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 Arrival
Shaun Tan
(illustrator),
South Melbourne
:
Lothian
,
2006
Z1285263
2006
single work
graphic novel
children's
(taught in 16 units)
"The Arrival is a migrant story told as a series of wordless images that might seem to come from a long forgotten time. A man leaves his wife and child in an impoverished town, seeking better prospects in an unknown country on the other side of a vast ocean. He eventually finds himself in a bewildering city of foreign customs, peculiar animals, curious floating objects and indecipherable languages. With nothing more than a suitcase and a handful of currency, the immigrant must find a place to live, food to eat and some kind of gainful employment. He is helped along the way by sympathetic strangers, each carrying their own unspoken history: stories of struggle and survival in a world of incomprehensible violence, upheaval and hope." (Source: Shaun Tan website)
The Complete Maus, Spiegelman
A Visit from the Goon Squad, Egan
This unit examines how the 'medium' of a text, its material form and its genre, is an intrinsic part of its significance, the way it conveys meaning. Novels, poetry, feature films, television shows, graphic novels, abstract art, interactive internet fiction, all make different demands of their audiences depending on the medium in which they are presented. Readers of these creative texts are often interested not just in what is represented but in how a text innovates upon an existing genre or form, encouraging them to participate in the construction of that text's meaning. By analysing a variety of contemporary fiction, from novels to graphic novels and feature films, this unit enables students to explore the proposition that the medium of a creative work is an intrinsic part of its 'message', its capacity for imaginative expression.
