Thea Astley: Inventing Her Own Weather Free
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Reflections on Some Recent Australian Novels ELIZABETH WEBBY
Books and Covers: Reflections on Some Recent Australian Novels ELIZABETH WEBBY For the 2002 Miles Franklin Award, given to the best Australian novel of the year, my fellow judges and I ended up with a short list of five novels. Three happened to come from the same publishing house – Pan Macmillan Australia – and we could not help remarking that much more time and money had been spent on the production of two of the titles than on the third. These two, by leading writers Tim Winton and Richard Flanagan, were hardbacks with full colour dust jackets and superior paper stock. Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish (2001) also featured colour illustrations of the fish painted by Tasmanian convict artist W. B. Gould, the initial inspiration for the novel, at the beginning of each chapter, as well as changes in type colour to reflect the notion that Gould was writing his manuscript in whatever he could find to use as ink. The third book, Joan London’s Gilgamesh (2001), was a first novel, though by an author who had already published two prize- winning collections of short stories. It, however, was published in paperback, with a monochrome and far from eye-catching photographic cover that revealed little about the work’s content. One of the other judges – the former leading Australian publisher Hilary McPhee – was later quoted in a newspaper article on the Award, reflecting on what she described as the “under publishing” of many recent Australian novels. This in turn drew a response from the publisher of another of the short- listed novels, horrified that our reading of the novels submitted for the Miles Franklin Award might have been influenced in any way by a book’s production values. -
Download Program
Festival Guests Festival Information Sponsors Amanda Anastasi is an award-winning poet writer of the The Treehouse series and the in Residence at Melbourne University, Janet How to Book Festival Venues Major Partners Williamstown Literary whose work ranges from the introspective to BUM trilogy. Clarke Hall. willy All events held on Saturday 13 June the socio-political. Gideon Haigh has been an independent Susan Pyke teaches with the University of For detailed descriptions of sessions, David Astle is the Dictionary Guy on Letters journalist for almost 30 years. Melbourne, and her poetry, short stories and presenters and to book tickets, visit and Sunday 14 June are located at either the Williamstown Town Hall www.willylitfest.org.au or phone the ( and Numbers (SBS) and well-known crossword John Harms is a writer, publisher, broadcaster associative essays have appeared in various Festival lit compiler. and historian who appears on Offsiders (ABC) journals. Box Office on 9932 4074. or the Williamstown Library. ‘’ Kate Atkinson is an actor and one of the and runs footyalmanac.com.au Jane Rawson was formerly the Environment Book before midnight, Sunday 24 May Both are located at 104 Ferguson original founders of Actors for Refugees. & Energy Editor for news website, The Catherine Harris is an award-winning writer 2015 for special early bird pricing. Street, Williamstown. Please check 13 and 14 June 2015 fest Matt Blackwood has won multiple awards for and author of The Family Men. Conversation. She is the author of the novel, A Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists. your ticket for room details. -
The Cyclone As Trope of Apocalypse and Place in Queensland Literature
ResearchOnline@JCU This file is part of the following work: Spicer, Chrystopher J. (2018) The cyclone written into our place: the cyclone as trope of apocalypse and place in Queensland literature. PhD Thesis, James Cook University. Access to this file is available from: https://doi.org/10.25903/7pjw%2D9y76 Copyright © 2018 Chrystopher J. Spicer. The author has certified to JCU that they have made a reasonable effort to gain permission and acknowledge the owners of any third party copyright material included in this document. If you believe that this is not the case, please email [email protected] The Cyclone Written Into Our Place The cyclone as trope of apocalypse and place in Queensland literature Thesis submitted by Chrystopher J Spicer M.A. July, 2018 For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy College of Arts, Society and Education James Cook University ii Acknowledgements of the Contribution of Others I would like to thank a number of people for their help and encouragement during this research project. Firstly, I would like to thank my wife Marcella whose constant belief that I could accomplish this project, while she was learning to live with her own personal trauma at the same time, encouraged me to persevere with this thesis project when the tide of my own faith would ebb. I could not have come this far without her faith in me and her determination to journey with me on this path. I would also like to thank my supervisors, Professors Stephen Torre and Richard Landsdown, for their valuable support, constructive criticism and suggestions during the course of our work together. -
An Open Book David Malouf POETRY
LONDON BOOK FAIR 2019 UNIVERSITY OF QUEENSLAND PRESS PUBLICATION DETAILS ARE CORRECT AS OF MARCH 2019 BUT ARE SUBJECT TO CHANGE Kate McCormack Telephone +617 3365 2998 PO Box 6042 Fax +617 3365 7579 St Lucia Email [email protected] QLD 4067 Website www.uqp.com.au 1 The White Girl FICTION Tony Birch A searing new novel from leading Indigenous storyteller Tony Birch that explores the lengths we will go to in order to save the people we love. Odette Brown has lived her whole life on the fringes of a small country town. After her daughter disappeared and left her with her granddaughter Sissy to raise on her own, Odette has managed to stay under the radar of the welfare authorities who are removing fair-skinned Aboriginal children from their families. When a new policeman arrives in town, determined to enforce the law, Odette must risk everything to save Sissy and protect everything she loves. In The White Girl, Miles-Franklin-shortlisted author Tony Birch shines a spotlight on the 1960s and the devastating government policy of taking Indigenous children from their families. PRAISE FOR TONY BIRCH 'Birch evokes place and time with small details dropped in unceremoniously, and the stories are rife with social commentary. ''Well, who are we to judge?” Perhaps that is the point — Birch shows empathy so that we might find it.' Weekend Australian Tony Birch is the author of Ghost River, which won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Indigenous Writing and Blood, which was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award. -
Figuring the Sacred Geography, Spirituality and Literature
Kunapipi Volume 17 Issue 2 Article 15 1995 Figuring the Sacred Geography, Spirituality and Literature Elaine Lindsay Follow this and additional works at: https://ro.uow.edu.au/kunapipi Part of the Arts and Humanities Commons Recommended Citation Lindsay, Elaine, Figuring the Sacred Geography, Spirituality and Literature, Kunapipi, 17(2), 1995. Available at:https://ro.uow.edu.au/kunapipi/vol17/iss2/15 Research Online is the open access institutional repository for the University of Wollongong. For further information contact the UOW Library: [email protected] Figuring the Sacred Geography, Spirituality and Literature Abstract Imagine Australia. First the geography of Australia. Yes, there it is, an island centred upon a glowing desert heart. What of its population? A fringe of coastal encampments with a scattering of people across the plains and deserts. This journal article is available in Kunapipi: https://ro.uow.edu.au/kunapipi/vol17/iss2/15 60 Elaine Lindsay ELAINE LINDSAY Figuring the Sacred Geography, Spirituality and Literature Imagine Australia. First the geography of Australia. Yes, there it is, an island centred upon a glowing desert heart. What of its population? A fringe of coastal encampments with a scattering of people across the plains and deserts. Now add in the early European explorers. There they go, waving goodbye to their women in the coastal towns and snail-trailing across the map, heading inland into the mysterious emptiness, looking for water and finding desolation. Overlay this map with one which shows holy sites, as identified over the years by Christian theologians. There's God in the centre, some where around Uluru, Ayers Rock. -
Nothing Will Silence It
LeadingWriters-FinalText.x 5/2/07 9:45 AM Page 3 Nothing Will Silence It By Alex Miller I don’t know that it’s making any difference, is it? And if it is making a difference, how do we begin to quantify the differ- ence it’s making? It’s rather like prayer. How can we know? Without poetry and drama and novels and music and art we know ourselves to be poorer. We know such things as these enrich our existence. But really that’s about all we can say. We can’t really say what it all means, or how it changes anything, at least not for other people, and perhaps not even for ourselves — unless we are book reviewers, of course, and no mysteries of the human soul are hidden from us. It is a rather elusive thing really, what creative writing or music mean. And this is one of their greatest charms. They elude our reason and give us respite from its tyrannies. What is this feeling of wonder that holds us in thrall as we read W.G. Sebald’s description of the decay of the Ashbury household in Ireland? Why are we so mesmerised? We don’t know these people. They are not our neighbours or our old friends. We are not learning anything useful. And Sebald is telling someone else’s story — the greatest source for all story- tellers, of course, other people’s stories. We are listening to Sebald’s own astonishment, to his sense of the melancholy and the inexplicable meaninglessness of the lives of this stricken family of forlorn exiles. -
A World-Ecological Reading of Drought in Thea Astley's
humanities Article Dry Country, Wet City: A World-Ecological Reading of Drought in Thea Astley’s Drylands Ashley Cahillane Discipline of English, National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland; [email protected] Received: 6 January 2020; Accepted: 16 July 2020; Published: 11 August 2020 Abstract: Using a postcolonial and world-ecological framework, this article analyses the representation of water as an energy source in Thea Astley’s last and most critically acclaimed novel Drylands (1999). As environmental historians have argued, the colonial, and later capitalist, settlement of Australia, particularly the arid interior, was dependent on securing freshwater sources—a historical process that showed little regard for ecological impact or water justice until recent times. Drylands’ engagement with this history will be considered in relation to Michael Cathcart’s concept of ‘water dreaming’ (2010): the way in which water became reimagined after colonization to signify the prospect of economic growth and the consolidation of settler belonging. Drylands self-consciously incorporates predominant modes of ‘water dreaming’ into its narrative, yet resists reducing water to a passive resource. This happens on the level of both content and form: while its theme of drought-induced migration is critical of the past, present, and future social and ecological effects of the reckless extraction of freshwater, its nonlinear plot and hybrid form as a montage of short stories work to undermine the dominant anthropocentric colonial narratives that underline technocratic water cultivation. Keywords: Australian literature; world-ecology; blue humanities; world literature; ecocriticism; postcolonial ecocriticism 1. Introduction Water dictates Australia’s ecology, economy, and culture. Though surrounded by water, Australia is the world’s driest inhabited continent. -
SL Magazine Summer Edition 2017-18
–Magazine for members Summer 2017–18 Painting by numbers: Ferdinand Bauer Message Dear readers, visitors and friends, What a privilege it is to be State Librarian, responsible for one of the best loved and most important institutions in Australia. Since I began on 28 August, I have encountered nothing but enthusiasm, good will and a broad desire to see the Library continue to flourish and grow — a tribute to the three State Librarians with whom I have worked over the years, Regina Sutton, Alex Byrne and Lucy Milne. I also pay tribute to a remarkable generation of recent curators and librarians, now retired, including the likes of Paul Brunton, Alan Davies and Elizabeth Ellis. This time next year the Library will be a very different place — with more of its unique treasures on public show than ever before thanks to a great partnership between the NSW Government and our benefactors led by Michael Crouch AC, who is driving a major development of new galleries in the Mitchell wing, and John B Fairfax AO, who is behind a new learning centre being created in the same building. You can find a little more about the plans for the next phase of the Library’s history inside these pages, but I would like to mention a special event in November which draws attention to another very important aspect of the Library’s work — collaboration with scholars and scientists. For some years, the Belalberi Foundation (led by Peter Crossing AM and Sally Crossing AM) has generously supported original research into Australian natural history at the Library, and on 16 November we are launching a book and special online exhibition marking the culmination of this remarkable, long term project. -
An Analysis of Food and Its Significance in the Australian Novels of Christina Stead, P
F.O.O.D. (Fighting Order Over Disorder): An Analysis of Food and Its Significance in the Australian Novels of Christina Stead, Patrick White and Thea Astley. Jane Frugtneit A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Humanities James Cook University August 2007 ABSTRACT The purpose of this thesis is to find a correlation between food as symbol and food as necessity, as represented in selected Australian novels by Christina Stead, Patrick White and Thea Astley. Food as a springboard to a unique interpretation of the selected novels has been under-utilised in academic research. Although comparatively few novels were selected for study, on the basis of fastidiousness, they facilitated a rigorous hermeneutical approach to the interpretation of food and its inherent symbolism. The principle behind the selection of these novels lies in the complexity of the prose and how that complexity elicits the “transformative powers of food” (Muncaster 1996, 31). The thesis examines both the literal and metaphorical representations of food in the novels and relates how food is an inextricable part of ALL aspects of life, both actual and fictional. Food sustains, nourishes and, intellectually, its many components offer unique interpretative tools for textual analysis. Indeed, the overarching structure of the thesis is analogous with the processes of eating, digestion and defecation. For example, following a discussion of the inextricable link between food, quest and freedom in Chapter One, which uncovers contrary attitudes towards food in the novels discussed, the thesis presents a more complex psychoanalytic theory of mental disorders related to food in Chapter Two. -
The Genesis of Thea Astley's the Multiple Effects of Rainshadow
The Genesis of Thea Astley’s The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow CHERYL TAYLOR JAMES COOK UNIVERSITY My purpose in this essay, which extends a project commenced a decade ago (Taylor 2009), is to analyse the sources of Thea Astley’s The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow, including but going beyond the list provided in the author’s ‘Acknowledgments.’ In truth, Astley’s achievement in Multiple Effects as in her other fiction far surpasses the sum of contributions that she derived from earlier writings. The mostly forgotten books that she lists as ‘[i]mpulses’ and her bequest to the Fryer Library of her newspaper sources and hand-written notes suggest that she may have welcomed a study of this novel’s genesis. The essay begins with an overview of the place of Multiple Effects in Astley’s oeuvre and the literary and political contexts for Astley’s increasing engagement with the history of Aboriginal dispossession. It then turns in detail to the novel itself and offers an excavation of the sources that inform its historical narrative. In doing this I hope to demonstrate something about Astley’s creative process: the extent and detail of her research, the ways in which her novel creatively reworks this archive, and some of the effects of that on the kind of history that Astley tells. Following the publication in 1994 of Coda, intended as the title indicates to be Astley’s last novel, the Keating Labor government awarded her a five-year Creative Fellowship of $325,000. Thus encouraged, after ‘one year of musing and two years of writing’ (Sayer 18) at Cambewarra on the NSW south coast, Astley published Multiple Effects in August 1996. -
Front Matter Antipodes Editors
Antipodes Volume 4 | Issue 1 Article 1 1990 Front Matter Antipodes Editors Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/antipodes Recommended Citation Editors, Antipodes (1990) "Front Matter," Antipodes: Vol. 4 : Iss. 1 , Article 1. Available at: https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/antipodes/vol4/iss1/1 Spring 1990 A North American Journal of Australian Literature The Publication of the American Association of Australian Literary Studies Antipodes A North American Journal of Australian Literature The Publication of the American Association of Contents Spring 1990, Vol. 4, No. 1 Australian Literary Studies POETRY EDITOR 12 Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Two Fruits Robert Ross 17 R. A. Simpson, Wattle Flowering Edward A. Clark Center for Australian Studies 21 Dennis Haskell, The Mitchell Freeway University of Texas at Austin 28 Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Paradise Regained 33 Stephen Edgar, Reef MANAGING EDITOR Marian Arkin 36 Connie Barber, Kore City University of New York 54 Jan Owen, Metro, Fern FICTION EDITOR 58 Stephen Edgar, How the World is Made Ray Willbanks 61 Kevin Hart, That Bad Summer Memphis State University 63 Mark O’Connor, In the Gardiner Valley POETRY EDITOR Paul Kane FICTION Yale University BOOK REVIEW EDITOR 9 David Malouf, from The Great World Phyllis Fahrie Edelson 23 Rome Warren, Aviary Pace University 25 Thea Astley, from Reaching Tin River EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD 37 Paul Wenz, Little Murphy Ian Adam, University of Calgary; Jack 55 Ian Kennedy Williams, Lily Healy, Carleton University; Herbert C. 59 Gillian Mears, Afterthought Jaffa, New York University; Joseph Jones, University of Texas at Austin; Glen Love, University of Oregon; Robert McDowell, ESSAYS University of Texas at Arlington; Daniel Walden, Pennsylvania State University. -
Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} a Descant for Gossips by Thea Astley a Descant for Gossips
Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} A Descant for Gossips by Thea Astley A Descant for Gossips. The world’s #1 eTextbook reader for students. VitalSource is the leading provider of online textbooks and course materials. More than 15 million users have used our Bookshelf platform over the past year to improve their learning experience and outcomes. With anytime, anywhere access and built-in tools like highlighters, flashcards, and study groups, it’s easy to see why so many students are going digital with Bookshelf. titles available from more than 1,000 publishers. customer reviews with an average rating of 9.5. digital pages viewed over the past 12 months. institutions using Bookshelf across 241 countries. A Descant for Gossips by Thea Astley and Publisher University of Queensland Press. Save up to 80% by choosing the eTextbook option for ISBN: 9780702254987, 0702254983. The print version of this textbook is ISBN: 9780702253553, 0702253553. A Descant for Gossips by Thea Astley and Publisher University of Queensland Press. Save up to 80% by choosing the eTextbook option for ISBN: 9780702254987, 0702254983. The print version of this textbook is ISBN: 9780702253553, 0702253553. ISBN 13: 9781459696884. A stylish reissue of one of Thea Astley's finest early novels In this classic story of small - town life, two schoolteachers are drawn to each other by their concern for a lonely young girl. For as long as Vinny Lalor could remember, she had been on the fringe of things - in her family and at school. But as the final term of the year progresses, rumour and malice mount against Vinny and her two teachers, sweeping them towards scandal and, for one of them, disaster.