Current Issues in Australian Writing (ENGL3620)
Semester 1 / 2010

Texts

y separately published work icon The Spare Room Helen Garner , Melbourne : Text Publishing , 2008 Z1457068 2008 single work novel (taught in 10 units) 'Helen lives in Melbourne, and her friend Nicola flies down from Sydney for a three-week visit. She will sleep in Helen's house, in her lovingly prepared spare room. This is no ordinary visit. Nicola has advanced cancer and is seeking alternative treatment from a clinic in Helen's city. From the moment Nicola steps off the plane, gaunt, staggering like a crone, her voice hoarse but still with something grand about her, Helen becomes her nurse, her protector, her guardian angel and her stony judge.' (Publisher's blurb)
y separately published work icon Selected Poems Les Murray , Melbourne : Black Inc. , 2007 Z1434567 2007 selected work poetry (taught in 2 units) 'Selected Poems ... comprises what Murray himself considers his most successfully realised poems, drawn from all his collections up to and including The Biplane Houses but not including his two verse novels.' (Publisher's blurb)
Every Move You Make David Malouf , 2006 single work short story (taught in 2 units)
— Appears in: Every Move You Make 2006; (p. 61-88) The Complete Stories 2007; (p. 46-65)
y separately published work icon Carpentaria Alexis Wright , Artarmon : Giramondo Publishing , 2006 Z1184902 2006 single work novel (taught in 47 units) Carpentaria's portrait of life in the precariously settled coastal town of Desperance centres on the powerful Phantom family, whose members are the leaders of the Pricklebush people, and their battles with old Joseph Midnight's tearaway Eastend mob on the one hand, and the white officials of Uptown and the neighbouring Gurfurrit mine on the other. Wright's storytelling is operatic and surreal: a blend of myth and scripture, politics and farce. The novel is populated by extraordinary characters - Elias Smith the outcast saviour, the religious zealot Mozzie Fishman, leader of the holy Aboriginal pilgrimage, the murderous mayor Stan Bruiser, the ever-vigilant Captain Nicoli Finn, the activist and prodigal son Will Phantom, and above all, Angel Day the queen of the rubbish-dump, and her sea-faring husband Normal Phantom, the fish-embalming king of time - figures that stand like giants in this storm-swept world. (Backcover)
y separately published work icon The Great Fire Shirley Hazzard , New York (City) : Farrar Straus and Giroux , 2003 Z1076835 2003 single work novel (taught in 4 units)

'The year is 1947. The great fire of the Second World War has convulsed Europe and Asia. In its wake, Aldred Leith, an acclaimed hero of the conflict, has spent two years in China at work on an account of world-transforming change there. Son of a famed and sexually ruthless novelist, Leith begins to resist his own self-sufficiency, nurtured by war. Peter Exley, another veteran and an art historian by training, is prosecuting war crimes committed by the Japanese. Both men have narrowly escaped death in battle, and Leith saved Exley's life. The men have maintained long-distance friendship in a postwar loneliness that haunts them both, and which has swallowed Exley whole. Now in their thirties, with their youth behind them and their world in ruins, both must invent the future and retrieve a private humanity.

'Arriving in Occupied Japan to record the effects of the bomb at Hiroshima, Leith meets Benedict and Helen Driscoll, the Australian son and daughter of a tyrannical medical administrator. Benedict, at twenty, is doomed by a rare degenerative disease. Helen, still younger, is inseparable from her brother. Precocious, brilliant, sensitive, at home in the books they read together, these two have been, in Leith's words, delivered by literature. The young people capture Leith's sympathy; indeed, he finds himself struggling with his attraction to this girl whose feelings are as intense as his own and from whom he will soon be fatefully parted.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

y separately published work icon The Garden Book Brian Castro , Artarmon : Giramondo Publishing , 2005 Z1211305 2005 single work novel (taught in 5 units)

Description

The course reads a selection of recent Australian writing with the aim of examining the literary, cultural, and political questions that are explored in these texts. What do writing and the literary mean in Australia today?

Assessment

Assignments, tutorial attendance & participation

Other Details

Offered in: 2009, 2008, 2007
Current Campus: St Lucia
Levels: Undergraduate
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