'Late on a hot summer night in the tail end of 1965, Charlie Bucktin, a precocious and bookish boy of thirteen, is startled by an urgent knock on the window of his sleep-out. His visitor is Jasper Jones, an outcast in the regional mining town of Corrigan. Rebellious, mixed-race and solitary, Jasper is a distant figure of danger and intrigue for Charlie. So when Jasper begs for his help, Charlie eagerly steals into the night by his side, terribly afraid but desperate to impress.
'Jasper takes him through town and to his secret glade in the bush, and it's here that Charlie bears witness to Jasper's horrible discovery. With his secret like a brick in his belly, Charlie is pushed and pulled by a town closing in on itself in fear and suspicion as he locks horns with his tempestuous mother; falls nervously in love and battles to keep a lid on his zealous best friend, Jeffrey Lu.
'And in vainly attempting to restore the parts that have been shaken loose, Charlie learns to discern the truth from the myth, and why white lies creep like a curse. In the simmering summer where everything changes, Charlie learns why the truth of things is so hard to know, and even harder to hold in his heart.' (Publisher's blurb)
Jasper Jones
2014
2014
Strawberry Hills
:
Currency Press
,
2016
7441879
2014
single work
drama
'Corrigan is a town populated by barnacles: hard shells that clench themselves shut and choose not to know.'
'Charlie Bucktin is a geeky thirteen-year-old living in a country WA town in 1965. He's probably the only teenager who reads books in a town that's sport mad. His best mate Jeffrey Lu is Vietnamese, and isn't having such a good time of things either.
'Jasper Jones is an Indigenous 14 year-old that lives on the outside of town and the wrong side of the tracks. One summer night, Jasper takes Charlie to his secret glade in the bush. Charlie witnesses a terrible discovery and is suddenly embroiled in a plot with more twists and turns than any of the novels he so dearly loves.
'Barking Gecko is thrilled that talented playwright and actor Kate Mulvany will adapt Craig Silvey's multiple award-winning, best-selling novel, Jasper Jones for WA audiences.' (Production summary)
Jasper Jones
( dir. Rachel Perkins
)
Australia
:
Porchlight Films
Bunya Productions
,
2016
8368946
2016
single work
film/TV
On the night that Jasper Jones, a young Aboriginal man and social outcast, shows Charlie Bucklin the dead body of young Laura Wiseheart, Charlie's life is changed forever. Believing Jasper to be innocent, Charlie embarks on a dangerous journey to find the killer, defeating the local racists, facing the break up of his parents and falling head over heels in love as he discovers what it means to be truly courageous.
Source: Screen Australia.
'In recent years, various studies have drawn attention to a lack of Australian literature being taught in secondary classrooms in Australia, with these findings often attributed to teachers’ minimal experience of Australian texts during their senior secondary and tertiary education. This paper draws on a state-wide study of texts studied in Year 12 English and Literature classrooms in Western Australia in 2018, which revealed that Australian works, and particularly Western Australian texts, were popular inclusions for study. The externally examined English course in WA not having a prescribed text list, yet this condition of text list expansion does not necessarily ensure that a wider variety of texts will be studied in schools. This paper explores some possible explanations for this situation by referring to sites of sociability and to the work of John Guillory on canonicity and cultural capital (1993), to consider the impact of a parochial canon on Western Australian English subjects.' (Publication abstract)
Craig Silvey's Jasper Jones
Cheltenham
:
Insight Publications
,
2021
23871956
2021
single work
criticism
'The Insight Text Guide on Craig Silvey's Jasper Jones is a comprehensive and accessible guide to the novel for secondary school students of English. It provides detailed notes on context and background, genre, structure and language, as well as an analysis of each chapter. Characters and themes are covered in depth. Essay topics, guidelines on responding to a topic and a complete sample essay give students invaluable support for their own assessment tasks.'(Publication summary)
'According to the NSW K–10 English Syllabus, all students should engage with ‘texts that give insight into Aboriginal experiences in Australia’. Along with the inclusion of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Cross Curriculum Priority, this suggests that texts in English should develop deep understanding of Aboriginal cultures, experiences and perspectives. This project uses critical discourse analysis followed by content analysis, adapted from Lowe and Yunkaporta’s (2013) Cultural Analysis Matrix, to analyse representations of Aboriginal experiences and perspectives in six commonly used classroom texts to ascertain the nature and depth of the Aboriginal voices, experiences and perspectives within each text. This paper argues that texts which include Aboriginal characters and experiences through non-Aboriginal perspectives remain at risk of tokenism and/or shallow inclusion. However, texts which embody and value Aboriginal ways of knowing, doing and being demonstrate a capacity for more nuanced and genuine insights into Aboriginal experiences in Australia.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
