AUSTRALIAN LITERATURE

                  AUSTRALIAN   LITERATURE

 

Anna Maria Bunn(1808–1889) was the anonymous author of The Guardian: a Tale (by an Australian)(1838),[1]the first novel published on mainland Australia and the first in the continent by a woman

 Marcus Clarke( 1846 –1881)

•For the Term of His Natural Life/ His Natural Life-1874

 It is the best-known novelisation of life as a convict in nearly Australian history.

Richard Devine finds out his son of the same name, not his son-real father-Lord Bellassis-throws Richard away-Richard witnesses the murder of his biological father and is arrested for it. He saw his father walking away from the scene of crime-takes the name of Rufus Dawes in jail-doesn’t know it was his real father-

Dawes –now on the ship –informs the captain about a mutiny on the ship and the mutineers frame him saying he saw the ring leader

LT. Maurice Frere-who would have gotten all the money

John Rex-bastard son of Bellassis-tries to impersonate Rufus–in front of his mother –to take hold of Rufus’ money

Sylvia and Dawes are on a ship

 

Andrew Barton"Banjo" Paterson,1864–1941

•more notable poems include "Waltzing Matilda“-the unofficial national anthem

•, "The Man from Snowy River" and "Clancy of the Overflow".

 

Henry Lawson–1867-92

•John "Jack" Mitchell, often referred to only as Mitchell, is a recurring fictional character in the short stories and sketches by Australian writer Henry Lawson. He is widely considered one of Lawson's most memorable characters.

"The Drover's Wife" is a dramatic short story by the Australian writer Henry Lawson. It recounts the story of an outback woman left alone with her four children in an isolated hut.

Murray Bail –wrote it from the husband’s perspective –saying the wife left the dentist's husband the drover Barbera Jefferis writes it with a feminist perspective using henry lawson and Murray Bail as characters.

Miles Franklin(1879–1954)

•Novels[edit]

•My Brilliant Career(1901)

Protagonist-SybellaMelvyn –poor ventures get family poor-drought spells to add to misery-goes to live with grandmother-Harold Beecham proposes-but believing herself to be ugly and tom boyish-rejects his proposal-has to now work for an illiterate family to pay off debts of her family-beecham proposes again –but she says no saying she will only make him miserable-decided to start her career off as a writer

•Some Everyday Folk and Dawn(1909)

•Old Blastusof Bandicoot(1931)

•Bring the Monkey(1933)

•All That Swagger(1936)

•Pioneers on Parade(1939) –withDymphnaCusack

•My Career Goes Bung(1946)

•On Dearborn Street(1981)

•Under the pseudonym of "Brent of Bin Bin"

•Up the Country(1928)

•Ten Creeks Run(1930)

•Back to BoolBool(1931)

•Prelude to Waking(1950)

•Cockatoos(1954)

•Gentleman at GyangGyang(1956)

•Non-fiction[edit]

•Joseph Furphy: The Legend of a Man and His Book(1944)

•Laughter, Not for a Cage(1956)

•Childhood at Brindabella(1963)

 Christina Stead(1902–1983

 •The Man Who Loved Children is 1940

•The novel tells the story of a highly dysfunctional family, the Pollits. The naive egoism of the eponymous Sam Pollitoverwhelms his family, especially his wife Henny and eldest daughter Louie. The family is not wealthy, a situation exacerbated by Sam's idealism, Henny'saccumulated debts, and the terrible rift between the couple. Stead details the parents' marital battles and the various accounts of the blended family's affections and alliances. The character Sam is primarily based on Stead's own father, marine biologist David Stead. The Man Who Loved Children was initially set in Sydney but the setting was altered to suit an American audience, to Washington, D.C., somewhat unconvincingly due to linguistic nuances. Unsparing and penetrating, Stead reveals, among other things, the danger of unchecked sentimentality in relationships and political thought.

 •LettyFox: Her LuckI

•Set around economic depression and WW1 –first person pov–bildungsroman–sexually frank work –banned in Australia how a male capitalist culture dominates women

•Letty’schoice to marry and have a child -because she is “tired of steering” in a sea of men -may be viewed as Stead's criticism of a society that strictly limits the female experience.

 Patrick Victor Martindale White(1912–1990)

•1973 –Nobel

•Novels

•Happy Valley(1939)

•The Living and the Dead(1941)

•in 1930s London. The Standishes—mother Catherine, son Elyot-writer –detached from relations and daughter Eden (2 relationships-betrayed in one-lover dies in Spanish civil war in the second one—lead disparate lives under the one roof. The relationships between the three remain detached throughout the novel, each privately searching for purpose in a rapidly changing world. Their insignificance is overshadowed by the advance of the war, deepening the portrayal of their inner bleakness.

•The Aunt's Story(1948)

•The Tree of Man(1955)

•lives of the Parker family and their changing fortunes over many decades

•Voss(1957)

•The novel centres on two characters: Voss, a German, and Laura, a young woman, orphaned and new to the colony of New South Wales. It opens as they meet for the first time in the house of Laura's uncle and the patron of Voss's expedition, Mr Bonner.

•Johann Ulrich Voss set out to cross the Australian continent in 1845. After collecting a party of settlers and two Aborigines, his party heads inland from the coast only to meet endless adversity. The explorers crossed the drought-plagued desert and then waterlogged lands until they retreat to a cave where they lie for weeks waiting for the rain to stop. Voss and Laura retain a connection despite Voss's absence and the story intersperses developments in each of their lives. Laura adopts an orphaned child and attends a ball during Voss's absence.

•The travelling party splits in two and nearly all members eventually perish. The story ends some twenty years later at a garden party hosted by Laura's cousin Belle Radclyffe(née Bonner) on the day of the unveiling of a statue of Voss. The party is also attended by Laura Trevelyan and the remaining member of Voss's expeditionary party, Mr Judd.

•The novel's strength comes not from the physical description of the events in the story but from the explorers' passion, insight and doom. The novel draws heavily on the complex character of Voss.

 •Riders in the Chariot(1961)

•The Solid Mandala(1966)

•The Vivisector(1970)

•The Eye of the Storm(1973)

•A Fringe of Leaves(1976)

•The TwybornAffair(1979)

•Memoirs of Many in One(1986)

•The Hanging Garden(2012) (Unfinished, posthumous

Morris Langlo West AO(26 April 1916–9 October 1999

•The Devil's Advocate is 1959

•West's "Vatican" sequence of novels, along with The Shoes of the Fisherman(1963), The Clowns of God(1981), and Lazarus(1990)

•Father Blaise Meredith, a dying English priest, is sent from the Vatican to a small village in Calabria to investigate the life of Giacomo Nerone, a local being touted for sainthood. Meredith was chosen for the task because Cardinal Marottawanted someone learned and meticulous; someone who might be lacking in charity, but not in precision. The residents of the nearby village of GemelloMaggiore are promoting Nerone'scult because it will bring prestige to the area.

•Meredith discovers that Neronewas, in fact, a deserter from the British army, who had an illegitimate son by a local woman and was executed by Communist partisans towards the end of World War II, yet is a man revered in his small village.

David George Joseph Malouf (1934)

• 1978 – An Imaginary Life

• It tells the story of the Roman poet Ovid, during his exile in Tomis.

• While there, Ovid lives with the natives, although he doesn't understand their language, and forms

a bond with a wild boy who is found living wild in nature. The relationship between Ovid and the

boy, first of protection and protection, becomes an alliance between two people in a foreign

land.

• Ovid comes to Tomis enculturated with a Roman world view and through his attempts at teaching

the boy language is able to free himself from the constrictions of Latin and the encompassing

perception of reality that is his only barrier against transcendence.

• Ovid is continually searching for the Child and what he represents to him. He goes so far as to

capture him in an attempt to learn from him, and to teach him language and conventions.

• Malouf has been described as a post-colonialist author. He wrote this novel when issues with the

treatment of the indigenous people of Australia was under question and the White Australia

Policy and paternalistic mentality were inherent in society. These values can be seen in An

Imaginary Life, with the Child, so wild and close to nature, captured by an encultured person who

wishes to teach him.

• 1993 – Remembering Babylon- commonwealth greater narrative of an English boy, Gemmy Fairley, who is marooned on a foreign land and is raised by a group of aborigines, natives of the land. When white settlers reached the area, he attempts to move back into the world of Europeans. As Gemmy wrestles with his own identity, the community of settlers struggle to deal with their fear of the unknown.

• 1982 – Fly Away Peter

• Jim Saddler- fond and keen to understand bird life – hired by Ashley Crowther – become warden of an estuary- joins world war 1 and sees its gruesome reality – starts looking at crows and how they continue unaffected by war Conversations at Curlew Creek -1827

• Michael Adair, an Irish-born officer in the colonial mounted troopers, and Daniel Carney, an Irish escapee and bushranger.

• 2009 – Ransom

• Achilles after the death of Patroclus – kills Hector in battle and drags his corpse around the pyre of Patroclus for 10 days – prism then comes to Achilles to ransom him for his son's corpse.

 Thomas Keneally, - 1935

 • Bring Larks and Heroes is 1967

• The novel is set in an unidentified Penal colony in the South Pacific, which bears a superficial resemblance to Sydney. The novel is concerned with the exploits of the colony's "felons" (a term which was not in general use at the time the novel is set, which

Keneally explains his use of in a brief preface as being more appropriate than "convicts"), in particular an Irish Marine named Phelim Halloran.

• Halloran joins the Marines after leaving prison and finds he identifies more with the Irish prisoners than his mainly Protestant English superiors •

Blood Red, Sister Rose (1974) (Novel) is loosely based on the life of Joan of Arc. It concentrates mainly on the events surrounding the Maid's lifting of the siege of Orleans, and the real reason behind her "voices".

• Schindler's Ark (released in America as Schindler's List)

is a Booker Prize-winning historical fiction novel published in 1982 the book tells the story of Oskar Schindler, a Nazi Party member who turns into an unlikely hero by saving 1,200 Jews from concentration camps all over Poland and Germany. It is a work of historical fiction which describes actual people and places with fictional events, dialogue and scenes added by the author and reconstructed dialogue where exact details are unknown

Peter Philip Carey AO (1943)

• 1988- Oscar and Lucinda - Booker

• t tells the story of Oscar Hopkins, the Cornish son of a Plymouth Brethren minister who becomes an Anglican priest, and Lucinda Leplastrier, a young Australian heiress who buys a glass factory. They meet on the ship over to Australia and discover that they are both gamblers, one obsessive, the other compulsive. Lucinda bets Oscar that he cannot transport a glass church from Sydney to a remote settlement at Bellingen, some 400 km up the New South Wales coast. This bet changes both their lives forever

• Jack Maggs (1997

Reworking of Great Expectations

• Jack Maggs (the equivalent of Magwitch) and his quest to meet his 'son' Henry Phipps (the equivalent of Pip),

who has mysteriously disappeared, having closed up his house and dismissed his household.

• Maggs becomes involved as a servant in the household of Phipps's neighbour, Percy Buckle, as he attempts to wait out Phipps or find him in the streets of London. He eventually cuts a deal with the young and broke up and- coming novelist Tobias Oates (a thinly disguised Charles Dickens) that he hopes will lead him to Phipps.

Oates, however, has other plans, as he finds in Maggs a character from whom to draw much-needed inspiration for a forthcoming novel that he desperately needs to produce. Spurned an invitation from Queen Elizabeth

• True History of the Kelly Gang- 2000

2001 Booker Prize and the Commonwealth Writers Prize in the same year.

• Ned Kelly telling his tale of how he became the leader of the Kelly Gang-

• Constable Alex Fitzpatrick.- the reason for his descent to a life of crime

 Kim Scott -1957

• Indigenous ancestry

• Novels[edit]

• True Country (Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1993)

• Benang: From the Heart (Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1999)

novel deals with the process of "breeding out the colour” Stolen

Generations- coined by Peter read

Protagonist-Harley Scat- who tries to trace the history of his family

• Lost (Southern Forest Arts, 2006)

• That Deadman Dance (Picador, 2010- commonwealth

• Bobby Wabalanginy.- the protagonist- is forced to be in the middle of the

settlers and the Aboriginals – trouble arises after the whites have

settled and Bobby tries to keep the peace between the two sides- but

ultimately has to choose between the old world and the new

 Richard Miller Flanagan (born in 1961

• The Narrow Road to the Deep North 2014

• Booker

• The book tells the story of Dorrigo Evans, an Australian doctor haunted by memories of a love affair with his uncle's wife and his subsequent experiences as a prisoner of war. Post-war, he finds his growing celebrity as a war hero at odds with his sense of his own failings and guilt.

• Taking its title from 17th-century haiku poet Matsuo Bashō's famous haibun, Oku no Hosomichi, best known in English as

 The Narrow Road to the Deep North, the novel is epic in form and chronicles an Australian century, with one horrific day at its heart on the Burma Railway in August 1943. As that day builds to its climax, the novel grows to encompass the post-war lives of Japanese and Korean prison guards as well as Australian Far East Prisoners of War. The book deals both with the effects of war and the many forms of love.

 Judith ArundellWright (31 May 1915 – 25 June 2000

• an Australian poet, environmentalist and campaigner for Aboriginal land rights.

• Moving Image, Woman to Man, The Gateway, The Two Fires, Birds, The Other

Half, Magpies, Shadow, Hunting Snake, among others.

• Blue Arab, Trapped Dingo, to a Child

 Alec Derwent Hope AC OBE (21 July 1907 – 13 July 2000)

• 20th century’s greatest 18th cetury poet

• He wrote a book of "answers" to other poems, including one in response to the poem "To His Coy Mistress" by Andrew Marvell.

•Tragical History of Doctor Faustus: By Christopher Marlow, purged and amended by A.D. Hope (1982)

• “Conquistador” (1947) and “The Return from the Freudian Isles” (1944).

• best known for his elegies and satires.

And day by day the whisper of love grows stronger