'Collection of short stories by the author of To Ride a Cock Horse', winner of the 1989 South East Asian and South Pacific First Book Award in the British Commonwealth Writers Prize. The stories are linked together by the river Fineflour and its place in the lives of the characters through successive generations.' (Publication summary)
This book was banned from the HSC reading list in 1997.
A selection of interrelated short stories.
'The sensitive question of whether censorship is permissible in the classroom has not been effectively explored, nor has there been an exhaustive survey of all occurrences of public censorship in schools. Through tracking all public occurrences, this article seeks to understand whether censorship is ever justified in both the English classroom and the school beyond. The language surrounding occurrences revealed three different social discourses about the agency of the child: purity and danger, the pedagogy of the oppressed, and liberal consensus. Whether text censorship is justified is ultimately a nuanced ethical issue concerning what constitutes the good society and the free agency of its children. From a social utilitarian position, I conclude that the liberal consensus model is most constructive for the Australian social contract, and argue for a rare case for censorship when a consensus model is undermined.' (Publication abstract)
