The Promise : Stories
St Lucia
:
University of Queensland Press
,
2014
7277350
2014
selected work
short story
(taught in 3 units)
'Outstanding new fiction from the Miles Franklin-shortlisted author of Blood
'In this breathtaking new work, Tony Birch affirms his position as one of Australia’s finest writers of short-form fiction.
'Using his unflinching creative gaze, he ponders love and loss and faith. A trio of amateur thieves are left in charge of a baby moments before a heist. A group of boys compete in the final of a marbles tournament, only to find their biggest challenge was the opponent they didn’t see coming. Two young friends find a submerged car in their local swimming hole and become obsessed by the mystery of the driver’s identity.
'Across twelve blistering stories, The Promise delivers a sensitive and often humorous take on the lives of those who have loved, lost and wandered.' (Publication summary)
Benang : From the Heart
Fremantle
:
Fremantle Press
,
1999
Z135862
1999
single work
novel
(taught in 31 units)
'Oceanic in its rhythms and understanding, brilliant in its use of language and image, moving in its largeness of spirit, compelling in its narrative scope and style, Benang is a novel of celebration and lament, of beginning and return, of obliteration and recovery, of silencing and of powerful utterance. Both tentative and daring, it speaks to the present and a possible future through stories, dreams, rhythms, songs, images and documents mobilised from the incompletely acknowledged and still dynamic past.' (Publisher's website)
The Swan Book
Artarmon
:
Giramondo Publishing
,
2013
Z1836223
2013
single work
novel
(taught in 14 units)
'The new novel by Alexis Wright, whose previous novel Carpentaria won the Miles Franklin Award and four other major prizes including the Australian Book Industry Awards Literary Fiction Book of the Year Award. The Swan Book is set in the future, with Aboriginals still living under the Intervention in the north, in an environment fundamentally altered by climate change. It follows the life of a mute teenager called Oblivia, the victim of gang-rape by petrol-sniffing youths, from the displaced community where she lives in a hulk, in a swamp filled with rusting boats, and thousands of black swans driven from other parts of the country, to her marriage to Warren Finch, the first Aboriginal president of Australia, and her elevation to the position of First Lady, confined to a tower in a flooded and lawless southern city. The Swan Book has all the qualities which made Wright’s previous novel, Carpentaria, a prize-winning best-seller. It offers an intimate awareness of the realities facing Aboriginal people; the wild energy and humour in her writing finds hope in the bleakest situations; and the remarkable combination of storytelling elements, drawn from myth and legend and fairy tale.' (Publisher's blurb)
The subject explores the resonances (and differences) between the historical experiences of indigenous peoples in settler nation states such as Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the US by focusing on three textual forms: literary texts, paratextual primary sources such as government policy documents related to the contexts of these literary texts, and contemporary political theory by indigenous and non-indigenous authors on these topics. Literary texts addressed will include life-writing, novels, poetry, and plays. Paratextual primary sources addressed will include modes of settler governance over indigenous peoples in the aforementioned nation-states (as a means to build a basis for comparison). Contemporary political theory will be deployed to foreground student awareness of the robust critique of governmental dispossession now extant among indigenous scholars and their settler colonial studies allies.
