Beneath Clouds
( dir. Ivan Sen
)
Sydney
:
Autumn Films
,
2001
Z1440560
2001
single work
film/TV
(taught in 12 units)
Blue eyed, fair skinned Lena is the daughter of an Aboriginal mother, living in a small country town. She longs for the romantic ideal of her absent father and his Irish heritage. When her home life feels set to implode, she hits the road with little money, a backpack and a photo of her dad. When Lena misses her bus to Sydney, she meets up with Vaughn, an Aboriginal teenager who has run away from a minimum-security prison in the desperate hope of reaching his ill mother. Vaughn is hardened by his anger at the world. Initially the two reluctant travelling companions are suspicious and wary of each other, but their journey, mostly by foot and the odd lift, builds an understanding between them. -- Libraries Australia
Yolngu Boy
( dir. Stephen Johnson
)
Victoria
:
Australian Children's Television Foundation
,
2000
Z1604170
2000
single work
film/TV
(taught in 2 units)
'Caught in a collision between the modern world of rap, football, street cred and the oldest living culture on earth, Lorrpu, Botj and Milika are three teenagers who once shared a childhood dream of becoming great hunters together. But things have changed and their paths are diverging. The film is about the search for identity, making the journey from adolescence to adulthood and the implications of belonging to a larger social group, whether it be culture, a family or a group of friends'.
Source : http://librariesaustralia.nla.gov.au/ (Sighted 8 July 2009).
Japanese Story
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.
Tiger's Eye : A Memoir
Melbourne
:
Text Publishing
,
2000
Z282560
2000
selected work
autobiography
short story
prose
(taught in 6 units)
Benang : From the Heart
Fremantle
:
Fremantle Press
,
1999
Z135862
1999
single work
novel
(taught in 31 units)
'Oceanic in its rhythms and understanding, brilliant in its use of language and image, moving in its largeness of spirit, compelling in its narrative scope and style, Benang is a novel of celebration and lament, of beginning and return, of obliteration and recovery, of silencing and of powerful utterance. Both tentative and daring, it speaks to the present and a possible future through stories, dreams, rhythms, songs, images and documents mobilised from the incompletely acknowledged and still dynamic past.' (Publisher's website)
Night Letters : A Journey Through Switzerland and Italy
Sydney
:
Macmillan Australia
,
1996
Z529292
1996
single work
novel
(taught in 7 units)
'Every night for twenty nights in a hotel room in Venice, an Australian man recently diagnosed with an incurable disease writes a letter home to a friend. In these letters he reflects on questions of mortality, seduction and the search for paradise in deeply life-enhancing ways.' (From publisher's web site.)
Craft for a Dry Lake
Sydney
:
Anchor
,
2000
Z997375
2000
single work
autobiography
(taught in 4 units)
In Craft for a Dry Lake, Kim Mahood embarks on an extraordinary journey to her heartland - the outback of her youth. Compelled to revisit the haunts of her childhood by the tragic death of her father, Kim seeks to lay his ghost to rest, but instead finds herself faced with many of her own. Her adventures are interwoven with the echoes of childhood memories and peopled by an intriguing cast of outback characters. At times the lines between past and present become blurred as a daughter travels in the footsteps of her father, searching for a sense of place in this landscape she once called home. (Source: Trove)
Hiam
St Leonards
:
Allen and Unwin
,
1998
Z804000
1998
single work
novel
(taught in 4 units)
"The world had changed. As far as the eye could see, the earth was red. It wasn't orange, or soil red, or brown red, or perhaps all of them at once. It was profound rich red, glittering deeply in the mid-morning light. She was vaguely aware of having known that somewhere in Australia the land was this colour but the reality of it was startling and stunning.'
Hiam is the story of a journey through both a psychic and geographic landscape, a journey through disintegration and loss. Hiam, an Arab migrant woman, abandons Adelaide to unravel her life and memories on the road North after her family and identity have been destroyed. In the course of the novel she weaves an identity out of past, present, stories, dreams and the Australian landscape with which she engages for the first time.
On one level, this is the story of a migrant's experience in a strange land, a novel which explores the pressures, fragilities and strengths of exiled communities. It is also a story of universal human grief, individual courage and the will, not only to survive, but to live fully in the world."
To the Islands
London
:
MacDonald
,
1958
Z320065
1958
single work
novel
(taught in 5 units)
'To the Islands concerns the ordeal of Stephen Heriot, an elderly, careworn, and disillusioned Anglican missionary who abandons his mission when he mistakenly believes he has accidentally killed one of his Aboriginal charges in a not entirely unprovoked confrontation. Heriot flees into the desert not to escape justice but to embrace its desolate beauty and its elemental purity as the one objective reality and the one certainty left available to him.
Heriot's flight and his embrace of the desert may be seen as his attempt, as a European Australian, to immerse himself in the landscape, to make himself one with the land. At this realistic level, the novel enacts the ontological and existential dilemma that confronts most — if not all — European Australians, the dilemma that Professor Hassall [in his introduction to the 2002 UQP Australian Authors version] defines as the continuing quest for psychic integration, for reconciliation with indigenous Australians, and with the land itself.'
Wells-Green, James. [Untitled Review.] JAS Review of Books 15 (May 2003)
