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AustLit

University of Notre Dame
WA

Works Taught at This Institution

form y separately published work icon The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert Stephan Elliott , ( dir. Stephan Elliott ) Australia : Latent Image Productions Specific Films , 1994 Z367706 1994 single work film/TV humour satire (taught in 8 units) 'Tick' Belrose, a Sydney drag queen, accepts his ex-wife's invitation to bring his stage show to the outback. Felicia, a younger drag queen, and the grieving Bernadette. They set out for Alice Springs in a second-hand bus that they name 'Priscilla, Queen of the Desert'. the journey takes them to Broken Hill, Coober Pedy and are rescued by an open-minded mechanic when Priscilla breaks down in the desert. In Alice Springs, Tick meets the young son he barely knows and the three climb Kings Canyon together in full drag, before making their debut at the Alice Springs casino.
y separately published work icon Antipodes : Stories David Malouf , London : Chatto and Windus , 1985 Z428468 1985 selected work short story (taught in 1 units)

'Antipodes - stories which pinpoint the contrast between the old world and the new, between youth and age, love and hatred and even life and death itself...'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

y separately published work icon The Arrival Shaun Tan , Shaun Tan (illustrator), South Melbourne : Lothian , 2006 Z1285263 2006 single work graphic novel children's (taught in 16 units)

"The Arrival is a migrant story told as a series of wordless images that might seem to come from a long forgotten time. A man leaves his wife and child in an impoverished town, seeking better prospects in an unknown country on the other side of a vast ocean. He eventually finds himself in a bewildering city of foreign customs, peculiar animals, curious floating objects and indecipherable languages. With nothing more than a suitcase and a handful of currency, the immigrant must find a place to live, food to eat and some kind of gainful employment. He is helped along the way by sympathetic strangers, each carrying their own unspoken history: stories of struggle and survival in a world of incomprehensible violence, upheaval and hope." (Source: Shaun Tan website)

y separately published work icon Behind the Moon Hsu-Ming Teo , Crows Nest : Allen and Unwin , 2005 Z1201374 2005 single work novel (taught in 8 units)

'Justin Cheong, Tien Ho and Nigel Gibbo' Gibson have been best friends since school in a world divided along ethnic lines into skips, wogs and slopes. Together they've survived a suburban tragedy, compulsory karaoke nights and Justin's mother's obsession with clean toilets. They thought they would always be there for each other but they hadn't counted on the effects of jealousy, betrayal, and their desire to escape themselves.

'Ho Ly-Linh, Tien's mother, wasn't around for much of Tien's childhood. Left behind in a rapidly changing Vietnam, she risked everything to follow her family to Australia. Having spent so much of this dangerous journey alone, she is ready now to find love. On Saturday, 6 September 1997 they all meet at the Cheongs' house for the first time in years because Princess Diana is dead and their mothers have decided to hold a Dead Diana Dinner to watch the funeral on television. Nobody realises just how explosive this dinner will be, or how complicated life is going to get.

'This is a story of three families' discovery of the meaning of love and friendship.' [Source: publisher's website]

y separately published work icon Bliss Peter Carey , St Lucia : University of Queensland Press , 1981 8407782 1981 single work novel (taught in 11 units)

'For thirty-nine years Harry Joy has been the quintessential good guy. But one morning Harry has a heart attack on his suburban front lawn, and, for the space of nine minutes, he becomes a dead guy. And although he is resuscitated, he will never be the same. For, as Peter Carey makes abundantly clear in this darkly funny novel, death is sometimes a necessary prelude to real life.' (From the author's website.)

y separately published work icon Carpentaria Alexis Wright , Artarmon : Giramondo Publishing , 2006 Z1184902 2006 single work novel (taught in 47 units) Carpentaria's portrait of life in the precariously settled coastal town of Desperance centres on the powerful Phantom family, whose members are the leaders of the Pricklebush people, and their battles with old Joseph Midnight's tearaway Eastend mob on the one hand, and the white officials of Uptown and the neighbouring Gurfurrit mine on the other. Wright's storytelling is operatic and surreal: a blend of myth and scripture, politics and farce. The novel is populated by extraordinary characters - Elias Smith the outcast saviour, the religious zealot Mozzie Fishman, leader of the holy Aboriginal pilgrimage, the murderous mayor Stan Bruiser, the ever-vigilant Captain Nicoli Finn, the activist and prodigal son Will Phantom, and above all, Angel Day the queen of the rubbish-dump, and her sea-faring husband Normal Phantom, the fish-embalming king of time - figures that stand like giants in this storm-swept world. (Backcover)
form y separately published work icon The Castle Rob Sitch , Santo Cilauro , Tom Gleisner , Jane Kennedy , ( dir. Rob Sitch ) Australia : Working Dog Productions , 1997 Z1542696 1997 single work film/TV humour (taught in 4 units)

The Kerrigan family's home is situated right beside one of Melbourne's airports, but they don't mind. In fact, they love living there. When the government and airport authorities announce that they are buying up all the properties in the neighbourhood in order to make way for airport extensions, Darryl decides to defend his right to live in his beloved home. The Castle is the story of how they take on the authorities, all the way to the High Court.

y separately published work icon The Children's Bach Helen Garner , Melbourne : McPhee Gribble , 1984 Z371975 1984 single work novella (taught in 6 units)

Athena and Dexter lead an enclosed family life, innocent of fashion and bound towards a disturbed child. Their comfortable rut is disrupted by the arrival of Elizabeth, a tough nut from Dexter's past. With her three charming, chaotic hangers-on, she draws the couple out into a world whose casual egotism they had barely dreamed of. How can they get home again? (Source: publisher's website)

form y separately published work icon Cloudstreet Tim Winton , Ellen Fontana , ( dir. Matt Saville ) Australia : Screentime Showtime , 2011 Z1582485 2011 series - publisher film/TV (taught in 1 units) 'The highly anticipated three part mini-series of the modern Australian classic novel. Set in and around Perth during the 40s and 50s, Cloudstreet tells the story of two rural families who suffer separate catastrophes and flee to the city to pick up the pieces of their lives and start again. Brought together in the same house at No.1 Cloud Street, the Lambs and the Pickles' share numerous tragedies and triumphs that draw them closer together, until the roof over their heads becomes a home for their hearts.' (Showtime website)
y separately published work icon Cloudstreet Nick Enright , Justin Monjo , 1998 Sydney Perth : Currency Press Company B Belvoir Black Swan Theatre Company , 1999 Z396116 1998 single work drama (taught in 2 units) Tim Winton's quintessential Australian yarn of the spirited child Fish, his family and unlikely neighbours - sharing determination, faith, pain, and laughter is a story of love and the bonds that tie us to our sense of place. Hailed as one of the most acclaimed theatrical events of the decade, it is a five hour epic. (Source: Libraries Australia)
y separately published work icon Coonardoo : The Well in the Shadow Katharine Susannah Prichard , 1928 Z1081769 1928 single work novel (taught in 39 units) Set in North-West of Western Australia, it describes life on cattle stations and the relationship between the white owner of the station and Coonardoo, an Aboriginal woman.
y separately published work icon Cyberbile [and] Grounded Alana Valentine , 2013 5989652 2013 selected work drama (taught in 1 units)
y separately published work icon Dirt Music Tim Winton , Sydney : Picador , 2001 Z918096 2001 single work novel (taught in 15 units)

'Georgie Jutland is a mess. At forty, with her career in ruins, she finds herself stranded in White Point with a fisherman she doesn't love and two kids whose dead mother she can never replace. Her days have fallen into domestic tedium and social isolation. Her nights are a blur of vodka and pointless loitering in cyberspace. Leached of all confidence, Georgie has lost her way; she barely recognises herself.

'One morning, in the boozy pre-dawn gloom, she looks up from the computer screen to see a shadow lurking on the beach below, and a dangerous new element enters her life. Luther Fox, the local poacher. Jinx. Outcast...' (From the publisher's website.)

y separately published work icon Diving for Pearls Katherine Thomson , 1991 Sydney : Currency Press , 1992 Z369414 1991 single work drama (taught in 2 units) 'Set in Wollongong during the economic rationalism of the 1980s, Diving for Pearls remains startlingly relevant–the political decisions of that time planted the seeds of divide we continue to witness between those with opportunity, and those without.

'With the town she grew up in changing all around her, Barbara is determined to change with it. Dreaming of a way out, she sets her sights on landing a job at one of the new resorts popping up all over town. Meanwhile, her partner Den is having change forced upon him. The steelworks he’s worked at his whole life has been sold and Den must reinvent himself to survive. The arrival of Barbara’s daughter, Verge, just might be the thing that tips Barbara and Den over the edge.' 

 (Publication summary)


 
y separately published work icon Don's Party David Williamson , 1971 1971 (Manuscript version)x402002 Z1505961 1971 single work drama satire (taught in 17 units)
y separately published work icon Five Bells Gail Jones , North Sydney : Vintage Australia , 2011 Z1735512 2011 single work novel (taught in 19 units)

'On a radiant day in Sydney, four adults converge on Circular Quay, site of the iconic Opera House and the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Crowds of tourists mix with the locals, enjoying the glorious surroundings and the play of light on water.

'But each of the four carries a complicated history from elsewhere; each is haunted by past intimacies, secrets and guilt: Ellie is preoccupied by her sexual experiences as a girl, James by a tragedy for which he feels responsible, Catherine by the loss of her beloved brother in Dublin and Pei Xing by her imprisonment during China's Cultural Revolution.

'Told over the course of a single Saturday, Five Bells describes four lives which chime and resonate, sharing mysterious patterns and symbols. But it is a fifth person, a child, whose presence at the Quay haunts the day and who will overshadow everything that unfolds. By night-time, when Sydney is drenched in a rainstorm, each life has been transformed.' (From the publisher's website.)

y separately published work icon Flying in Silence Gerry Turcotte , Rose Bay : Brandl and Schlesinger , 2001 Z900112 2001 single work novel (taught in 2 units)

“Gerry Turcotte’s Flying in Silence is a book of boyhood memoirs and family secrets, yet it creates a genre all of its own. It contains an anatomy of depression and speaks of a family’s inability to cohere…it swells with compassion and a deep commitment to our life and living... musical in both its shape and function... a testament to being human.” - Australian Book Review

y separately published work icon Give Peas a Chance Morris Gleitzman , Camberwell : Puffin , 2007 Z1412589 2007 selected work children's fiction (taught in 3 units)

'Surprise your mum with a chainsaw, be a bigger star than Tom Cruise, save the world with a plate of veggies, start your new life in a taxi, rescue your family with a tomato, send your dad into a panic with a tractor, do a good deed with a paper bag on your head pack your bags for a trip to the spleen, upset your auntie with ten kilos of chocolate, swap a bomb for three ice-creams on a train . . . and lots more.' (Publication summary)

y separately published work icon The Great Shame : A Story of the Irish in the Old World and the New Thomas Keneally , Milsons Point : Random House , 1998 Z820476 1998 single work prose (taught in 1 units)

"In the nineteenth century, Ireland lost half of its population to famine, emigration to the United States and Canada, and the forced transportation of convicts to Australia. The forebears of Thomas Keneally, author of Schindler's List, were victims of that tragedy, and in The Great Shame Keneally has written an astonishing, monumental work that tells the full story of the Irish diaspora with the narrative grip and flair of a great novel. Based on unique research among little-known sources, this masterly book surveys eighty years of Irish history through the eyes of political prisoners--including Keneally's ancestors--who left Ireland in chains and eventually found glory, in one form or another, in Australia and America.

We meet William Smith O'Brien, leader of an uprising at the height of the Irish Famine, who rose from solitary confinement in Australia to become the Mandela of his age; Thomas Francis Meagher, whose escape from Australian captivity led to a glittering American career as an orator, a Union general, and governor of Montana; John Mitchel, who became a Confederate newspaper reporter, gave two of his sons to the Southern cause, was imprisoned with Jefferson Davis--and returned to Ireland to become mayor of Tipperary; and John Boyle O'Reilly, who fled a life sentence in Australia to become one of nineteenth-century America's leading literary lights.

Through the lives of many such men and women--famous and obscure, some heroes and some fools (most a little of both), all of them stubborn, acutely sensitive, and devastatingly charming--we become immersed in the Irish experience and its astonishing history. From Ireland to Canada and the United States to the bush towns of Australia, we are plunged into stories of tragedy, survival, and triumph. All are vividly portrayed in Keneally's spellbinding prose, as he reveals the enormous influence the exiled Irish have had on the English-speaking world."

-Publisher's blurb.

y separately published work icon The Harp in the South Ruth Park , 1947 Z1326724 1947 single work novel (taught in 2 units)
— Appears in: The Harp in the South Trilogy 1987;

— Appears in: Great Australian Writers : Miles Franklin, Henry Handel Richardson, Mrs Aeneas Gunn, Ruth Park 1987; (p. 513-698)

'Amid the brothels, grog shops and run-down boarding houses of inner-city Surry Hills, money is scarce and life is not easy. Crammed together within the thin walls of Twelve-and-a-Half Plymouth Street are the Darcy family: Mumma, loving and softhearted; Hughie, her drunken husband; pipe-smoking Grandma; Roie, suffering torments over her bitter-sweet first love; while her younger sister Dolour learns about life the hard way.' (Book description from publisher's website.)

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