race Thinking Shaped Australia's Identity Henry Reynolds , Camberwell : Penguin , 2005 Z1217331 2005 single work autobiography (taught in 1 units)

'In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, people of mixed Aboriginal and European ancestry were commonly assumed to be morally and physically defective, unstable and degenerate. They bore the brunt of society's contempt, and the removal of their children created Australia's stolen generations. Nowhere People is a history of beliefs about people of mixed race, both in Australia and overseas. It explores the concept of racial purity, eugenics, and the threat posed by miscegenation.' (Publication summary)

y separately published work icon Sharing Spaces : Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Responses to Story, Country and Rights Gus Worby (editor), Lester-Irabinna Rigney (editor), Perth : API Network Curtin University of Technology. Australia Research Institute , 2006 Z1273416 2006 anthology criticism (taught in 2 units) A collection of conversations and essays by Elders, Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars addresses a range of contemporary issues including the politics of space sharing derived from a colonial history of non-sharing, the relationship between the stories Australians tell themselves about their place as a nation. (Libraries Australia)
y separately published work icon Up from the Mission : Selected Writings Noel Pearson , Melbourne : Black Inc. , 2009 Z1585263 2009 selected work autobiography biography prose (taught in 1 units)

'Up from the Mission charts the life and thought of Noel Pearson, from his early days as a native title lawyer to his position today as one of Australia's most influential figures.

'This is writing of great passion and power, which introduces a fascinating man and a compelling writer. Many of the pieces included have been hard to find until now. Gathered together in a cohesive, broad-ranging book, they show a key Australian thinker coming into being.

'Pearson evokes his early life in Hope Vale, Queensland. He includes sections of his epoch-making essay Our Right To Take Responsibility, which exposed the trap of passive welfare and proposed new ways forward. There are pieces on the apology; on Barack Obama and black leadership; on Australian party politics - Keating, Howard and Rudd; and on alcoholism, despair and what can be done to mend Aboriginal communities that have fallen apart.' (Publisher's blurb)

Short Stories and Their Writers (ENGL1007) Semester 2
y separately published work icon Being Australian : Narratives of National Identity Catriona Elder , Crows Nest : Allen and Unwin , 2007 Z1418401 2007 single work criticism (taught in 6 units)

Catriona Elder explores the origins, meanings and effects of the many stories we tell about ourselves, and how they have changed over time. She outlines some of the traditional stories and their role in Australian nationalism, and she shows how concepts of egalitarianism, peaceful settlement and sporting prowess have been used to create a national identity.
(Publisher's blurb)

y separately published work icon Seven Versions of an Australian Badland Ross Gibson , St Lucia : University of Queensland Press , 2002 Z1005706 2002 single work prose travel mystery (taught in 8 units)

'Part road movie, part memoir, part murder mystery, Seven Versions of an Australian Badland embarks on an enthralling journey through time, into the realms of myth and magic, narcissism and genocide.' (Back cover)

y separately published work icon Tracks Robyn Davidson , London : Jonathan Cape , 1980 Z811575 1980 single work autobiography travel (taught in 8 units)

Robyn Davidson tells the story of her 1977 journey across the desert, from Alice Springs to Western Australia. She and a Pitjantjara elder completed their crossing on camel's back. Tracks is the story of her adventure, not only across the desert, but also into self-discovery, and the discovery of the beauty, nobility, and history of the country and its people. (Source: Trove)

The Craft of Poetry (ENGL2301) Semester 2

2009

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 The Cocky, the Crow and the Hawk : A Dreaming Narrative Matingali (Bridget) Napanangka Mudgedell , Christine Nicholls (editor), Marie Nakamarra Mudgedell (translator), Kingswood : Working Title Press , 2002 Z950068 2002 single work picture book children's Indigenous story (taught in 1 units)

'In the Dreaming, the cocky, the crow and the hawk lived together and shared their food. But one day, the cocky and the crow began to argue, and everything changed.' (Publisher's blurb)

y separately published work icon Fox Margaret Wild , Ron Brooks (illustrator), St Leonards : Allen and Unwin , 2000 Z820936 2000 single work picture book children's (taught in 2 units) "An injured magpie and a one-eyed dog live happily together in the forest until a jealous fox arrives to teach them what it means to be alone." (Source: Google Books)
y separately published work icon Galax-Arena Gillian Rubinstein , South Yarra : Hyland House , 1992 Z511941 1992 single work novel young adult science fiction (taught in 3 units) In the year 2026, three young Australians, a brother and two sisters, are kidnapped by space pirates and taken to another galaxy to perform for aliens in a futuristic amphitheatre
John Brown, Rose and the Midnight Cat Jenny Wagner , Ron Brooks (illustrator), Harmondsworth : Kestrel , 1977 Z830203 1977 single work picture book children's (taught in 6 units)
— Appears in: The Macquarie Bedtime Story Book 1987; (p. 190-192)
'Rose and her Old English Sheepdog, John Brown, live contentedly together. They need only each other. When the midnight cat appears outside their home, John Brown refuses even to admit its existence. But he comes to realise that the cat is important to Rose and to allow it in the house, even though it makes him sad.' (From the publisher's website.)
y separately published work icon Lockie Leonard, Human Torpedo Tim Winton , South Yarra : McPhee Gribble , 1990 Z362664 1990 single work novel young adult humour (taught in 6 units)

'Lockie Leonard, hot surf-rat, is in love. The human torpedo is barely settled into his new school, and already he's got a girl on his mind. And not just any girl: it has to be Vicki Streeton, the smartest, prettiest, richest girl in the class. What chance have you got when your dad's a cop, your mum's a frighteningly understanding parent, your brother wets the bed and the teachers take an instant dislike to you and then you fall in love at twelve-and-three-quarter years old? It can only mean trouble, worry, mega-embarrassment and some wild, wild times ' (Publication summary)

y separately published work icon The Lost Thing Shaun Tan , Shaun Tan (illustrator), Port Melbourne : Lothian , 2000 Z668356 2000 single work picture book children's (taught in 11 units) 'A boy discovers a bizarre looking creature while out collecting bottle tops at the beach. Realising it is lost, he tries to find out who owns it or where it belongs, but is met with indifference from everyone else, who barely notice its presence, each unwilling to entertain this uninvited interruption to their day to day lives. For reasons he does not explain, the boy empathises with the creature, and sets out to find a 'place' for it.'
(Source: The Lost Thing website)
y separately published work icon My Place : The Story of Australia from Now to Then My Place Nadia Wheatley , Donna Rawlins , Donna Rawlins (illustrator), Blackburn : Collins Dove , 1987 Z795146 1987 single work picture book children's historical fiction (taught in 7 units)

'My Place, the classic Australian picture book, is a "time machine" which takes the reader back into the past. It depicts the history of one particular piece of land in Sydney from 1788 to 1988 through the stories of the various children who have lived there. It aims to teach the reader about the history of Australia, about families, settlers, multiculturalism, and the traditional owners of the land. Each child's story covers a decade in time, showing their particular dress, customs and family life.

'The book also features maps that the successive generations of children have 'drawn' which demonstrate the things that have changed - as well as the things that have remained constant. My Place ultimately aims to show "that everyone is part of History" and that "every place has a story as old as the earth".' -- Provided by publisher (2008 ed.)

y separately published work icon Nips XI Ruth Starke , Port Melbourne : Lothian , 2000 Z797033 2000 single work children's fiction children's (taught in 2 units) If white boys can't jump, can Asian kids play cricket? Lan's fed up with being called a nip. He wants to be a true-blue Aussie. What better way than by playing the greatest Anglo game of all? Lan gathers a team together and defiantly gives it a name: NIPS XI. Now all they have to do is get some equipment, find a coach, get themselves a sponsor and learn the rules of the game. Then it's time to challenge the best cricket team in the district. (Libraries Australia)
y separately published work icon The Pangkarlangu and the Lost Child : A Dreaming Narrative Belonging to Molly Tasman Napurrurla Molly Tasman Napurrurla , Christine Nicholls (editor), Lajamanu Community Education Centre (illustrator), Kingswood : Working Title Press , 2002 Z969653 2002 single work picture book children's Indigenous story (taught in 2 units)

'When a small boy ignores his parents’ advice and follows them out hunting, he meets a huge, wild-eyed, knotty-haired monster known as the Pangkarlangu! ' (Publisher's blurb)

y separately published work icon Possum Magic Mem Fox , Julie Vivas (illustrator), Adelaide : Omnibus Books , 1983 Z831721 1983 single work picture book children's (taught in 2 units) Two Australian possums go in search of the magic that will make the invisible one of them visible.
y separately published work icon Two Weeks With the Queen Morris Gleitzman , London : Blackie , 1989 Z509661 1989 single work novel humour young adult (taught in 3 units) "Sent to live with relatives in England when his younger brother develops a rare form of cancer, Colin tries to see the Queen to help find a cure for his brother." (Source: Trove)
y separately published work icon Unreal! : Eight Surprising Stories Paul Jennings , Ringwood : Penguin , 1985 Z668486 1985 selected work children's fiction children's humour (taught in 3 units)
— Appears in: Absolut unheimlich! 2006;
A ghost that haunts the outside dunny, a mix of manure that makes hair fall out, two musical ghosts who try to save a lighthouse - these are spooky stories with a surprise ending every time. (Source: Trove)
y separately published work icon The Watertower Gary Crew , Steven Woolman (illustrator), Adelaide : Era Publications , 1994 Z282128 1994 single work picture book mystery children's (taught in 5 units) On a scorching hot summer day in Preston, Australia, Spike and Bubba go for a swim in the old water tower which casts a long dark shadow across everything in the area.
y separately published work icon Where the Forest Meets the Sea Jeannie Baker , Jeannie Baker (illustrator), New York (City) : Greenwillow Books , 1987 Z823665 1987 single work picture book children's (taught in 2 units)

'A boy and his father travel in their boat, ‘Time Machine’ to a stretch of beach beside a primordial tropical rainforest. As the boy walks among the trees he imagines the forest as it might have been in the past. Dinosaurs emerge, barely perceptible, from a tangle of trunks and vines; the faint outlines of an aboriginal child melt into a background of trees and in the final haunting scene the unspoiled vista readers have toured is overlaid with translucent images of a possible future civilisation..' (Source: Author's website)

y separately published work icon Window Jeannie Baker , Jeannie Baker (illustrator), London : Julia MacRae Books , 1991 Z834244 1991 single work picture book children's (taught in 5 units) Through a house window the view gradually changes over the passage of time to show how the environment changes, not necessarily for the better.
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 Bom Bali Steve Westh , Phil Craig , ( dir. Steve Westh ) Australia : Brook Lapping Productions Network Ten , 2006 Z1542936 2006 single work film/TV (taught in 1 units) The attacks of October 12, 2002 are remembered by the Balinese as Bom Bali. In this program the bombers tell their own stories in detail, explaining how they carried out their attack and why. The victims recall the event and the impact on their lives and the lives of the families of the victims. The documentary re-enacts the events surrounding the bomb blasts.
y separately published work icon Art, History, Place Christine Nicholls , Kingswood : Working Title Press , 2003 Z1109480 2003 single work information book children's (taught in 4 units)
y separately published work icon Art, Land, Story Christine Nicholls , Kingswood : Working Title Press , 2003 Z1211618 2003 single work non-fiction children's (taught in 4 units)

'Indigenous Australian art today is recognised throughout Australia and the world for its strength and vitality. 

'In her book Art, Land, Story, Christine Nicholls looks at some of the traditions this art has come from and emphasises the continuous links between Indigenous art, place and The Dreaming the central core of Indigenous law and religion. 

'Sections on body painting, art from the central and western deserts and bark painting from Arnhem Land, highlight the extraordinary diversity that is and always has been a hallmark of Indigenous Australian art.' (Publication summary)

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

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

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

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

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

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

y separately published work icon True 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 Year of Wonders : A Novel of the Plague Geraldine Brooks , London : Fourth Estate , 2001 Z900724 2001 single work novel historical fiction (taught in 1 units) This historical novel is based on the true story of Eyam, the 'Plague Village,' in the rugged mountain spine of England. In 1666, a tainted bolt of cloth from London carries bubonic infection to this isolated settlement of shepherds and lead miners. A visionary young preacher convinces the villagers to seal themselves off in a deadly quarantine to prevent the spread of disease. The story is told through the eyes of eighteen-year-old Anna Frith, the vicar's maid, as she confronts the loss of her family, the disintegration of her community, and the lure of a dangerous and illicit love. As the death toll rises and people turn from prayers and herbal cures to sorcery and murderous witch-hunting, Anna emerges as an unlikely and courageous heroine in the village's desperate fight to save itself. (Source: Trove)
y separately published work icon The Last Magician Janette Turner Hospital , St Lucia : University of Queensland Press , 1992 Z461943 1992 single work novel (taught in 1 units) Set largely in Sydney, the 'last magician' is Charlie the photographer, who records everything as he seeks the Cat. Charlie, Cat, Robbie and Catherine shared a childhood summer in a Queensland rainforest till death intruded in their circle. Decades later, memories seep into the present.
y separately published work icon Sharing Spaces : Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Responses to Story, Country and Rights Gus Worby (editor), Lester-Irabinna Rigney (editor), Perth : API Network Curtin University of Technology. Australia Research Institute , 2006 Z1273416 2006 anthology criticism (taught in 2 units) A collection of conversations and essays by Elders, Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars addresses a range of contemporary issues including the politics of space sharing derived from a colonial history of non-sharing, the relationship between the stories Australians tell themselves about their place as a nation. (Libraries Australia)
y separately published work icon In My Skin : A Memoir Kate Holden , Melbourne : Text Publishing , 2005 Z1206034 2005 single work autobiography (taught in 1 units)

"I watched the glaze of headlights, the windscreens of oncoming cars: a series of trapezoids with the silhouette of a single male driver. One pulled up in front of me; I reached over and opened the door, slid in. The smell of an unfamiliar car. A middle-aged man looking at me. 'Hi', I said. 'How are you?"...

'There was no single moment when someone looked at Kate Holden and said, 'Why don't you have some?' No one made her try heroin. There was only the sense, with her friends setting out on this forbidden adventure, that she would lose something if she didn't. Just once: to know. So this book is the story of a journey. From a loving family home to the streets of St Kilda; from a shy, bookish life to the ambivalent glamour of an inner-city brothel, Kate Holden describes with breathtaking lyricism and poignancy her travels in an unknown world. Contains explicit sexual scenes.' (Source: Vision Australia Information and Library Service)

y separately published work icon Foreign Correspondence Geraldine Brooks , Sydney : Anchor , 1998 Z1182902 1998 single work autobiography (taught in 2 units)

From adolescent pen pal in the suburbs of Australia to prize-winning foreign correspondent, Geraldine Brooks presents an intimate and captivating memoir. Born on Bland Street in a working-class neighborhood of Sydney, Australia, Geraldine Brooks longs to discover the vivid place where history happens and culture comes from. As a means of escaping the world around her, she enlists pen pals from around the globe who offer her a window on the hazards of adolescence in the Middle East, Europe, and America. With the aid of her letters, Brooks turns her bedroom into the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, the barricades of Parisian student protests, the swampy fields of an embattled kibbutz.

Brooks goes from the protected environment of a Catholic girls school to the University of Sydney, eventually renting her own flat near the bustling Sydney harbor. She hires on as an intern at The Sydney Morning Herald and then wins a scholarship to the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University in New York City, where she begins her career as a foreign correspondent. As a writer for The Wall Street Journal, Brooks reports on wars and famines in the Middle East, Bosnia, and Africa, but she never forgets her earlier foreign correspondence.

Back in Australia to attend her dying father, she stumbles on her old letters in her parents' basement, and embarks on a journey that tales her around the world on the most meaningful assignment of her career. Her search leads her through Israeli moshavim, Arab souks, medieval French hill towns, Martha's Vineyard fishing shacks, and Manhattan nightclubs. One by one, she finds men and women whose lives have been shaped by war and hatred, by fame and notoriety, and by the ravages of a mysterious and tragic mental illness.

It is only from the distance of foreign lands and against the background of alien lives that Brooks finally sees her homeland and her own life clearly. Candid, thoughtful, and compelling, Foreign Correspondence speaks to the unquiet heart of every girl who has ever yearned to become a woman of the world. (Publisher description)

y separately published work icon Stasiland Anna Funder , Melbourne : Text Publishing , 2002 Z1001793 2002 single work non-fiction (taught in 5 units)
— Appears in: Reader's Digest Encounters : Real Life Reading 2006; (p. 9-174)

To write this non-fiction work about life in the former East Germany, Anna Funder interviewed former Stasi officers and the people they surveilled. Described in the National Library of Australia record as 'A book of travel, history and biography that reads like a documentary novel,' Stasiland takes 'a deliberately subjective and "literary" approach' to its material with an 'emphasis on a sympathetic authorial persona as the source of the reader's perspective' (Susan Lever 'The Crimes of the Past: Anna Funder's Stasiland and Helen Garner's Joe Cinque's Consolation'. Paper delivered at the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL) conference 2006).

y separately published work icon Tracks Robyn Davidson , London : Jonathan Cape , 1980 Z811575 1980 single work autobiography travel (taught in 8 units)

Robyn Davidson tells the story of her 1977 journey across the desert, from Alice Springs to Western Australia. She and a Pitjantjara elder completed their crossing on camel's back. Tracks is the story of her adventure, not only across the desert, but also into self-discovery, and the discovery of the beauty, nobility, and history of the country and its people. (Source: Trove)

form y separately published work icon Black Chicks Talking Leah Purcell , Brendan Fletcher , ( dir. Brendan Fletcher et. al. )agent 2002 Australia : Bungabura Productions SBS Independent , 2001 Z967010 2002 single work film/TV (taught in 2 units)

Black Chicks Talking investigates what it means to be Black in Australia today. Over dinners of Indigenous gourmet cuisine, Purcell turns the camera on five Indigenous women, allowing them to speak candidly about the issues that have affected their lives, exploring themes of culture, identity, and denial.

The five women are Rosanna Angus, a community warden and cultural tour guide in her traditional Western Australian community of One Arm Point; Kathryn Hay, from Tasmania, who became the first Aboriginal Miss Australia; Deborah Mailman, an award-winning actress who was born and raised in Mount Isa; Cilla Malone, a mother of six who lives in Cherbourg (an Aboriginal settlement in southeast Queensland); and Tammy Williams from Gympie, a lawyer who aims to be the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

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

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

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

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

y separately published work icon The Idea of Perfection Kate Grenville , South Melbourne : Picador , 1999 Z141413 1999 single work novel (taught in 5 units)

Set in the eccentric backwater of Karakarook, New South Wales, this is the story of Douglas Cheeseman, a shy and clumsy engineer who meets Harley Savage, a woman who is known for being rather large and abrupt. Harley Savage is a plain, rawboned woman, a part-time museum curator and quilting expert with three failed marriages and a heart condition. Douglas Cheeseman is a shy, gawky engineer with jug-handle ears, one marriage gone sour, and a crippling lack of physical courage. Seeming to be incompetent was something Douglas did to protect himself, just as having a "dangerous streak" served the same purpose for Harley. Douglas is there to pull down a quaint old bridge and Harley aims to foster heritage. They are clearly on a collision course - but when they meet they are unaware that something unexpected is going to happen. (Source: Trove)

 

form y separately published work icon Japanese Story Alison Tilson , Fitzroy : Gecko Films , 2002 (Manuscript version)x401999 Z1498780 2002 single work film/TV (taught in 10 units)

'Sandy, a geologist, finds herself stuck on a field trip to the Pilbara desert with a Japanese man she finds inscrutable, annoying and decidedly arrogant. Hiromitsu's view of her is not much better. Things go from bad to worse when they become stranded in one of the most remote regions on earth. JAPANESE STORY is a journey of change and discovery for its two lead characters.'

Source: Screen Australia.

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

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

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

form y separately published work icon Little Fish Jacquelin Perske , ( dir. Rowan Woods ) Dirty Films Porchlight Films , 2005 Z1221009 2005 single work film/TV crime (taught in 5 units)

'How do you learn to love again when the pain of the past won't let you go? Tracy Heart has set herself the humble goal of owning her own business. The return of her ex-boyfriend Jonny, the criminal aspirations of her brother Ray and the emotional draw of ex-footy star Lionel create friction for Tracy, and her bond of trust with her mother Janelle is tested. A story about families. About lies. And about learning to love again.'

Source: Screen Australia. (Sighted: 6/8/2013)

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.)

form y separately published work icon Look Both Ways Sarah Watt , ( dir. Sarah Watt ) 2004 Australia : Hibiscus Films , 2005 Z1218102 2004 single work film/TV (taught in 1 units) Over a fiercely hot weekend, four people grapple with life changing news, wondering whether their fate is deserved or earned, and how happiness might be possible. Meryl is a lonely artist who literally envisions disaster around every corner. Nick is a photojournalist whose work keeps him emotionally distanced from the tragedies he documents. When the two meet in the aftermath of a real train accident, their lives, and the lives of a handful of other witnesses and victims, are revealed and transformed.
y separately published work icon The Riders Tim Winton , Chippendale : Pan Macmillan Australia , 1994 Z295967 1994 single work novel (taught in 3 units)

Fred Scully is in another country, a 'desert Irishman' far from home. After two long years of travelling through Europe, he decided to move his family from Australia to western Ireland. Scully arrived weeks ahead of his family to renovate the old farmhouse they'd bought in the shadow of a castle in County Offally, and which he's renovated by hand. Now, at the gate of Shannon's international airport, he anxiously awaits the arrival of his pregnant wife and seven-year-old daughter, envisioning a new life ahead, a fresh start. He has waited for and worried about this for months. He is a man who does not like being alone. The plane lands, the glass doors to the terminal slide open and his daughter emerges. Alone. There is no note, no word of explanation from his wife, only the mute silence of his stunned child. In an instant, Scully's life goes down in flames. This is a story of a marriage in our time. So begins a love-crazed odyssey across Europe, to the underside of the male psyche, in search of a woman vanished.

(Adapted from Trove)

2008

y separately published work icon Foreign Correspondence Geraldine Brooks , Sydney : Anchor , 1998 Z1182902 1998 single work autobiography (taught in 2 units)

From adolescent pen pal in the suburbs of Australia to prize-winning foreign correspondent, Geraldine Brooks presents an intimate and captivating memoir. Born on Bland Street in a working-class neighborhood of Sydney, Australia, Geraldine Brooks longs to discover the vivid place where history happens and culture comes from. As a means of escaping the world around her, she enlists pen pals from around the globe who offer her a window on the hazards of adolescence in the Middle East, Europe, and America. With the aid of her letters, Brooks turns her bedroom into the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, the barricades of Parisian student protests, the swampy fields of an embattled kibbutz.

Brooks goes from the protected environment of a Catholic girls school to the University of Sydney, eventually renting her own flat near the bustling Sydney harbor. She hires on as an intern at The Sydney Morning Herald and then wins a scholarship to the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University in New York City, where she begins her career as a foreign correspondent. As a writer for The Wall Street Journal, Brooks reports on wars and famines in the Middle East, Bosnia, and Africa, but she never forgets her earlier foreign correspondence.

Back in Australia to attend her dying father, she stumbles on her old letters in her parents' basement, and embarks on a journey that tales her around the world on the most meaningful assignment of her career. Her search leads her through Israeli moshavim, Arab souks, medieval French hill towns, Martha's Vineyard fishing shacks, and Manhattan nightclubs. One by one, she finds men and women whose lives have been shaped by war and hatred, by fame and notoriety, and by the ravages of a mysterious and tragic mental illness.

It is only from the distance of foreign lands and against the background of alien lives that Brooks finally sees her homeland and her own life clearly. Candid, thoughtful, and compelling, Foreign Correspondence speaks to the unquiet heart of every girl who has ever yearned to become a woman of the world. (Publisher description)

y separately published work icon Stasiland Anna Funder , Melbourne : Text Publishing , 2002 Z1001793 2002 single work non-fiction (taught in 5 units)
— Appears in: Reader's Digest Encounters : Real Life Reading 2006; (p. 9-174)

To write this non-fiction work about life in the former East Germany, Anna Funder interviewed former Stasi officers and the people they surveilled. Described in the National Library of Australia record as 'A book of travel, history and biography that reads like a documentary novel,' Stasiland takes 'a deliberately subjective and "literary" approach' to its material with an 'emphasis on a sympathetic authorial persona as the source of the reader's perspective' (Susan Lever 'The Crimes of the Past: Anna Funder's Stasiland and Helen Garner's Joe Cinque's Consolation'. Paper delivered at the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL) conference 2006).

y separately published work icon Tracks Robyn Davidson , London : Jonathan Cape , 1980 Z811575 1980 single work autobiography travel (taught in 8 units)

Robyn Davidson tells the story of her 1977 journey across the desert, from Alice Springs to Western Australia. She and a Pitjantjara elder completed their crossing on camel's back. Tracks is the story of her adventure, not only across the desert, but also into self-discovery, and the discovery of the beauty, nobility, and history of the country and its people. (Source: Trove)

  • 2016
  • 2015
  • 2014
  • 2013
  • 2012
  • 2011
  • 2010
  • 2009
  • 2008
X