Texts

y separately published work icon Alien Son Judah Waten , Sydney : Angus and Robertson , 1952 Z53291 1952 selected work short story autobiography (taught in 2 units)

'Alien Son, in simple yet rich language, is the story of a Russian family settling in Australia in the years before the first World War.  Waten tells of life in his home, among the family's Jewish friends, among his new Australian playmates, on his father's bottle-o rounds - of their hopes, despairs, the comedies and tragedies - all told with the warmth, understanding, and sometimes lack of understanding, that is felt by a child finding himself between the two worlds.  His attempts to reconcile the demands of these two worlds rarely meet with success; often they end in situations that are at once poignantly sad and humorous.'

Source: Publisher's blurb (Australian Classics ed.).

y separately published work icon That Deadman Dance Kim Scott , Sydney : Picador , 2010 Z1728528 2010 single work novel historical fiction (taught in 43 units)

Big-hearted, moving and richly rewarding, That Deadman Dance is set in the first decades of the 19th century in the area around what is now Albany, Western Australia. In playful, musical prose, the book explores the early contact between the Aboriginal Noongar people and the first European settlers.

'The novel's hero is a young Noongar man named Bobby Wabalanginy. Clever, resourceful and eager to please, Bobby befriends the new arrivals, joining them hunting whales, tilling the land, exploring the hinterland and establishing the fledgling colony. He is even welcomed into a prosperous local white family where he falls for the daughter, Christine, a beautiful young woman who sees no harm in a liaison with a native.

'But slowly - by design and by accident - things begin to change. Not everyone is happy with how the colony is developing. Stock mysteriously start to disappear; crops are destroyed; there are "accidents" and injuries on both sides. As the Europeans impose ever stricter rules and regulations in order to keep the peace, Bobby's Elders decide they must respond in kind. A friend to everyone, Bobby is forced to take sides: he must choose between the old world and the new, his ancestors and his new friends. Inexorably, he is drawn into a series of events that will forever change not just the colony but the future of Australia...' (From the publisher's website.)

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 Henry Lawson : Selected Stories Henry Lawson , Pymble : Angus and Robertson , 2001 Z376398 2001 selected work short story (taught in 1 units)

'An essential collection of Henry Lawson's best-loved stories. Rogues, larrikins and the lost people - these timeless stories range from inspired, laconic comedies to pathos and tragedy. This selection showcases Lawson's range as a fiction writer and highlights his profound influence on how Australians see themselves. Here are delightful tales, thrilling tales, tales of love, of strife and of adventure, tales full of humour - stories of every mood, all alive with the magic of Lawson's genius, a genius which ranks with that of the world's greatest short-story writers. Includes The Drover's Wife, The Union Buries Its Dead and The Loaded Dog.' (Publication summary)

y separately published work icon Homecoming Adib Khan , Pymble : Harper Perennial , 2003 Z1078091 2003 single work novel (taught in 2 units)

'Some wars are never over.

'From an award-winning author, a breathtaking new novel that holds a mirror up to contemporary Australia. Martin Godwin is a man alone. Divorced from his wife, in an uneasy relationship with his son, and with complicated, guilty feelings towards his lover, Nora, he is also a veteran of Vietnam, haunted by the fear that his exposure to dangerous chemicals such as Agent Orange has triggered his son's depression; and haunted too by the events of one sweltering afternoon during a raid on a village. These memories become more urgent when an old soldier comes calling, asking for Martin's silence as he establishes a political career. This powerful novel winds the strands of Martin's life – father, comrade, lover, unwilling conspirator and reluctant spiritual searcher – into a seamless and compelling whole. Through its lens we are given a snapshot of contemporary Australia, groping towards meaning in a rapidly changing world.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

y separately published work icon Wild Cat Falling Colin Johnson , Sydney : Angus and Robertson , 1965 Z203627 1965 single work novel (taught in 13 units)

'Wild Cat Falling is the story of an Aboriginal youth, a 'bodgie' of the early sixties who grows up on the ragged outskirts of a country town, falls into petty crime, goes to gaol, and comes out to do battle once more with the society who put him there. Its publication in 1965 marked a unique literary event, for this was the first novel by any writer of Aboriginal blood to be published in Australia. As well, it is a remarkable piece of literature in its own right, expressing the dilemmas and conflicts of the young Aboriginal in modern Australian society with its memorable insight and stylishness.' (Publication summary)

y separately published work icon A Fortunate Life A. B. Facey , 1980 (Manuscript version)14731177 14731171 1980 single work autobiography (taught in 4 units)

'Born in 1894, Albert Facey lived the rough frontier life of a sheep farmer, survived the gore of Gallipoli, raised a family through the Depression and spent sixty years with his beloved wife, Evelyn. Despite enduring hardships we can barely imagine today, Facey always saw his life as a "fortunate" one. A true classic of Australian literature, his simply written autobiography is an inspiration. It is the story of a life lived to the full – the extraordinary journey of an ordinary man.' (Penguin Australia abstract)

y separately published work icon Voss : A Novel Patrick White , London : Eyre and Spottiswoode , 1957 Z872480 1957 single work novel (taught in 33 units)

'Set in nineteenth-century Australia, Voss is the story of the secret passion between an explorer and a naïve young woman. Although they have met only a few times, Voss and Laura are joined by overwhelming, obsessive feelings for each other. Voss sets out to cross the continent. As hardships, mutiny and betrayal whittle away his power to endure and to lead, his attachment to Laura gradually increases. Laura, waiting in Sydney, moves through the months of separation as if they were a dream and Voss the only reality.

'From the careful delineation of Victorian society to the sensitive rendering of hidden love to the stark narrative of adventure in the Australian desert, Patrick White's novel is a work of extraordinary power and virtuosity.'

Source: Random House Books (Sighted 21/09/2012)

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

y separately published work icon Remembering Babylon David Malouf , London Milsons Point : Chatto and Windus Random House , 1993 Z452447 1993 single work novel historical fiction (taught in 48 units)

'In the mid-1840s, a thirteen-year-old boy, Gemmy Fairley, is cast ashore in the far north of Australia and taken in by Aborigines. Sixteen years later, when settlers reach the area, he moves back into the world of Europeans, men and women who are staking out their small patch of home in an alien place, hopeful and yet terrified of what it might do to them.

Given shelter by the McIvors, the family of the children who originally made contact with him, Gemmy seems at first to be guaranteed a secure role in the settlement, but there are currents of fear and mistrust in the air. To everyone he meets - from George Abbot, the romantically aspiring young teacher, to Mr Frazer, the minister, whose days are spent with Gemmy recording the local flora; from Janet McIvor, just coming to adulthood and discovering new versions of the world, to the eccentric Governor of Queensland himself - Gemmy stands as a different kind of challenge, as a force which both fascinates and repels. And Gemmy himself finds his own whiteness as unsettling in this new world as the knowledge he brings with him of the savage, the Aboriginal.' - Publisher's blurb (Chatto & Windus, 1993).

y separately published work icon The Travel Writer Simone Lazaroo , Sydney : Picador , 2006 Z1305845 2006 single work novel (taught in 7 units) London, late 1980s. Ghislaine de Sequeira lies in a hospital bed. Once an obituary writer in Malacca, she had practised eloquence in the face of death for years. But now she is dying, and it is her bereft daughter Isabelle's turn to articulate the meaning of a life at its end. Isabelle tries to find an anchor in this storm by telling her mother's story and by seeking solace in her writing tutor, as many years ago her mother sought solace with the travel writer after the death of her own mother, Mathilde. Seeking to understand her mother's past choices in war-torn Malacca in light of her own persistent desire for love, Isabelle spins a version of Ghislaine's passion for the travel writer, a man who would alter Ghislaine's life - and that of Isabelle - completely. (Publisher's blurb)
y separately published work icon Jack Maggs Peter Carey , St Lucia : University of Queensland Press , 1997 Z205857 1997 single work novel (taught in 8 units) The year is 1837 and a stranger is prowling London. He is Jack Maggs, an illegal returnee from the prison island of Australia. He has the demeanor of a savage and the skills of a hardened criminal, and he is risking his life on seeking vengeance and reconciliation.
Influenced by Charles Dickens's Great Expectations.

Description

The exploration and settlement of new lands inspire exciting and moving narratives that develop into a national literature, cross-culturally spanning indigenous and settler writing. Students interrogate and research the concept of and generation of ideas in Australian fiction and the striking elements that define it, both from the perspective of the settlers and from the indigenous people. A range of long and short fiction is examined from the nineteenth-century writers who were predominantly Anglo-Celtic through increasing numbers of writers from Europe and indigenous cultures in the twentieth century to twenty-first century writers from a multitude of lands, including the African and Indian continents as well as the Asian region. Students test a range of critical and theoretical approaches in their own cross-cultural and international analyses of Australian fiction, since our students, too, bring to both the reading and writing of Australian fiction the fresh eyes of new generations of indigenes, settlers and migrants.

Assessment

Essay (an analysis of selected Australian fiction) 40%; Participation 20%; Examination 40%.

Supplementary Texts

SIGNIFICANT REFERENCES

Armellino, P., & Melikoglu, K. (2009). Ob-scene spaces in Australian narrative. An account of the socio-topographic construction of space in Australian literature. Germany: ibidem-verlag, Jessica Huaunshild u Christian Schon.

Arnold, J., & Hay, J (Eds.). (1996). Bibliography of Australian literature project. List of Australian writers 1788-1992. Melbourne, VIC; National Centre for Australian Studies. Monash University.

Bennett, B. (2002). Australian short fiction: A history. St Lucia, QLD: University of Queensland Press.

Birns, N., & McNeer, R. (2007). A companion to Australian literature since 1900. Rochestor, NY: Camden House.

Gelder, K. (2009). After the celebration: Australian fiction 1989-2007. Melbourne, VIC: Melbourne University Publishing.

Huggan, G. (2007). Australian literature: Poscolonialism, racism, transnationalism. Oxford, UK: Oxford Univeristy Press.

Kossew, S. (2003). Writing women, writing place: Contemporary Australian and South African fiction. London, UK: Routledge.

Krauth, N. (Ed.). (1982). New Guinea images in Australian literature: Portable Australian authors. Brisbane, QLD: University of Queensland Press.

Lauer, G. (2010). Darkness subverted: aboriginal Gothic in black Australian literature and Film. Gottingen, Germany: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.

Reid, R, (1979). Fiction and the great depression: Australia and New Zealand, 1930-1950. Melbourne, VIC: Edward Arnold.

Miller, E. M. (1975). Australian literature, from its beginnings to 1935: A descriptive and bibliographical survey of books by Australian authors in poetry, drama, fiction, criticism and anthology, with subsidiary entries to 1938. Sydney, Australia: Sydney University Press:

Ouvang, Y. (2008). Chinese in Australian fiction: 1888-1988. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press.

Pierce, P. (2009). The Cambridge history of Australian literature. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Russell, R. (1997). Literary links: Celebrating the literary relationship between Australia nd Britain. Sydney, NSW: Allen & Unwin.

Weaver, R., Palumbo, D. E., & Sullivan, C. W. (2011). Apocalypse in Australian fiction and film: A critical study. Jefferson, North CA: McFarlane and Co Inc.

JOURNALS

Australian Book Review

Australian Literary Studies

Kunapipi

Meanjin Quarterly

Quadrant

Southerly

Westerly

WEB SITES

http://www.currency.com.au

http://www.middlemiss.org/lit/lit.html

www.nla.gov.au/apps/eresources

http://home.vicnet.net.au/~ozlit/

http://faculty.arts.ubc.ca/sgunew/MININT.HTM

Other Details

Levels: Undergraduate
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