Literary Studies: Reading the City (9174)
Semester 1 / 2015

Texts

War of Streets and Houses
y separately published work icon The Summer Exercises Ross Gibson , Crawley : UWA Publishing , 2009 Z1553941 2009 single work novel (taught in 3 units)

'A civilian chaplain records whispered confessions and low urgings into a notebook during his summer tenure at Central Street Police Station. His Summer Exercises are habitual - five times a day - his terseness can generate feelings so sharp that sometimes a great notion gets pared clean with a meagre swatch of syllables.

'Constructing this notebook of a sharp observer, author Ross Gibson builds a world: Sydney in 1946 - sordid and bruised after decades of depredations. A war will take your innards out. In The Summer Exercises, Gibson uses approximately 175 carefully selected black and white photographs from the collection of the Justice & Police Museum taken during the years immediately after World War II.

'These photographs, generated by NSW Police in the course of their investigations between 1945-1960, form a visual reference for richly imagined and experimental storytelling to take place. Anchored in the realities of 1940s Sydney police investigative procedure, the work is an artistic re-invention of history as it happened.' (Publisher's blurb)

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