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AbstractHistoryArchive Description
'There are some things you should never speak about.
' In Francesca Rendle-Short's family, silence was golden. So to break ranks and tell stories about her peculiar family life and her mother's moral crusading should send this daughter straight to hell in a ball of smoke and flame along with all those books her mother wanted to burn.
'Set in 1970s Queensland and also contemporary times, Bite Your Tongue is an elegant mix of novel and memoir that is in turn harrowing and delightful. Can a daughter forgive her mother for making her a pawn in her conservative moral crusades? Can greater understanding reinstate love? What does a mother owe a daughter and a daughter a mother?
'Bite Your Tongue is the story of the deep bond that exists between a daughter and her mother, no matter how difficult that mother might be. It is also a story of acceptance.' (From the publisher's website.)
Notes
-
Book launched in Melbourne at Readings Carlton, 20 September 2011 and in Canberra at Electric Shadows Bookshop, 29 September 2011.
-
An autobiographical novel.
-
Dedication:For my mother, Angel
1920-2006 -
Epigraph:
'The books leapt and danced like roasted birds, their
wings ablaze with red and yellow feathers.'
-Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Works about this Work
-
y
Packing Death in Australian Literature : Ecocides and Eco-Sides
London
:
Routledge
,
2020
19932417
2020
multi chapter work
criticism
'Packing Death in Australian Literature: Ecocides and Eco-Sides addresses Australian Literature from ecocritical, animal studies, plant studies, indigenous studies, and posthumanist critical perspectives. The book’s main purpose is twofold: to bring more sustained attention to environmental, vegetal, and animal rights issues, past and present, and to do that from within the discipline of literary studies. Literary studies in Australia continue to reflect disinterest or not enough interest in critical engagements with the subjects of Australia’s oldest extant environments and other beings beside humans.
'Packing Death in Australian Literature: Ecocides and Eco-Sides foregrounds the vegetal and nonhuman animal populations and contours of Australian Literature. Critical studies relied on in Packing Death in Australian Literature: Ecocides and Eco-Sides include books by Simon C. Estok, Bill Gammage, Timothy Morton, Bruce Pascoe, Val Plumwood, Kate Rigby, John Ryan, Wendy Wheeler, Cary Wolfe, and Robert Zeller. The selected literary texts include work by Merlinda Bobis, Eric Yoshiaki Dando, Nugi Garimara, Francesca Rendle-Short, Patrick White, and Evie Wyld.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
-
Australian Tongue and Ag-gag Law
2016
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Australasian Journal of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology , no. 6 2016-2017; (p. 50-61) 'In this essay, I comment on two histories of animal farming in Australia in an ecocritical reading of several works of Australian literature: Tim Winton’s novel Shallows (1984), Susan Hawthorne’s collection of poetry, Cow (2011) and Francesca Rendle-Short’s novel Bite Your Tongue (2011). The first of those histories, the background of Shallows, refers to the whaling industry that operated in Western Australian waters up through the 1970s and the growing public awareness of that industry that eventually drove it to a halt in 1978, the year the main events of the novel take place. Cow and Bite Your Tongue, the texts that I mostly discuss, carry references to the history of industrial farming of cows in Australia, which, along with the industrial farming of other domesticated animal species, exploded after 1970 (in Australia and elsewhere in urban-industrialising countries), the same decade when Australians were beginning to rally behind animal rights activists’ opposition to whale slaughter. Today, almost half a century later, animal advocacy activists continue to raise pressing questions about animal species that are industrially farmed. They are doing so at the same time as the meat industry is attempting to restrict public access to and information about its operations. I address those questions in my reading of Hawthorne’s paean to cows and Rendle-Short’s references to the Moral Right movement in Queensland in the 1970s and attempts by its supporters to remove works of literature from school book shelves.' (Publication abstract) -
Bite Your Tongue by Francesca Rendle-Short
2015
single work
review
— Appears in: Reviews in Australian Studies , vol. 9 no. 1 2015;
— Review of Bite Your Tongue 2008 single work novel -
Memory in a Curiously Conservative Queensland
2014
single work
review
— Appears in: Australian Women’s Book Review , vol. 26 no. 1/2 2014;
— Review of Bite Your Tongue 2008 single work novel 'CAN full disclosure be fully rendered? The short answer is no. The longer, more engaging answer is that it is impossible to answer that question when the relationship with an author is embedded in one’s own experience. In fact, the measure of disclosure is indicated by the way gaps in a narrative are filled in with literary devices that hint at the emotional truth of the people in question. In this case, Francesca Rendle-Short and I share a connection in the fundamentalist Protestant history of Brisbane’s 1960s-1970s that cannot be boiled down to a single perspective.' (Author's introduction) -
Book Review : Bite Your Tongue
2014
single work
review
— Appears in: Queensland Review , June vol. 21 no. 1 2014; (p. 110-112)
— Review of Bite Your Tongue 2008 single work novel
-
Untitled
2011
single work
review
— Appears in: Bookseller + Publisher Magazine , August vol. 91 no. 2 2011; (p. 29)
— Review of Bite Your Tongue 2008 single work novel -
Daughters in a Family Minefield
2011
single work
review
— Appears in: The Canberra Times , 10 September 2011; (p. 26)
— Review of Her Father's Daughter 2011 single work autobiography ; Bite Your Tongue 2008 single work novel -
Cover Notes
2011
single work
review
— Appears in: The Sunday Age , 18 September 2011; (p. 17)
— Review of Bite Your Tongue 2008 single work novel ; Death and the Spanish Lady 2011 single work novel -
Moving Testaments to Forgiveness and Filial Love
2011
single work
review
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 24 -25 September 2011; (p. 20-21)
— Review of Surviving Maggie 2011 single work biography ; Bite Your Tongue 2008 single work novel -
Non-Fiction
2011
single work
review
— Appears in: The Courier-Mail , 15 - 16 October 2011; (p. 23)
— Review of Bite Your Tongue 2008 single work novel - y Bite Your Tongue Wollongong : 2008 Z1804123 2008 single work thesis
-
The Big L-Word
2011
single work
column
— Appears in: The Canberra Times , 24 September 2011; (p. 12-13) -
Writing in the Gaps Between : An Interview with Francesca Rendle-Short
Nigel Featherstone
(interviewer),
2011
single work
interview
— Appears in: Verity La , November 2011; -
Australian Tongue and Ag-gag Law
2016
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Australasian Journal of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology , no. 6 2016-2017; (p. 50-61) 'In this essay, I comment on two histories of animal farming in Australia in an ecocritical reading of several works of Australian literature: Tim Winton’s novel Shallows (1984), Susan Hawthorne’s collection of poetry, Cow (2011) and Francesca Rendle-Short’s novel Bite Your Tongue (2011). The first of those histories, the background of Shallows, refers to the whaling industry that operated in Western Australian waters up through the 1970s and the growing public awareness of that industry that eventually drove it to a halt in 1978, the year the main events of the novel take place. Cow and Bite Your Tongue, the texts that I mostly discuss, carry references to the history of industrial farming of cows in Australia, which, along with the industrial farming of other domesticated animal species, exploded after 1970 (in Australia and elsewhere in urban-industrialising countries), the same decade when Australians were beginning to rally behind animal rights activists’ opposition to whale slaughter. Today, almost half a century later, animal advocacy activists continue to raise pressing questions about animal species that are industrially farmed. They are doing so at the same time as the meat industry is attempting to restrict public access to and information about its operations. I address those questions in my reading of Hawthorne’s paean to cows and Rendle-Short’s references to the Moral Right movement in Queensland in the 1970s and attempts by its supporters to remove works of literature from school book shelves.' (Publication abstract) -
y
Packing Death in Australian Literature : Ecocides and Eco-Sides
London
:
Routledge
,
2020
19932417
2020
multi chapter work
criticism
'Packing Death in Australian Literature: Ecocides and Eco-Sides addresses Australian Literature from ecocritical, animal studies, plant studies, indigenous studies, and posthumanist critical perspectives. The book’s main purpose is twofold: to bring more sustained attention to environmental, vegetal, and animal rights issues, past and present, and to do that from within the discipline of literary studies. Literary studies in Australia continue to reflect disinterest or not enough interest in critical engagements with the subjects of Australia’s oldest extant environments and other beings beside humans.
'Packing Death in Australian Literature: Ecocides and Eco-Sides foregrounds the vegetal and nonhuman animal populations and contours of Australian Literature. Critical studies relied on in Packing Death in Australian Literature: Ecocides and Eco-Sides include books by Simon C. Estok, Bill Gammage, Timothy Morton, Bruce Pascoe, Val Plumwood, Kate Rigby, John Ryan, Wendy Wheeler, Cary Wolfe, and Robert Zeller. The selected literary texts include work by Merlinda Bobis, Eric Yoshiaki Dando, Nugi Garimara, Francesca Rendle-Short, Patrick White, and Evie Wyld.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
Awards
- 2011 shortlisted Colin Roderick Award
- Brisbane, Queensland,
- 1970s