Reading Suburbia (ENGL6115)
Semester 2 / 2015

Texts

y separately published work icon My Brother Jack : A Novel George Johnston , London Sydney : Collins , 1964 Z824887 1964 single work novel (taught in 13 units)

''The thing I am trying to get at is what made Jack different from me. Different all through our lives, I mean, and in a special sense, not just older or nobler or braver or less clever.'

'David and Jack Meredith grow up in a patriotic suburban Melbourne household during the First World War, and go on to lead lives that could not be more different. Through the story of the two brothers, George Johnston created an enduring exploration of two Australian myths: that of the man who loses his soul as he gains worldly success, and that of the tough, honest Aussie battler, whose greatest ambition is to serve his country during the war. Acknowledged as one of the true Australian classics, My Brother Jack is a deeply satisfying, complex and moving literary masterpiece. ' (Publication summary)

y separately published work icon Johnno : A Novel David Malouf , St Lucia : University of Queensland Press , 1975 Z25348 1975 single work novel (taught in 9 units)

'Dante and Johnno are unlikely childhood friends, growing up in the bustle of steamy, wartime Brisbane. Later, as teenagers, they learn about love and life amidst the city's pubs and public libraries, backyards and brothels, Moreton Bay figs and tennis parties. As adults, they make the great pilgrimage overseas and maintain an uneasy friendship as they seek to build their lives.

'An affectionate and bittersweet portrait, Johnno brilliantly recreates the sleazy, tropical half-city that was Brisbane and captures a generation locked in combat with the elusive Australian dream.'

Source: Publisher's blurb (Penguin).

y separately published work icon The Children's Bach Helen Garner , 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)

y separately published work icon Blue Skies Helen Hodgman , London : Duckworth , 1976 Z271751 1976 single work novel (taught in 3 units)

'A young wife and mother watches a clock that seems forever stuck at three-in-the-afternoon. Her neighbour obsesses over the front lawn, and the women at the local beach chatter about knitting patterns. Her husband didn't come home last night.

'She lives for Tuesdays and Thursdays, when the baby is with Mother-in-law and she can escape to a less humdrum life. Jonathan, man about town, is Tuesday. Ben, a freethinking artist, is Thursday.

'But Jonathan is in serious trouble, and Thursdays are turning sour. Very sour.

'A brilliant, acerbic tale of a crack-up in stultifying suburbia, Blue Skies marked the emergence of a unique voice in Australian fiction.' (Abstract for 2011 publication from Text Publishing website.)

y separately published work icon The Tribe Michael Mohammed Ahmad , Artarmon : Giramondo Publishing , 2014 7186026 2014 selected work novella (taught in 5 units)

'The Tribe is a collection of three novellas portraying significant aspects in the life of an extended Muslim Lebanese-Australian family with its roots in the suburb of Lakemba in Western Sydney.The first novella describes the family house, and the three generations who live, often in some discord, in its rooms; the second explores the marriage of the boy’s uncle, and the threatened appearance of an estranged branch of the family at the ceremony. The third rounds off the circle, describing the death of the family matriarch, the boy’s grandmother. Together they offer an intimate insight into a community negotiating the conflict between tradition and modernity, and the complex tribal affiliations of the extended family.' (Publisher's blurb)

y separately published work icon The Slap Christos Tsiolkas , Crows Nest : Allen and Unwin , 2008 Z1739894 2008 single work novel (taught in 40 units)

'At a suburban barbecue, a man slaps a child who is not his own.

'This event has a shocking ricochet effect on a group of people, mostly friends, who are directly or indirectly influenced by the event.

'In this remarkable novel, Christos Tsiolkas turns his unflinching and all-seeing eye onto that which connects us all: the modern family and domestic life in the twenty-first century. The Slap is told from the points of view of eight people who were present at the barbecue. The slap and its consequences force them all to question their own families and the way they live, their expectations, beliefs and desires.

'What unfolds is a powerful, haunting novel about love, sex and marriage, parenting and children, and the fury and intensity - all the passions and conflicting beliefs - that family can arouse. In its clear-eyed and forensic dissection of the ever-growing middle class and its aspirations and fears, The Slap is also a poignant, provocative novel about the nature of loyalty and happiness, compromise and truth.' (Publisher's blurb)

Description

Suburbia is a bad object in Australian literature. Neither city nor bush, suburbs can seem culturally bland zones of consumerist domesticity from which artists and writers want to escape. Yet loathing of suburbia can be mixed with desire. This unit explores various topographies of suburbia in fiction, poetry, non-fiction and film. Why do writers return to suburbia? How do suburbs give shape to settler modernity, or stimulate literary modernism? Is the suburb a national or transnational scene in Australian writing?

Other Details

Levels: Postgraduate
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