Blacksoil Country single work   short story  
  • Author:agent David Malouf http://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poets/malouf-david
Issue Details: First known date: 2000... 2000 Blacksoil Country
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Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • 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. 116-130
  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon On the Edge : Thirty Modern Australian Short Stories Barry Oakley (editor), Rowville : Five Mile Press , 2005 Z1204831 2005 anthology short story extract autobiography (taught in 1 units) Rowville : Five Mile Press , 2005 pg. 167-183
  • 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. 269-280

Works about this Work

Place, Placelessness and David Malouf’s Meditation on the Dual Meaning of Possession : Is Haunting or Being Haunted Only about Expiation of Colonial Sins? Christine Texier-Vandamme , 2020 single work criticism
— Appears in: Commonwealth : Essays and Studies , vol. 42 no. 2 2020;

'This article deals with the spectrality of the narrative voice in “Blacksoil Country,” a short story from David Malouf’s collection Dream Stuff (2000) in which a dead child artificially addresses the reader, as if from beyond the grave. The interrelated issues of settlement, place and placelessness are tackled through the analysis of Malouf’s choice to focus on the lost child trope commonly found in Australian settler literature, and the resulting haunted nature of the disembodied narrative voice speaking from an unplaceable source. The effects of this narrative strategy include ventriloquisation, conflation and destabilisation.' (Publication abstract)

Place, Placelessness and David Malouf’s Meditation on the Dual Meaning of Possession : Is Haunting or Being Haunted Only about Expiation of Colonial Sins? Christine Texier-Vandamme , 2020 single work criticism
— Appears in: Commonwealth : Essays and Studies , vol. 42 no. 2 2020;

'This article deals with the spectrality of the narrative voice in “Blacksoil Country,” a short story from David Malouf’s collection Dream Stuff (2000) in which a dead child artificially addresses the reader, as if from beyond the grave. The interrelated issues of settlement, place and placelessness are tackled through the analysis of Malouf’s choice to focus on the lost child trope commonly found in Australian settler literature, and the resulting haunted nature of the disembodied narrative voice speaking from an unplaceable source. The effects of this narrative strategy include ventriloquisation, conflation and destabilisation.' (Publication abstract)

Last amended 29 May 2006 13:32:22
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