That Deadman Dance
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.)
The Dressmaker
Potts Point
:
Duffy and Snellgrove
,
2000
Z668510
2000
single work
novel
(taught in 1 units)
Dungatar is a small town like any other in the Victorian wheatlands - except that the women dress like Paris models. This is the story of the exotic Tilly, a talented and beautiful misfit, who returns from Europe to Dungatar to nurse her mad old mother. Her reappearance after twenty years is met with suspicion and malice from the eccentric locals until they discover her startling dressmaking skills. Gradually, she wins over the town with her fabulous creations. Then she falls in love and things start to go terribly wrong. (Source: Trove)
The Boundary
2009
St Lucia
:
University of Queensland Press
,
2011
Z1622544
2009
single work
novel
crime
(taught in 2 units)
'Hours after rejecting the Corrowa People's native title claim on Brisbane's Meston Park, Justice Bruce Brosnan is brutally murdered in his home. Days later, lawyers against the claim are also found dead.
Aboriginal people were once prohibited from entering Brisbane's city limits at night, and Meston Park stood on the boundary. The Corrowa's matriarch, Ethel Cobb, is convinced the murders are the work of an ancient assassin who has returned to destroy the boundary, but Aboriginal lawyer Miranda Eversely isn't so sure.
When the Premier is kidnapped, the pressure to find the killer intensifies ... While the investigation forces Detective Sergeant Jason Matthews to confront his buried heritage, Miranda battles a sense of personal failure at the Corrowa's defeat. How far will it take her to the edge of self-destruction?' Source: www.uqp.com.au/ (Sighted 25/03/2011).
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.
