Texts

y separately published work icon The Monkey's Mask Dorothy Porter , South Melbourne : Hyland House , 1994 Z528794 1994 single work novel crime (taught in 31 units)
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y separately published work icon Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence Doris Pilkington Garimara , St Lucia : University of Queensland Press , 1996 Z126936 1996 single work biography (taught in 26 units)

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

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

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

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y separately published work icon Sorry Gail Jones , Milsons Point : Vintage Australia , 2007 Z1380261 2007 single work novel (taught in 9 units)

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

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

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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).

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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)

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Description

This unit uses postcolonial approaches to trace the development of Australian literature from its colonial beginnings to the present day. A wide variety of texts will be introduced -- books, extracts from literary works or documents such as explorers' notebooks, settlers' letters and diaries. There will also be opportunities to study film versions of literary texts. The works selected will provide the basis for studying cultural change in Australia in terms of changing attitudes to Europe, Aboriginal history and national identity.

Other Details

Levels: Undergraduate
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