|
Author |
Title |
Theme |
Characters |
|
symbolism of snake |
pregnant girl |
|
|
Anderson |
The Appearance of Things p. 9 |
family life; truthfulness |
Rhoda, narrator |
|
Ladies Need Only Apply 186 |
chauvinism; sexual power |
Leo & Sadie |
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ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ - p.131 |
relationships |
Kathy Pridham Bedford |
|
|
Bedford |
Through Road 156 |
warnings; relationship |
Robert, I. |
|
The Hair and the Teeth 289 |
sentiment, lost feelings |
herself, McClean. |
|
|
A World This Size 355 |
. |
. |
|
|
appearances deceive; |
narrator, Mr Gleason |
||
|
Amateur Hour p. 120 |
indifference, racism. |
Evert, Tobias |
|
|
The Bodysurfers 268 |
search, nostalgia, communication |
David, Lydia & kids |
|
|
Black Genoa 327 |
grief, dream, death |
narrator, Joanna, Ray |
|
|
Little Helen's Sunday Afternoon 89 |
inner states; ridiculous visions |
Little Helen, Noah |
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|
The List of All Possible Answers 261 |
. |
. |
|
|
Junction 243 |
Love as obsession; futility |
. |
|
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Dream People 36 |
. |
. |
|
|
Gates 167 |
immaturity; jealousy |
Andrew & Sally |
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|
Wednesdays and Fridays 252 |
mothering; loving |
Mabel Morgan |
|
|
Sister Ships p. 101 |
. |
. |
|
|
Inside the Oyster 321 |
appearances; horror |
Eddie Blish |
|
|
The Brush Bronzewing 73 |
justice; trust |
Eddie, grandfather |
|
|
That Antic Jezebel 374 |
estrangement; exile |
Clay McHugh |
|
|
Moorhouse |
The Commune Does Not Want You 233 |
belonging, |
narrator, Milton |
|
To Be Congruous with the Sea 339 |
fate, loneliness, artist |
Gina Addams-Smith |
|
|
Precious Bane p. 143 |
. |
. |
|
|
Papaellinas |
Christos Mavromatis is a Welder 347 |
. |
. |
|
Reading the Signs 47 |
. |
. |
|
|
Sandcastles 309 |
. |
"almost man" |
|
|
The Archbishop or the Lady 218 |
lost feelings, writer as artist |
he, her |
|
|
Winton |
My Father's Axe 297 |
grief, relationships |
narrator |
|
Only a Little of so Much 367 |
. |
. |
Thea Astley "Ladies Need Only Apply" (1981) Personal Best pp. 186-213.
Astley's other novels: The Acolyte (1972), Beachmasters (1985), A Boatload of Home Folk (1985), A Kindness Cup (1974) racist attitudes to aborigines, specific Australian moments, An Item from the Late News (1982), The Well Dressed Explorer (1962), Girl with a Monkey (1958), a short story collection: Hunting the Wild Pineapple (1979).
Murray Bail "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ" p. 131.
Notes on Bail from The Penguin New Literary History of Australia Ed. L. Hergenhan Penguin 1988: Bail's surrealism derives from recent American or European wiriting; 434 part of the literary avant garde for the cool or ironic rendering of experience as an intellectual or perceptual puzzle. In this literature an enhanced role is assumed for the reader." = reader's role in constructing meaning; however this has not yet led to the death of the author.
He was supported by Literature Board grants for 7 years; concerned for the nature of language and writing (542)
His publications: Short story "The Drover's Wife" (1975) a parody of Lawson's famous story. Novel: Homesickness (1980) a stylistic tour de force about Australians abroard; explores cross-cultural politics (504). Edited the Australian Book of Contemporary Short Stories (1988).
John Bryson "A World This Size" 1982 pp. 355-63.
Freddy Unthank, an acute observer, a salesman of many things
"all this success is the result of his interest, he would tell you, in the human pageant." 356.
detailed descriptions are typical of a journalist like Bryson, or Geroge Johnston (My Brother Jack)
An enjoyable story, with lots of colour and detail, "like a Breughel painting."
Significance of the title: the world is created thus, "There is a restaurant like this in every fast city", claustrophobia is a false feeling, reality is bigger than we allow it to be - just look around you!
Garry Disher "Amateur Hour" (1988) p. 120
"Is a novel cut down to a short story" says Disher.
"Amateur Hour" is Disher's best known short story and won the National Short Story Award. It deals with a naive young man trying to make sense of a fatal accidental shooting he witnesses in South Africa.
quite disturbing STORY; its SETTING is quite different from anything I have experienced. STYLE: economy and unpredictability.; tensions and ironies abound CHARACTERS the new-boy narrator, Tobias & the drunk woman.
the significance and relevance of the TITLE?
in the introduction that it was "a local tragedy revealing a greater one" = they have a universal significance.
Refer his 1988 collection of short stories The Difference to Me; & his novel: The Stencil Man (1988), Personal Best (1989).
Robert Drewe "The Bodysurfers"
Novels by Drewe: The Savage Crows (1976) in ideological crisis and helplessness over the genocide of the Tasmanian aborigines; A Cry in the Jungle Bar (1979)surburban experience in Perth.; Australians encountering Asia; being part of yet apart from the culture. From the New Literary History of Australia Hergenhan (Ed.) Penguin 1988.
Peter Goldsworthy's "The List of all Possible Answers" (1986) p. 261-5.
Compare with other stories on home life and children: Bird "The Hair and the Teeth" p. 289, Drewe "The Body Surfers" 268, Garner "Little Helen's Sunday Afternoon" 89, McQueen "The Brush Bronzewing" 73, Weller "Sandcastles" 309.
Write a survey of these stories showing the differing attitudes to children and children's experiences of family life.
Debate: "Childhood is a fiction in real life; real children have to live like adults too often."
Helen Garner "Little Helen's Sunday Afternoon" (1985) p. 89.
Peter Carey, "American Dreams" (1974) p. 57
Gleason's model of the town on Bald Hill is too true; the effects of the passing of time; a local drama; the family/village is deceived; values change with time; narrative structure like The Year my Voice Broke.
Carey's Novels: The Fat Man in History (1974) 12 surreal stories creating Australian myths & legends, Bliss, llywhacker (1985) Herbert Badgery is hopelessly unreliable and amazingly inventive picaresque character in a traditionalist family saga. Oscar and Lucinda (1989) is another saga of a great love, the founding of the nation, the ordinary and the incredible; The Tax Inspector (1991) incest and financial deception, greater loyalties, social justice..
Issues: what is truth? Deceived by appearances and prejudice; time tells; cultural surrender; reality is more than two dimensional; adolescent discovers life.
Notes © G. Smith 1992.
Kate Grenville "Junction" (1984) p. 243.
In "Junction", Kate Grenville refuses to give the traditional happy ending, to have Doug meet and marry the girl with the blonde hair on the 63 bus.
His "toneless hysteria" as Grenville calls it in her introduction is very much today
Her story's SETTING features the facts of modern urban poverty, in its unpretty realism: "In his room he boils an egg and eats it with revulsion he wishes he knew how to cook. He sits and burps and stares at the spatters on the tiles . . . "(244). Finally the sordid ending on the third Friday night in frustration and rejection
a modern THEME Doug is misunderstood by the landlady, the "toadwoman" at the railway station and the lady wig-seller at the op. shop. Even the kid betrays him: "It rams its knuckles into its eye the man hit me." . He is misunderstood by the girl he loves too.
Grenville's STYLE of writing is realistic and experimental - no full stops or commas do show the rush and quiet fury of the actual events as they happen: "Lunging his hand in for the keys he rips his pocket drops the keys grabs them they slip his hands are sweaty he rams the key at the lock but it won't go in he's using the wrong key he drops them again but snatches them up before they hit the ground" (245). this stream of action style of writing
Doug comes across as a real character in love: obsessed with red raincoats, oblivious of his circumstances, willing to take slim chances,
Grenville's "Junction" has realistic plot, setting, and characterization.
Notes © G. Smith 1992.
Morris Lurie "Inside the Oyster" pp. 321.
James McQueen "The Bush Bronzewing " pp. 73-86
G. Smith April 19, 1992 2:08 PM
Barry Hill "Gates" (1983) pp. 167-184.
Discuss: "'But it happened. We can face that, can;'t we?" (178) Her frankness, his possessiveness, her lack of timing, his jealousy of the bloke, etc....
174 elaboration of the gates title. How is this theme ironic in the long run? Wasn't this the sticking point between them in the marriage?
Is Andrew finally liberated? Was Hill ironic in the observation about the children of separated parents??
Hill's novels Rim of Blue (1978) and Headlocks (1983) have as dominant themes politics and family relations (or sometimes the politics of family relations).
David Malouf "That Antic Jezebel" p. 374 - 386. 1985
Malouf won the Vance Palmer award for his collection of short stories Antipodes .
This story a typical Malouf exploration of an estranged migrant in a modern Australian setting. strong sense of locale, the Sydney eastern suburbs.
From Hergenhan: Malouf is part of the growing taste for migrant writing in the 80s.(543) part of a movement away from Australianity to a more locally based vision of 'place.' (544) Malouf an aesthetic of locale, interested in the relationship of place and the self.
Novels: Fly away Peter (1982) a reconstruction of a POW in World War I; Harland's Half Acre ( 1984) the artist in exile and misfit Harland chooses to live alone on an island; An Imaginary Life Ovid in exile- reminds us of our isolation in Australia; Johnno (1975) life in Brisbane for children after World War II- the stable narrator and the unstable character, 12 Edmonstone Street (1985) his own memoir of childhood in Brisbane ; The Great World (1990) Digger & Vic's return after the War. Remembering Babylon 1993.
Notes from The Penguin New Literary History of Australia Ed. L. Hergenhan, Penguin 1988.
Finola Moorhead "To Be Congruous With The Sea" (undated, published 1974) pp. 337-44.
Gina Addams-Smith = hyphenated name, high class family but Gina is a Greek name
hermit in north western Tasmania, the artist alone in her studio. an unfortunate life so far. Is a tragic end full of defeat suggested?
only two loves: Tony her agent and Poppa Peppi the greengrocer.
"her world and her dream were one." 343. She felt the boy and the girl's intrusion into her space? She could not live with the reality of sadness?
"a human lost at the edge of the rising tide." even literally??
congruous means fitting in with, at one with, defined coextensively. So was Gina dreaming to become one with the sea in its tides, rhythms, its fate, its destruction. Her art and the sea were one. She was not incongruous at the sea.
"the one thing sensuous about her was the way she ate" = her survival, her naive simplicity, her unsocialised behaviour? a childlike untrained manner
I keep thinking of the French lieutenant's woman on Lyme Regis, she was beyond society, wild and unnamed and untamed and alone and sensuous.
Elizabeth Jolley "Wednesdays and Fridays" (1981) p. 251
"Wednesdays and Fridays" has an unusual format, not an exchange of correspondence but one half of it, the short notes Mabel writes. It shows the changing relationship between Mabel Doris Morgan and her son between 4th June and 6th August. The reader is at first fooled into thinking it is a communication between a landlady and her boarder but as the last letter shows, she is his mother. The writing is amusing and convincing with its contrived awkwardnesses of expression and the inevitable happy ending.
This unusual fiction shows the truth that Mabel is unable to asset herself; she disallows the outboard motor, the girl, the smoking and the mess in the bathroom but cannot prevent them. She resorts to the letters instead of a face-to-face demand and throughout she undercuts her demands which then become requests then allowable foibles. This change is pleasing and I rather like the way Jolley can show but not tell the perennial truth that people are basically accommodating.
Is this just another illustration that love is the weakness of womankind? Knowing Jolley, I would say this story's message has a slightly feminist edge to it. In this story, she has successfully shown that a truth can be illustrated rather than told.
Gerald Murnane "Precious Bane" 1985 pp. 143-153
Michael Wilding "Reading the Signs" 1987 pp. 47-50.
Comments, reactions, points for discussion:
Obviously this story has had some airing and public success. Why? Its growing awareness of class, long misunderstood experiences in adolescence, a strange event gone wrong, accuracy of memories recalled, what?
Michael seems to be a passive observer in a small locality yet he belonged there too until he went to university where he got a perspective on it.
the mother's unreliable memory ("It was like this when . . .") or her delay in getting things straight, the father's foolishness and fate (at home dying of emphysema from the foundry dust) . Is the title description or prescription: should he/they have been more alert to the significance of events? First half has lots of description & narration, the second lots of dialogue and homey recollection. Constructed this way merely to display various reading skills?
Wilding's corpus: Wrote The Short Story Embassy (1975) as if an anthropologist viewing current events through the fresh but not naive eyes of an immigrant (himself). Wrote The Tabloid Story Pocket Book (1978) about experimental writing. Wrote Marcus Clarke (1977) a commentary on Marcus Clarke's His Natural Life, a 19th century Australian novel; living as a convict may corrode but cannot totally consume his innate goodness. Wilding interested in moral messages - innocent but powerless virtue versus the seemingly all-powerful society. Wilding has edited a selection of Clarke's short fiction in Stories (1983). Wrote Pacific Highway (1982) narrator agonising about what is natural and what is polluted; looks at the impossibility of living together naturally even in the most untouched places. Wilding edited a reprint William Lane's The Workingman's Paradise: Pioneering socialist realism (1980 facsimile of 1892 edition) an ironic title about the mystique of the 'goodly city' - a relentless proletarian realism . . . a remorseless encounter with the slums . . . labour . .and bourgeois socialists"; Lane portrayed social injustice in an essentially harmonic cosmic universe; to reverse prevailing social stereotypes about socialists. Wilding's collection of stories Reading the Signs (1984) emphasises reader's role in constructing meaning; fascination with reader and the process of reading. Wrote The Paraguayan Experiment (1984) a fictionalised account of William Lane's idealistic attempt to set up a New Australia in Paraguay. Wilding wrote "My Name is Rickeybockey: The Poetry of Robert Adamson and the Spirit of Henry Kendall" Southerly (1986). Wilding was part of the new fiction of the 1970s = a new awareness of fiction as fiction, of a story as an artefact rather than a simple reflection of 'life'.; that there is no simple uncomplicated relationship beteen language and experience.
Archie Weller "Sandcastles" (1977) p. 309.
Tommy Caylun , almost white, an almost man.
"I am what the white people want me to " 310
"I was something bad, and black, and unsightly in my real " 310
" You live and learn and live." 311
"You may be what you like on the outside, but inside you are you." 312
"Nyoongahs lose their laughter young in life, you know." 314
"The King of sandcastles - that's me all the way through . . . I cried, and the others laughed. But you see, for one whole day I had owned something beautiful, for the first time in my life." Why do we dream you might say. . . "318.
Sad realistic first person narrative. The half caste's fate? or just a fatalistic view of it? This story a precious memory for Weller, haunts him.
Is there any hope offered here? What are the positives in the story?
Notes © G. Smith 1992.
Gerard Windsor "The Archbishop or The Lady" (1985) p. 218.
EVALUATION Is this just an amusing story, an exercise in self consciousness and trumpet blowing? Is the short story valuable? It is Australian, it shows the artist's anguish. It develops the characters, it can be read in one sitting, it plays round with point of view, identity of narrator(s), timeframes telescope, reveals secrets, etc. What is your opinion?
Fay Zwicky "Only A Little Of So Much" 1984 pp. 367-72.
a monologue by the listener's Aunt Eva; re-read the Introduction 366 especially for her profile. Note Zwicky's dramatic purpose "the dismantling of the educated self" very much a current preoccupation and perhaps one you feel within yourself as you study this year - the crushing of spontaneity to gain correctness?
casting off the mind-forged manacles of self consciousness, dismantling the trappings of the educated self, recognising the wasteful impoverishment of a mind fettered in absolutes.
"Forever rampant or prostrate, grace seemed well beyond my spiky grasp." (The Last Rites of the Nizam). the attainment of style by someone untrained uncouth clumsy or low born is a better aim of life?
My Opinion: This is dense prose to read but is rewarding. The revelation of the character is its strength and central interest; her difficulties with English idiom and getting sayings round the wrong way are hilarious. Zwicky's Introduction is very helpful.