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'...always remember where you're from... To the Aboriginal Families of Mundra this saying brings either comfort or pain. To Nana Vida it is what binds the generations. To the unwilling savant Archie Corella it portends a fate too cruel to name. For Sophie Salte, whose woman's body and child's mind make her easy prey, nothing matters while her sister Murilla is there to watch over her.
For Murilla, fierce protector and unlikely friend to Caroline Drysdale, wife of the town patriarch, what matters is survival. In a town with a history of vigilante raids, missing persons and unsolved murders, survival can be all that matters'. (Source: back cover, 2002 edition)
Notes
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Dedication: For my grandmother, Vera, and my mother, May.
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Other Formats
- Also sound recording.
- Also e-book.
Works about this Work
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‘A Place with Its Own Shying’ : Countering the Aboriginal Uncanny in Vivienne Cleven’s Her Sister’s Eye
2018
single work
criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , vol. 17 no. 2 2018;'In their introduction to the book Phantom Past, Indigenous Presence, Colleen E. Boyd and Coll Thrush recall the recurring nature of the ‘Indian burial ground’ (vii) cliché in popular culture. As Boyd and Thrush see it, the Aboriginal burial ground as the rationale for a piece of land being uncanny or haunted has become ‘a tried-and-true element of the cultural industry’ (vii). Boyd and Thrush argue that possessed, sacred Aboriginal territory or the ‘Indian uncanny’ (ix) remains one of the most common explanations for the supernatural attributes of a house or other physical site in texts produced in ‘settler colonies’ (Ashcroft 133) such as Australia, Canada, and the United States, ‘[w]hether . . . the haunted house down the dirt lane, the spectral woods behind the subdivision or the seemingly cursed stretch of highway up the canyon’ (Boyd vii).' (Introduction)
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Con-Juring the Phantom : Spectral Memories
2010
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Darkness Subverted : Aboriginal Gothic in Black Australian Literature and Film 2010; (p. 116-146) -
Introduction : Resistance to the Un-Australian
2010
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Darkness Subverted : Aboriginal Gothic in Black Australian Literature and Film 2010; (p. 1-10) 'The Australian mind seems to be obsessed with the invocation of its 'un-national' apart from newspaper headlines, advertisements on television, or in signs tacked to lamp-posts in suburban Sydney, even the Macquarie Dictionary shows a preoccupation with the 'un-Australian'. Having introduced the lemma only as recently as 2001 in their Federation edition, the lexicographers already updated it in the subsequent 2005 edition by adding a fourth entry to account for the increased use of the word in the popular domain:' violating a pattern of conduct, behaviour, etc., which, it is implied by the user of the term, is one embraced by Australians'. Despite this zeal for determining the' un-national', little attention has been paid to its positive counterpart, thus making it easier to exclude people on grounds of their 'un-Australianness' than to welcome a national diversity.' (Author's introduction) -
Back to the Outback
2009
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Ob-Scene Spaces in Australian Narrative : An Account of the Socio-Topographic Construction of Space in Australian Literature 2009; (p. 245-265) -
'Disappearing Memory' and the Colonial Present in Recent Indigenous Women's Writing
2008
single work
criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , Special Issue 2008; (p. 37-55) Ferrier writes that her paper: 'contextualise[s] some significantly innovative women's texts within the developing history of Indigenous women's published writing since the 1960s, notably two novels- Vivienne Cleven's Her Sister's Eye (2002) and Alexis Wright's Carpentaria (2006). It will do this by placing them within perspectives that other, mainly Indigenous, commentators have offered; by considering Indigenous people's long negotiation with racialised and sexualised stereotypes of black women; by discussing what Indigenous people and others have suggested about postcoloniality and postcolonisation as a frame used for their situation; and by showing how these narratives emerge within, against and out of a past history of colonialist and paternalist intervention ... that involves little truth or reconciliation.' (p.37)
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Rock of Dreams
2002
single work
review
— Appears in: The Advertiser , 14 December 2002; (p. 11)
— Review of Confessing the Blues 2002 single work novel ; Her Sister's Eye 2002 single work novel -
In Short
2003
single work
review
— Appears in: The Sydney Morning Herald , 4-5 January 2003; (p. 15)
— Review of Her Sister's Eye 2002 single work novel ; Black and Whiteley : Barry Dickins in Search of Brett 2002 single work biography -
Incantations of Grief and Memory
2002
single work
review
— Appears in: Australian Women's Book Review , vol. 14 no. 2 2002;
— Review of Her Sister's Eye 2002 single work novel -
[Review] Her Sister's Eye
2003
single work
review
— Appears in: Australian Feminist Studies , November vol. 18 no. 42 2003; (p. 324-326)
— Review of Her Sister's Eye 2002 single work novel -
[Review] Her Sister's Eye
2004
single work
review
— Appears in: JAS Review of Books , June no. 24 2004;
— Review of Her Sister's Eye 2002 single work novel -
Design of the Times
2003
single work
criticism
— Appears in: The Courier-Mail , 29 November 2003; (p. 7) This article discusses the proliferation of book covers, particularly fiction, that have photographs of parts of the body. -
'Disappearing Memory' and the Colonial Present in Recent Indigenous Women's Writing
2008
single work
criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , Special Issue 2008; (p. 37-55) Ferrier writes that her paper: 'contextualise[s] some significantly innovative women's texts within the developing history of Indigenous women's published writing since the 1960s, notably two novels- Vivienne Cleven's Her Sister's Eye (2002) and Alexis Wright's Carpentaria (2006). It will do this by placing them within perspectives that other, mainly Indigenous, commentators have offered; by considering Indigenous people's long negotiation with racialised and sexualised stereotypes of black women; by discussing what Indigenous people and others have suggested about postcoloniality and postcolonisation as a frame used for their situation; and by showing how these narratives emerge within, against and out of a past history of colonialist and paternalist intervention ... that involves little truth or reconciliation.' (p.37) -
Back to the Outback
2009
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Ob-Scene Spaces in Australian Narrative : An Account of the Socio-Topographic Construction of Space in Australian Literature 2009; (p. 245-265) -
Introduction : Resistance to the Un-Australian
2010
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Darkness Subverted : Aboriginal Gothic in Black Australian Literature and Film 2010; (p. 1-10) 'The Australian mind seems to be obsessed with the invocation of its 'un-national' apart from newspaper headlines, advertisements on television, or in signs tacked to lamp-posts in suburban Sydney, even the Macquarie Dictionary shows a preoccupation with the 'un-Australian'. Having introduced the lemma only as recently as 2001 in their Federation edition, the lexicographers already updated it in the subsequent 2005 edition by adding a fourth entry to account for the increased use of the word in the popular domain:' violating a pattern of conduct, behaviour, etc., which, it is implied by the user of the term, is one embraced by Australians'. Despite this zeal for determining the' un-national', little attention has been paid to its positive counterpart, thus making it easier to exclude people on grounds of their 'un-Australianness' than to welcome a national diversity.' (Author's introduction) -
Con-Juring the Phantom : Spectral Memories
2010
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Darkness Subverted : Aboriginal Gothic in Black Australian Literature and Film 2010; (p. 116-146)
Awards
- 2006 joint winner Australian Centre Literary Awards — The Kate Challis RAKA Award — Creative Prose Awarded jointly to Cleven's two novels 'Bitin' Back' and 'Her Sister's Eye'.
- 2004 winner Victorian Premier's Literary Awards — Prize for Indigenous Writing
- 2003 shortlisted One Book One Brisbane