Jacko's Reach single work   short story  
  • Author:agent David Malouf http://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poets/malouf-david
Issue Details: First known date: 1998... 1998 Jacko's Reach
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Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon A Sea Change : Australian Writing and Photography Adam Shoemaker (editor), Sydney : Sydney Organising Committee for the Olympic Games , 1998 Z286345 1998 anthology biography short story extract poetry prose

    'The unique collection explores the sea change in Australian life today. Two years before the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games the nation is witness to transformations of all types, whether they are radical, magical, sexual or political. In this especially-commissioned anthology, twenty-five of Australia's finest writers and photographers take up the challenge of exploring that theme, including David Malouf, Lily brett, Robert Drewe, Beth Yahp, Robert Dessaix, Tracey Moffatt, Anne Zhalka and William Yang.

    This unusual anthology conterpoints essays and photographic images, short stories and the cartoons of Matthew Martin to challenge, surprise and entertain.' (Source: Back cover)

    Sydney : Sydney Organising Committee for the Olympic Games , 1998
    pg. 226-232
  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Dream Stuff David Malouf , London : Chatto and Windus , 2000 Z270324 2000 selected work short story

    'Here are nine haunting stories from the award-winning author of "Remembering Babylon," in which history and geography, as well as the past and the present, combine and often collide, illuminating the landscape and revealing the character of Australia.

    'An eleven-year-old boy sees his father in his own elongated shadow only to realize that he will not return from the war. In a parting moment, a young woman hired to "marry" vacationing soldiers, grasps the weight of the word "woe." When a failing farmer senselessly murders a wandering aborigine, he imperils his son but discovers in the spring of sympathy that follows the power to influence others.

    'Wise and moving, startling and lyrical, "Dream Stuff" reverberates with the unpredictability of human experience, revealing people who are shaped by the mysterious rhythms of nature as well as the ghosts of their own pasts.'

    Source: Publisher's blurb.

    London : Chatto and Windus , 2000
    pg. 93-100
  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon The Complete Stories David Malouf , New York (City) : Pantheon Books , 2007 Z1422116 2007 selected work short story

    In this stunning collection, internationally acclaimed writer David Malouf gives us bookish boys and taciturn men, strong women and wayward sons, fathers and daughters, lovers and husbands, a composer and his muse. These are their stories, whole lives brought dramatically into focus and powerfully rooted in the vividly rendered landscape of the vast Australian continent. Malouf writes about men and women looking for something they seem to have missed, or missed out on, puzzling over not only their own lives but also the place they have come to occupy in the lives of others. This single volume gathers both a new collection of Malouf’s short fiction, Every Move You Make, and all of his previously published stories.

    Source: Penguin Random House

    (http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/106744/the-complete-stories-by-david-malouf/9780307386038/)

    Sydney : Knopf , 2007
    pg. 251-256

Works about this Work

'The Dimension of the Symbolic' : Environmental Issues in David Malouf's "Jacko's Reach" Jacopo Vigna-Taglianti , 2017 single work criticism
— Appears in: Le Simplegadi , November vol. 17 no. 2017; (p. 306-313)

In David Malouf’s works natural landscape often plays a crucial role: rather than being a simple narrative background, it becomes the main protagonist in his exploration of the relationship between man and nature. In my analysis of “Jacko’s Reach”, the shortest story in the Dream Stuff collection, I will focus on two different environmental concerns that emerge from a close reading of this work: the question of space and identity (and the passage from the physical landscape to the ‘dimension of the symbolic’) and the issue of territorial deprivation as a neo-colonial policy with its possible solutions.

Places of the Imagination : Ecological Concerns in David Malouf's "Jacko's Reach" Antonella Riem Natale , 2017 single work criticism
— Appears in: Le Simplegadi , November vol. 17 no. 2017; (p. 72-80)

Malouf’s ecological concerns and interest in the natural world and their relationship with the cultural can be traced in most of his works, both in prose and poetry. Space and place such as the wilderness and the garden, the steppe and the Roman Empire, the Australian bush and the city are fundamental elements in Malouf’s delineation of individual, social, political and cultural relationships with the land. This article focuses on “Jacko’s Reach” (Malouf 2000), where, under the label of progress, globalisation is enforcing the development of a local natural place. Jacko’s Reach, “our last pocket of scrub”, will be destroyed by “mechanical shovels and cranes”, to build “a new shopping mall” (93), deceptively advertised as a necessity for the benefit of the community. The narratorial voice on the surface describes a usual event, the building of a new shopping centre, and at the same time criticises the destruction of the natural world for the sake of progress, which leads to the annihilation of
wilderness in order to domesticate and acculturate it. This article focuses in particular on Malouf’s narrative strategies, which, more relevantly, emphasise the mythological power of the imagined or remembered place as a form of resistance to the devastation of the natural environment. In “the dimension of the symbolic” (99), through memory, imagination, creativity and dream, the total erasure of wilderness – in both the natural world and ourselves – cannot be fully achieved. Constantly re-imagined and re-configured in our memory, it will be forever “pushing up under the concrete” (99), and “in our head” (100), in a profound visionary and creative interconnectedness between the natural world and the human being.

Places of the Imagination : Ecological Concerns in David Malouf's "Jacko's Reach" Antonella Riem Natale , 2017 single work criticism
— Appears in: Le Simplegadi , November vol. 17 no. 2017; (p. 72-80)

Malouf’s ecological concerns and interest in the natural world and their relationship with the cultural can be traced in most of his works, both in prose and poetry. Space and place such as the wilderness and the garden, the steppe and the Roman Empire, the Australian bush and the city are fundamental elements in Malouf’s delineation of individual, social, political and cultural relationships with the land. This article focuses on “Jacko’s Reach” (Malouf 2000), where, under the label of progress, globalisation is enforcing the development of a local natural place. Jacko’s Reach, “our last pocket of scrub”, will be destroyed by “mechanical shovels and cranes”, to build “a new shopping mall” (93), deceptively advertised as a necessity for the benefit of the community. The narratorial voice on the surface describes a usual event, the building of a new shopping centre, and at the same time criticises the destruction of the natural world for the sake of progress, which leads to the annihilation of
wilderness in order to domesticate and acculturate it. This article focuses in particular on Malouf’s narrative strategies, which, more relevantly, emphasise the mythological power of the imagined or remembered place as a form of resistance to the devastation of the natural environment. In “the dimension of the symbolic” (99), through memory, imagination, creativity and dream, the total erasure of wilderness – in both the natural world and ourselves – cannot be fully achieved. Constantly re-imagined and re-configured in our memory, it will be forever “pushing up under the concrete” (99), and “in our head” (100), in a profound visionary and creative interconnectedness between the natural world and the human being.

'The Dimension of the Symbolic' : Environmental Issues in David Malouf's "Jacko's Reach" Jacopo Vigna-Taglianti , 2017 single work criticism
— Appears in: Le Simplegadi , November vol. 17 no. 2017; (p. 306-313)

In David Malouf’s works natural landscape often plays a crucial role: rather than being a simple narrative background, it becomes the main protagonist in his exploration of the relationship between man and nature. In my analysis of “Jacko’s Reach”, the shortest story in the Dream Stuff collection, I will focus on two different environmental concerns that emerge from a close reading of this work: the question of space and identity (and the passage from the physical landscape to the ‘dimension of the symbolic’) and the issue of territorial deprivation as a neo-colonial policy with its possible solutions.

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