Paige Gibbs adapted Cloudstreet into a radio play in 1996 for ABC Radio National.
Unit Suitable For
AC: Year 12 (English Unit 3)
Themes
Australian identity, belonging, community, faith, family, fate, fear, love, nostalgia, spirituality
General Capabilities
Critical and creative thinking, Ethical understanding, Information and communication technology, Intercultural understanding, Literacy, Personal and social
Selected in May 2003 by members of The Australian Society of Authors as their favourite Australian book.
Selected in December 2004 by the Australian public in an ABC poll as Australia's fifth favourite book.
'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)
'The notion of interiority in Australian literature can be thought of in two main ways: as a physical, geographical location, such as the outback, or as a subjective notion of what constitutes our identity. Examining a range of representative examples, this chapter examines the way in which Australian fiction has explored, transgressed, and questioned the overlap of these two metaphors of interiority. For authors like Patrick White and Tim Winton, for instance, these liminal moments are often presented as mystical experiences, whereas novels like Kate Grenville’s Joan Makes History or Kim Scott’s Benang explore their colonial and political dimensions. The common intersection for all these narratives lies in their shared ethical confrontation between self and other, internal and external, a contested line that challenges readers of Australian fiction to rethink the borders of their own interiority.'
Source: Abstract
'The somatic effects of empire can be found in Tim Winton’s “pneumatic materialism”, an aesthetic preoccupation in his novels with moments of anoxia, or the deprivation of oxygen to the brain. This essay will consider how Winton's novel engage with pneumatic materialism in response to questions of uneven development traditionally associated with the Global South, thereby disrupting clear South–North distinctions. By blurring his concerns across the North–South divide, Winton shows a willingness to think of empire as a series of relations that are not bound by national or territorial borders so much as by substances in the air. He does this, I argue, in his use of the breath.' (Publication abstract)
'The consolidation of the myths produced by Gallipoli suffused much of Australian public culture in the decades following the end of the First World War, producing models of masculinity, community and nationhood that became inscribed as cultural norms. It is these very norms that Winton's notion of the potential "new tribalism" of Australian community seeks to disrupt, especially by way of Cloudstreet's representation of family.' (Source: Article.)