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Image courtesy of publisher's website.
y separately published work icon Three Dog Night single work   novel  
Issue Details: First known date: 2003... 2003 Three Dog Night
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Is it possible to be too much in love? After ten years in London, Martin Blackman returns to Adelaide with his wife and fellow psychiatrist Lucy, blissfully happy. But then he introduces her to his old friend Felix, once a brilliant surgeon, now barred from practising and changed beyond recognition. In the complex triangle that develops, Martin must decide just how far he is prepared to go for Felix. So begins the darkest of journeys for all three of them...' (Publication summary)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

    • Camberwell, Camberwell - Kew area, Melbourne - Inner South, Melbourne, Victoria,: Viking , 2003 .
      image of person or book cover 2331635245020702007.jpg
      Image courtesy of publisher's website.
      Extent: 341p.
      ISBN: 0670893986
    • Camberwell, Camberwell - Kew area, Melbourne - Inner South, Melbourne, Victoria,: Penguin , 2004 .
      image of person or book cover 6094828920390351414.jpg
      Image courtesy of publisher's website.
      Extent: 341p.p.
      ISBN: 9780140281033, 0140281037
Alternative title: Nacht für drei Hunde Roman
Language: German
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  • Also sound recording.
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Related Works

Three Dog Night Petra Kalive , 2008 single work drama '"Three Dog Night", questions the philosophical challenge of learning how to die and Australia's conflicted multi-culture. It is an ironic, restless and at times confronting work about the fathomless human capacity for self-deception; about the means we invent to hide our true feelings. This modern day tragedy explores the underlying impulses that shape human behaviour via an Aboriginal Dreaming. Indigenous spirituality and storytelling are intrinsic to this story's exploration of the clinical conviction that compassion is the means to liberation. Beginning in the Adelaide Hills, Three Dog Night journeys to the vast expanse of the Australian outback and takes us deep into the desert of the human soul.' Source: www.fortyfivedownstairs.com (Sighted 16/05/2008).
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Works about this Work

Representations of Agreement-Making in Australian Post-Mabo Fiction Kieran Dolin , 2024 single work criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , 4 November vol. 23 no. 2 2024;

'It has been widely argued that a ‘culture of agreement making’ as an alternative to litigation in native title and other areas of political and legal activity emerged in Australia in the early 2000s (Langton and Palmer). This paper explores the ways in which this development has been taken up in post-Mabo fiction. It begins by surveying the debates around the possibilities and limitations of current frameworks of agreement-making, especially their ability to deliver “equitable outcomes for Indigenous parties” (Langton and Palmer 1), and the endemic inequality produced by settler colonialism. It then examines four novels which include agreements between white and Aboriginal characters in the light of these debates: Peter Goldsworthy’s Three Dog Night (2003), Jessica White’s Entitlement (2012), Melissa Lucashenko’s Mullumbimby (2013) and Kim Scott’s Taboo (2017). Three Dog Night highlights the politics of cross-cultural negotiation in a narrative marked by transgressive desire and the blurring of normative boundaries. In Entitlement an imaginative revisioning of the process of bargaining reverses the usual power imbalance between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal characters such that the former secure their ‘entitlements,’ making visible the presence of inequity in the contractual scene. Mullumbimby explores the conflict generated by native title litigation in Aboriginal communities, but also explores modes of resolving or pre-empting such discord through agreement. Taboo displaces a settler Australian desire for ‘reconciliation’ with a Noongar emphasis on ‘reconstitution’ (109), tracing the emergence of a tentative agreement-making project within a context of incremental acknowledgments of the traumatic effects of modern repetitions of colonial violence. In all four narratives a residue of unresolved conflict suggests a cautious, critical engagement with the ‘culture of agreement-making.’' (Publication abstract)
Mabo, History, Sovereignty : the Contemporary Postcolonial Novel Geoff Rodoreda , 2023 single work criticism
— Appears in: The Cambridge History of the Australian Novel 2023;
Reading Mabo in Peter Goldsworthy’s Three Dog Night Geoff Rodoreda , 2016 single work criticism
— Appears in: Journal of the European Association for Studies on Australia , vol. 7 no. 2 2016; (p. 15-29) 'This essay offers an analysis and interpretation of Peter Goldsworthy’s Three Dog Night (2003) as post-Mabo fiction. In doing so its broader aim is to expand the definition of post-Mabo fiction and to argue that no single historical event in recent decades has transformed the Australian literary imaginary more than the High Court’s Mabo decision of 1992. I concede that Goldsworthy’s text does not directly thematise the Mabo decision or native title. But in the portrayal of characters’ everyday conversations, their discussions about art, history and the land, the text engages with post-Mabo discourses, that is to say, with the recognition of indigenous people’s presence in the land, in history, and in political and social affairs, as opposed to their absence. Scholars in various fields of study—history, law, geography, film—have acknowledged the broad influence of Mabo in cultural production; literary scholars have too, though less so by way of close readings of specific texts. The examination of Three Dog Night, offered here, suggests Mabo’s impact on fiction writing is more widespread and more sustained than generally considered.' (Publication abstract)
Metaphysician: Trying to Read Peter Goldsworthy's Prescription Noel Henricksen , 2011 single work criticism
— Appears in: Journal of Commonwealth Literature , June vol. 46 no. 2 2011; (p. 257-273) 'As a medical practitioner, Peter Goldsworthy has been confronted, all too frequently, with human suffering, morbidity and mortality: he wrestles with their existential meaning in his poetry, essays and stories. Death, in Goldsworthy's works, is ubiquitous: it becomes an engine for tension between belief and scepticism, for contention between the legacy of his childhood Methodism and his professional grounding in scientific method. Goldsworthy describes incidents and presents arguments which explore the feasibility that we are not ephemeral but potentially eternal: séances and hoped-for hauntings; near-death experiences ... explained physiologically; cloned Tasmanian tigers, and a doctor's self-insemination with the DNA of Jesus; God-centred science fiction, and a convincing postulate for resurrection expressed in the language of mathematics and quantum mechanics. Detached and irreverent, Goldsworthy dissects and analyses, but avoids circumscription or dogmatism. He desires, at best, some proof that there is a dimension beyond the physical; he feels some sadness that a scientific mind is deprived of a certainty of the metaphysical; and he expresses hope that "perhaps, just perhaps ..."' (Author's abstract).
The Wide Brown Land : Literary Readings of Space and the Australian Continent Anthony J. Hassall , 2007 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australia : Making Space Meaningful 2007; (p. 45-53) 'In his 1987 poem "Louvres" Les Murray speaks of journeys to 'the three quarters of our continent/set aside for mystic poetry" (2002, 239), a very different reading of Australia's inner space to A.D. Hope's 1939 vision of it as '[t]he Arabian desert of the human mind" (1966, 13) In this paper I review the opposed, contradictory ways in which the inner space of Australia has been perceived by Australian writers, and note changes in those literary perceptions, especially in the last fifty years. In that time what was routinely categerised, by Patrick White among others, as the "Dead heart" (1974, 94) - the disappointing desert encountered by nineteenth=century European explorers looking for another America -has been re-mythologised as the "Red Centre," the symbolic, living heart of the continent. What Barcroft Boake's 1897 poem hauntingly portrayed as out where the dead men lie" (140,-2) is now more commonly imagined as a site of spiritual exploration and psychic renewal, a place where Aboriginal identification with the land is respected and even shared. This change was powerfully symbolised in 1985 by the return to the traditional Anangu owners of the title deeds to the renamed Uluru, the great stone sited at the centre of the continent; but while this re-mythologising has been increasingly influential in literary readings, older, more negative constructions of that space as hostile and sterile have persisted, so that contradictory attitudes towards the inner space of Australia continue to be expressed. In reviewing a selection of those readings, I am conscious that they both distort and influence broader cultural perceptions. I am also aware that literary reconstructions of the past reflect both the attitudes of the time depicted and the current attitudes of the writer, and that separating the two is seldom simple. Finally, I am conscious of the connections between literary readings and those in art and film of the kind documented by Roslynn Hanes in her 1998 study Seeking the Centre: the Australian Desert in Literature, Art and Film, and those in television and advertising. I have however, with the exception of the Postscript, limited my paper to literary readings, with an emphasis on works published since Haynes's study.' (Author's abstract p. 45)
Deep and Meaningful Journey to Oblivion Helen Elliott , 2003 single work review
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 27-28 September 2003; (p. 7)
— Review of Three Dog Night Peter Goldsworthy , 2003 single work novel
Good Medicine Katharine England , 2003 single work review
— Appears in: The Advertiser , 4 October 2003; (p. 11)
— Review of Three Dog Night Peter Goldsworthy , 2003 single work novel
When Cultures Collide Nicola Walker , 2003 single work review
— Appears in: The Age , 4 October 2003; (p. 5)
— Review of Three Dog Night Peter Goldsworthy , 2003 single work novel
A Better Class of Self-Deception James Ley , 2003 single work review
— Appears in: The Sydney Morning Herald , 18-19 October 2003; (p. 15)
— Review of Three Dog Night Peter Goldsworthy , 2003 single work novel
Corrosive Passion Giselle Bastin , 2003 single work review
— Appears in: The Adelaide Review , November no. 242 2003; (p. 24)
— Review of Three Dog Night Peter Goldsworthy , 2003 single work novel
Novel Lifestyle Chris Brice , 2003 single work column
— Appears in: The Advertiser , 20 September 2003; (p. 15)
Cooking from an Old Recipe David Gilchrist , 2003 single work column
— Appears in: The Canberra Times , 27 September 2003; (p. 3a)
Literary Names Give Award Fresh Life James Hall , 2004 single work column
— Appears in: The Australian , 30 April 2004; (p. 15)
The Courier-Mail Book of the Year Rosemary Sorensen , 2004 single work column
— Appears in: The Courier-Mail , 11 September 2004; (p. 10)
Human Stories Phil Brown , 2005 single work column
— Appears in: Brisbane News , 2 - 8 March no. 528 2005; (p. 27)
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Awards

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Last amended 13 Jul 2021 12:46:49
Subjects:
Settings:
  • Adelaide Hills, Adelaide, South Australia,
  • Adelaide City, Adelaide, South Australia,
  • Southern Northern Territory, Northern Territory,
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