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y separately published work icon Harland's Half Acre single work   novel  
  • Author:agent David Malouf http://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poets/malouf-david
Issue Details: First known date: 1984... 1984 Harland's Half Acre
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Born on a poor dairy farm in Queensland, Frank Harland's life is centred on his great artistic gift, his passionate love for his father and four brothers and his need to repossess, through a patch of land, his family's past. The story spans Frank's life; from before the First World War, through years as a swaggie in the Great Depression and Brisbane in the forties, to his retirement to a patch of Australian scrub where he at last takes possession of his dream. Solitude and society, possession and dispossession, the obsessive and often violent claims of family life and love, illuminate the imagination of the artist and the larger world of events. This is an ambitious novel, presented simply and poetically; the narrative is absorbing, full of incident, and peopled with characters of formidable humour and power.'

Source: Publisher's blurb (Vintage reprint).

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

    • New York (City), New York (State),
      c
      United States of America (USA),
      c
      Americas,
      :
      Knopf ,
      1984 .
      image of person or book cover 4784021341143887856.jpg
      This image has been sourced from online
      Extent: 230p.
      Note/s:
      • 1st American ed.
      • A Borzoi Book.
      ISBN: 0394539192
    • Ringwood, Ringwood - Croydon - Kilsyth area, Melbourne - East, Melbourne, Victoria,: Penguin , 1985 .
      image of person or book cover 2229064033341264726.jpg
      This image has been sourced from online
      Extent: 230p.
      Reprinted: 1988
      ISBN: 0140074694
    • Oxford, Oxfordshire,
      c
      England,
      c
      c
      United Kingdom (UK),
      c
      Western Europe, Europe,
      :
      Isis ,
      1985 .
      Extent: vi, 372 p.p.
      Description: illus., map
      ISBN: 1850890587
    • London,
      c
      England,
      c
      c
      United Kingdom (UK),
      c
      Western Europe, Europe,
      :
      Chatto and Windus ,
      1993 .
      Extent: 230p.
      Edition info: Collected ed.
      Description: illus., map
      ISBN: 0701161183
    • New York (City), New York (State),
      c
      United States of America (USA),
      c
      Americas,
      :
      Vintage ,
      1997 .
      Extent: 230p.
      ISBN: 0679776478, 0394539192
    • London,
      c
      England,
      c
      c
      United Kingdom (UK),
      c
      Western Europe, Europe,
      :
      Vintage ,
      1999 .
      image of person or book cover 4798403216676466527.jpg
      Image courtesy of publisher's website.
      Extent: 230p.
      ISBN: 0099273837
Alternative title: Harland et son domaine
Language: French
    • Paris,
      c
      France,
      c
      Western Europe, Europe,
      :
      Albin Michel ,
      1986 .
      image of person or book cover 2528921025333276684.jpg
      This image has been sourced from online
      Extent: 279p.
      Description: illus., map
      ISBN: 2226025928

Other Formats

  • Also braille, sound recording.

Works about this Work

A Unique and Necessary Form David Malouf , 2018 single work essay
— Appears in: Westerly , November vol. 63 no. 2 2018; (p. 10-15)

'Story-telling, the pleasure of sitting in close company and listening to a story, allowing oneself to float free in the moment and enter, both in the senses and in imagination, into the story's events so that the story becomes our own, must be one of the oldest and earliest of our pleasures - a function of that uniquely human faculty in us, the capacity to step beyond the actual into the possible.' (Introduction)

Camera, Colony, Künstlerroman : Photography in Three Australian Novels Lucy Van , 2018 single work criticism
— Appears in: Journal of Australian Studies , vol. 42 no. 1 2018; (p. 116-130)
"Reclaiming the Rubbish" : Outcasts, Transformation and the Topos of the Painter/Seer in the Work of Patrick White and David Malouf Michael Ackland , 2016 single work criticism
— Appears in: Le Simplegadi , no. 16 2016; (p. 27-36)

Settled by white convicts and often by people with few prospects in the Old World, Australia was sometimes thought of negatively as a dumping ground of miscreants and ne’er-do-wells. This paper traces how, post-war, this perception was challenged in the fiction of Patrick White and David Malouf, which depicts local versions of the outcast artist in actual rubbish dumps and the creative, regenerative transformations that can occur there.

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History As ‘Precarious Gift’ : Harland’s Half-Acre and The Great World As Malouf’s Not-So-Historical Novels Nicholas Birns , 2014 single work criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , vol. 14 no. 2 2014;
'Harland’s Half-Acre (1985) and The Great World (1991) were composed at a time of increasing worldwide interest in the historical novel, and both works do have potentially historical settings, yet Malouf is more interested in a lyrical treatment of history, which will underscore the risks, the precariousness, of the past rather than just honoring or revering it. These novels, in their affirmation of lived provisionality, are finally not-so-historical.' (Publication abstract)
Closure, Completion and Memory in Harland's Half Acre : Phil's Story Carolyn Masel , 2014 single work criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , vol. 14 no. 2 2014;
'Most of the excellent critical work on this novel deals with the topic that Malouf has identified as its central issue. Frank Harland’s original plan is to buy back his family’s land, lost through gambling and general carelessness, using the proceeds of the sale of his paintings. His thinking has to be radically altered after the death of his nephew and heir. Possession, he comes to realise, is an imaginative thing rather than a physical thing. This essay does not repeat or summarise previous critical contributions, which trace conceptions of non-Indigenous ownership all the way from terra nullius to the ethical ambitions of whiteness studies. Instead, focusing solely on Phil’s story, it deals with the construction and function of memory in the work and on the building of an emotional climax close to its end. It includes discussion of characters’ particular memories, the creation of verbal memories for the reader, and the use of memory to intensify emotion at strategic points of the novel, especially the climax.' (Publication abstract)
[Review] Harland's Half Acre Faye Davis , 1985 single work review
— Appears in: Fremantle Arts Centre Broadsheet , September - October vol. 4 no. 5 1985; (p. 2-3)

— Review of Harland's Half Acre David Malouf , 1984 single work novel
Revisiting Malouf's Michelangelo Moment Geordie Williamson , 2013 single work review
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 16-17 February 2013; (p. 18-19)

— Review of Harland's Half Acre David Malouf , 1984 single work novel
[Review] The Bodysurfers Brian Edwards , 1985 single work review
— Appears in: Landfall , June vol. 39 no. 2 1985; (p. 213-223)

— Review of Fly Away Peter David Malouf , 1982 single work novella ; The Bodysurfers Robert Drewe , 1983 selected work short story ; An Item from the Late News Thea Astley , 1982 single work novel ; The Cure Peter Kocan , 1983 single work novel ; White Stag of Exile Thomas Shapcott , 1984 single work novel ; The State of the Art : The Mood of Contemporary Australia in Short Stories 1983 anthology short story ; Kewpie Doll Barbara Hanrahan , 1984 single work novel ; The Bellarmine Jug : A Novel Nicholas Hasluck , 1984 single work novel ; Harland's Half Acre David Malouf , 1984 single work novel ; Woman in a Lampshade Elizabeth Jolley , 1983 selected work short story ; Miss Peabody's Inheritance Elizabeth Jolley , 1983 single work novel
[Review] Harland's Half Acre Phoebe-Lou Adams , 1984 single work review
— Appears in: Atlantic , October no. 254 1984; (p. 126)

— Review of Harland's Half Acre David Malouf , 1984 single work novel
[Review] Harland's Half Acre S. Bann , 1984 single work review
— Appears in: London Review of Books , vol. 6 no. 12 1984; (p. 18-19)

— Review of Harland's Half Acre David Malouf , 1984 single work novel
Ahasverus on the Walkabout : The Motif of the Wandering Jew in Contemporary Australian Fiction Gloria Gebhardt , 2002 single work criticism
— Appears in: Antipodes , June vol. 16 no. 1 2002; (p. 11-16)
My Life as a Book Robert Holden , 2005 single work criticism
— Appears in: Crackpots, Ratbags and Rebels : A Swag of Aussie Eccentrics 2005; (p. 195-209)
Holden looks at a selection of Australian eccentrics who have inspired literary characterisation.
y separately published work icon The Transformation of Political Identity from Commonwealth through Postcolonial Literature : The Cases of Nadine Gordimer, David Malouf and Michael Ondaatje Lamia Tayeb , Lewiston : Edwin Mellen Press , 2006 Z1411707 2006 single work criticism
An Imaginative Life : David Malouf Interviewed by Lee Spinks Lee Spinks (interviewer), 2009 single work interview
— Appears in: The Journal of Commonwealth Literature , vol. 44 no. 2 2009; (p. 5-14)
'An Imaginative Life: An Interview with David Malouf' presents a wide-ranging discussion of a number of Malouf's major works. Commencing with a consideration of Malouf's personal and artistic beginnings, the interview explores his own sense of his position as an Australian (and a regional Australian) writer, the thematic and stylistic development of his craft as a writer of prose, the development of his distinctive novelistic voice, the place of mythology and historical memory in his fiction, his sense of the relationship between landscape and language and the complex constitution of the character of the Australian settler located as it is between a residual fidelity to the Old World and its presence in a new and other place.
Homoeroticism in David Malouf's Fiction Xavier Pons , 2009 single work criticism
— Appears in: Messengers of Eros : Representations of Sex in Australian Writing 2009; (p. 271-292)

'David Malouf is hardly a gay icon. Although he has never kept his homosexuality a secret, neither has he flaunted it, either in his life or in his writings. Where the latter are concerned, there is no doubt that Malouf doesn't want to be pigeonholed, that he rejects restrictive levels that would do an injustice to his wide-ranging preoccupations and his considerable appeal to all manner of readers.' (p. 271)

Last amended 9 May 2014 11:16:04
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  • Bribie Island, Caboolture area, Brisbane Outer North, Brisbane, Queensland,
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