Australian Literature & "Place"?

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Australian Literature & "Place"?

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1vombatiformes
Jan 25, 2010, 5:01 pm

Hey everyone,

I posted here a while ago, and I'm back with more questions (since you have all been so helpful in the past!)

I'm an American university student currently in the second half of my second year. I'm majoring in both English Literature & History/Political Science. Over time it's become clear to me that one of my real academic passions (does that sound a bit heavy?) is Australian literature, and in the absence of any real guidance in the American university system on the subject (there may be a sense of bitterness within this sentence, please disregard it) I have been mostly self-taught.

So, as you can probably imagine, my experiences comes from anthologies and independent research and recommendations from nice people in groups like this. This has been adequate so far, but recently I've become frustrated with the lack of opportunity I've had in becoming more serious about this, so in light of my recent transfer to a different university, I insisted that I be allowed to do an independent research project on Australian literature. I've gotten permission, and so I will be doing a sort of self-directed study on a topic of my choosing and writing a paper.

My goal is to eventually get to Australia and work on a Master's there, and hopefully a project like this will aid me.

ANYWAY, I've run through a list of specific interests, and it seems the one that has me most interested in "place". My advisor seems to agree, so it seems likely that that's what it will be.

So, I'm requesting any suggestions any of you might have. I really want some nice examples of novels, short stories, poetry, etc, that have a strong sense of place and environment. I see Ozlit as unique in so many ways, but one of the most interesting aspects of that to me is how such a unique environment (the landscape, the plants, the animals) affects those writing within it and on it.

Thanks in advance for whatever you come up with. I guess while I am considering and aware of the sort of canonical works (although I will certainly take strong reminders for them, and they will be strongly considered in my project) some less mainstream writers or less well-known works of more famous writers would be wonderful as well.

2tandah
Jan 25, 2010, 5:58 pm

Hi there, wow, that's a question - I'll jump in with what's to me the clearest reference of an author aligning his work to 'place' and that's most of (Saint) Tim Winton's work and the West Australian coastline. The way Tim writes about it, the distinctions between the Indian and Pacific ocean coastlines are sensually tangible. Good luck, and will be really interested to hear what other readers have to say.

3wookiebender
Jan 25, 2010, 7:57 pm

Over at one of the "100 book" group challenge threads (http://www.librarything.com/topic/80514 - messages 23 & 25 in particular) a reader has read After the Celebration which is a review of Australian fiction 1989-2007. I now know (vaguely) the terms "eco-genealogical" and "rural apocalypse". Some of the books mentioned there might be worth tracking down (as might the original book!).

Now, for my suggestions (as a reader, not as anyone who knows the first thing about literary theory):

Landscape of Farewell, Alex Miller. I was a bit indifferent to this (issues with pacing and one character being somewhat unbelievable), but would have to say that the sense of place (Queensland outback) was very good. And some nice big meaty concepts.

The Broken Shore, Peter Temple. Gritty, realistic crime. Notable (to me) for being set in an unusual Australian climate - wet, windy Victorian coast. Not a sunny day in sight. (Not for the faint-hearted, it is quite a brutal book. My cup of tea, but I'm still slightly twitchy about some of the content.)

I didn't think much of it, but the others in my book group loved it: Everything I Knew, by Peter Goldsworthy. Another wet locale, this time a small town in South Australia, about growing up in the 1960s. (And about the vagaries of memory, which was rather interesting, but it was a case of "too little, too late" for me.)

Jasper Jones, Craig Silvey. Another growing-up-in-the-60s, this time a mining town in Western Australia. My favourite Australian read for the year. You got a good sense of small town oppression and small town attitudes, and a lingering sense of oppression from the heat wave hitting the town that summer.

Gilgamesh: A Novel, Joan London. 1930s (yeesh, do I not read anything set in contemporary times??) Western Australian coast - right near where my Mum grew up. (I passed my copy on to her and she LOVED it.)

I hope that's a good start. I haven't recommended anything that I haven't read in the last six months or so, because my memory is rather faulty and I am always susceptible to forgetting, and misremembering at that distance. (Small kids and their obsessions take up all the spare memory space I have!)

4amandameale
Jan 25, 2010, 8:35 pm

Journey to the Stone Country by Alex Miller

Blueback ny Tim Winton

There must be more...

5judylou
Jan 25, 2010, 9:19 pm

Peter Carey
Gail Jones
Marion Halligan
Kate Grenville
Sonya Hartnett
Richard Flanagan
Rodney Hall

Are some of the authors who spring to mind.

Both Ivan Southall and Colin Thiele are worth a look if you are at all interested in children's literature.

The following two are excellent in very different ways.
Charlotte Wood The Submerged Cathedral
Vicki Hastrich The Great Arch

7mccardey
Jan 26, 2010, 6:34 am

Kenneth Cook's "Wake In Fright"...? That's pretty good for landscape affecting the environment...

8alexdaw
Jan 26, 2010, 6:53 am

I reckon all you need is this website...

http://www.austlit.edu.au/

It's amazing...if you click on Teaching Aust. Lit in the menu on the left hand side, then click on All Institutions, you can click on every tertiary institution in Australia and see what courses they teach in Australian literature....they give you the titles of the texts too....

The most taught authors are listed here

http://teaching.austlit.edu.au/?q=mosttaught

I studied Australian Literature for one year under the formidable Leonie Kramer who swept into the lecture theatre of Sydney Uni in her academic gown.....consequently I think Australian Literature isn't complete without having read Patrick White, George Johnston and Henry Handel Richardson.

Then I swapped to UQ and Carole Ferrier introduced me to all sorts of wonderful writers like Jean Devanny.

I hope you read poets too.....please don't miss out on Kenneth Slessor - his stuff is magical as is Anthony Lawrence, Judith Wright and Oodgeroo Noonuccal or Kath Walker.

And there are some great screenwriters and playwrights too Andrew Bovell, Wesley Enoch, Christos Tsiolkas and Louis Nowra.

I grew up reading Ethel Turner - it seems quaint now but there are some things that stay the same....

We are very blessed with our writers here in Australia. They are a good mob - cheeky, scathing, brutal, loving....achingly good.

9aluvalibri
Editado: Jan 26, 2010, 7:54 am

I would go a bit farther back and would recommend Katharine Susannah Prichard, Jean Devanny, Miles Franklin, Eleanor Dark, Dorothy Hewett.

ETA: Oh, and did I mention that I envy you? ;-)

10richardderus
Jan 26, 2010, 1:55 pm

Happy Australia Day! (Yesterday, for y'all, but the thought was there.)

11pamelad
Jan 26, 2010, 4:19 pm

Helen Garner's books are set in Melbourne's inner suburbs, with her characters riding bikes, catching trains and going to the shops.

Ditto for Christos Tsiolkis and The Slap. The author lives near me, so I was delighted when his characters caught the same tram or shopped at the same supermarket.

I'd recommend Henry Handel Richardson's The Fortunes of Richard Mahoney for its depiction of life on the Ballarat diggings and in the post-goldrush cities of Melbourne and Ballarat.

Eleanor Dark's Lantana Lane is set amongst a group of pineapple growers in Queensland.

A Fortunate Life is the autobiography of A. B. Facey, who had a hard, impoverished childhood and was illiterate for much of his life, but whose optimism and good nature never flagged. Much of his book is set in the outback.

12shawjonathan
Editado: Jan 26, 2010, 6:41 pm

What wookiebender at 3 said about Landscape of Farewell (I know the real person that the implausible character is modelled on, and even though she is immediately recognisable – and verifiable from the acknowledgements -- she still doesn't work as a character.)

An awful lot of Judith Wright's poetry is about place. Bob Adamson has increasingly become the poet of the Hawkesbury River.

Xavier Herbert's Capricornia, and Alexis Wright's Carpentaria are both intensely about place -- and if you haven't read them they'd probably make a very interesting comparison at first read.

Many of Henry Lawson's stories (The Drover's Wife, The Bush Undertaker, Water Them Geraniums, The Loaded Dog, Macquarie's Mate etc etc)

Jean Devanny's Sugar Heaven is the only novel I know of that's set in the place I'm from, and I don't know if it does thgis for other people, but for me it just about smells of very particular locations.

13BlackSheepDances
Jan 27, 2010, 1:47 am

Tim Winton gets a lot of press, but dang, he lives up to it! I recommend Cloudstreet highest, followed by Dirt Music, That Eye, That Sky, The Turning and Breath. Along with it, Australian Colors is a great way to actually see the plants and sand that make Australia unique.

Bill Brysons In a Sunburned Country is really neat to get a people focus with humor (how accurate, I'm not sure, but some laughs).

The Fatal Shore is very useful in understanding how it all came to be, although most of the focus seems to be on Britain rather than Oz.

Lastly, The Long Green Shore is a really great read about WWII and Aussie forces that you don't usually get in history books.

14socialpages
Jan 27, 2010, 3:49 am

I'd recommend For the Term of His Natural Life by Marcus Clarke which tells the story of an innocent man transported to a penal settlement in Tasmania and the harshness of the Australian landscape.

15merry10
Jan 27, 2010, 6:11 am

a strong sense of place and environment.... how such a unique environment (the landscape, the plants, the animals) affects those writing within it and on it.

For me a strong sense of place and environment depends on cues that the writer triggers in my memory. Kate Grenville did this in The Idea of Perfection because she reminded me of the small country town of my grandparents. Sonya Hartnett did this in Of a Boy or What the Birds See in that she recreated for me the streets of Melbourne suburbs that like those on my way to my local primary school, the smells of suburban life, the school jumpers. Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip has a 70’s incarnation of the Carlton suburbs I inhabited as a student in the 80’s.

Patrick White has some great passages describing the Australian landscape and how unforgiving it was for early explorers and settlers. Voss where I could smell the eucalyptus the exploring party passed. I liked The Tree of Man where the main character settles a bush block and raises a family in an area where the changes echo the development of the Australian nation.

David Malouf has a great story about masculine rites of passage and friendship in Every Move You Make called “The Valley of Lagoons” which is set in the context of a wild pig hunt in rural Queensland - not an everyday experience for most Australians.

>11 pamelad: I agree with pamelad - Henry Handel Richardson’s Australia Felix, the first book of The Fortunes of Richard Mahoney really set the scene for a doctor and his family during the gold rush era and how they managed in the landscape. Great social realism.

>12 shawjonathan: I loved Carpentaria, so I'm going to read Capricornia some day. Henry Lawson I read as a school child and forms the background with AB Patterson, those myths of the Australian landscape.

>3 wookiebender: After the Celebration by Ken Gelder & Paul Salzman does give you a great overview of the last 20 years of Australian fiction and the important literary themes. Australian fiction has moved on the straight out pioneer story telling into themes of dispossession of Aboriginal peoples, and urban stories relating to the incredible mix of cultures that’s happening in our bigger cities. Brian Castro and Michelle De Kretser are given as authors who tackle the hybridity of modern urban Australia and it’s connection to the wider world.

After the Celebration‘s categories of “eco-genealogical and rural apocalypse fiction include Eucalyptus by Murray Bail, and The White Earth by McGahan. There are many titles listed and a brief discussion of their themes.

There is also the recently published Maquarie Pen Anthology of Australian Literature also known as The Literature of Australia: An Anthology edited by Nicholas Jose. It includes the recent Maquarie Pen Anthology of Aboriginal literature.

16KimB
Jan 27, 2010, 5:26 pm


The joint winner of last years Ned Kelly Award for Crime Writing, Smoke and Mirrors: A Brad Chen Novel gave a great sense of place for around Canberra.
I work at the Australian National University and shared the book with a colleague, we were delighted with picturing the areas mentioned in the novel.

17sally86
Editado: Fev 1, 2010, 7:40 am

Perhaps there's no Brisbanites on this thread yet, or it's so obvious that it goes without saying, but Johnno by David Malouf seems to me to have a very strong sense of place, although perhaps that's because it's always seemed to me that there's very few books set in Brisbane, so I notice them more when I come across them? You get a real sense of the changes that are going on over time in the city.
Interesting also how many of the books recommended are set in rural Australia, considering how large the percentage of city-dwellers is. I suppose it's such a big part of our national identity, but I've always found it somewhat out of proportion nonetheless.
Great thread though - I've been trying to read a lot more Australian fiction and often found it difficult to find anything that isn't along the Nick Earls/Rebecca Sparrow line (not that I don't enjoy a lighter read, or these authors - I do) so I'm going to check a lot of these out myself.

18alexdaw
Fev 1, 2010, 1:45 pm

sally86 you are absolutely right! I'm embarrassed beyond belief to have forgotten Johnno. And of course the other author who I think gives a great sense of place in Brisvegas is Venero Armanno...I particularly liked The Volcano for its descriptions of Cloudland. Kathy Webb's Other People's Diaries was an interesting read but I'm not sure that it was great literature as such but tried hard to give a sense of place I think.

19bookmark123
Fev 1, 2010, 10:17 pm

Currently reading After the Fire, A Still Small Voice and very much enjoying the description of Queensland.

20buttsy1
Fev 2, 2010, 7:05 am

Randolph Stow's Tourmaline, or his children's book Midnite both give a great sense of place.

21sally906
Fev 3, 2010, 4:04 am

I don't think anyone has mentioned The Build-Up by Phillip Gwynne - has Darwin down to a T - you can almost feel the humidity as you read.

22CraigHodges
Fev 5, 2010, 8:26 pm

May I suggest Ray Ericksen's book 'Cape Solitary'.

This is very much an Australian 'Walden', if you will. Set in Victoria's Cape Otway, it tells of Ericksen's escape from the city of Melbourne to live simply, to write and to rediscover himself.

He is very aware of his sense of 'place' and I think you will find this book meets many of the elements you are after.

Follow up and let me know...

http://www.librarything.com/work/4479408/book/56248328

23frances26
Fev 8, 2010, 8:57 am

There's an old series of murder mysteries by Arthur Upfield featuring Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte - 20 or more in the series - that my grandmother enjoyed for their authentic settings. Hardly great literature, but they'd be period pieces now. You'll find them listed on
http://trove.nla.gov.au (Trove is the new National Library of Australia site).

There's a huge amount of poetry. You could add to what the others have already mentioned, by looking at the Australian imprints in the profile of WendyandDavid for some popular and lesser-known poets. I'd list them but the touchstones weren't working and my computer crashed when I tried. (Old technology. So I'm typing this message again.)

A book I picked up recently that could be very useful to you is Geoffrey Serle From deserts the prophets come: the creative spirit in Australia 1788-1972.

Then there's the travel-as-spiritual-journey books, including a lovely 1970's book on retracing Ernest Giles' journeys called - I'll swear - Left of centre. But I can't find it on Trove.

For something completely different re sense of place consider looking at the songlines of our native peoples. A songline belonged to a tribe and told the story of its country, and threaded through Australia by joining with and intersecting other songlines along the traditional trade routes. For a rather heavily embroidered account read The songlines by Bruce Chatwin. It might be worth following up as a nice theme.

24mooseymoo332
Fev 12, 2010, 12:11 am

Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay :) the movie is great too :)

25socialpages
Fev 13, 2010, 7:02 pm

Death of a River Guide by Richard Flanagan is very much about the Australian landscape. It's set in Tasmania on the Franklin River.

I second #21 Sally906's suggestion, The Build Up for outback heat, humidity and storms.

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