The Sound of One Hand Clapping
Sydney
:
Pan Macmillan Australia
,
1997
Z366585
1997
single work
novel
(taught in 4 units)
'In the winter of 1954, in a construction camp in the remote Tasmanian wilderness, when Sonja Buloh was three years old and her father was drinking too much, Sonja's mother walked into a blizzard never to return. Some thirty-five years later, when Sonja visits Tasmania and her drunkard father, the shadows of the past begin to intrude into the present - changing forever his living death and her ordered life.' (Source: Libraries Australia).
Remembering Babylon
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Given shelter by the McIvors, the family of the children who originally made contact with him, Gemmy seems at first to be guaranteed a secure role in the settlement, but there are currents of fear and mistrust in the air.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).
The Children's Bach
Melbourne
:
McPhee Gribble
,
1984
Z371975
1984
single work
novella
(taught in 6 units)
Athena and Dexter lead an enclosed family life, innocent of fashion and bound towards a disturbed child. Their comfortable rut is disrupted by the arrival of Elizabeth, a tough nut from Dexter's past. With her three charming, chaotic hangers-on, she draws the couple out into a world whose casual egotism they had barely dreamed of. How can they get home again? (Source: publisher's website)
The Tall Man : Death and Life on Palm Island
Camberwell
:
Hamish Hamilton
,
2008
Z1483259
2008
single work
prose
(taught in 11 units)
In November 2004, in the small township of Palm Island in the far north of Queensland, Detective Hurley arrested Cameron Doomadgee for swearing at him. Doomadgee was drunk. A few hours later he died in a watch-house cell. According to the inquest, his liver was so badly damaged it was almost severed. (Source: Trove)
