Sacred Australia at Mission Australia

I am having such a great time working with this group of Clemente students at Mission Australia. They are such a lively, interested and passionate group of students who really have a need to connect with the core meanings of the literature we are studying. So far we have looked at poetry by Judith Wright- her amazing alchemical “The Wattle Tree” and her meditative “Pool and Star” – poems by dispossessed Australian Indigenous poets, yearning for a connection to their traditions, their culture and finally some wonderful passages from David Malouf who expresses so pertinently the power and importance of poetry in a person’s life. We looked especially at this passage of his from his novel “The Great World”:

“He was speaking of poetry itself, of the hidden part it played in their lives… How it spoke up, not always in the plainest terms, since that wasn’t always possible, but in precise terms just the same, for what is deeply felt and might otherwise go unrecorded: all those unique and repeatable events, the little sacraments of daily existence… To find words for that; to make glow with significance what is usually unseen, and unspoken too – that, when it occurs, is what binds us all, since it speaks immediately out of the centre of each one of us; giving shape to what we too have experienced and did not till then have words for, though as soon as they are spoken we know them as our own. (283-284).
Here is the flier that has attracted students to this unit. As you can see we have Bell Shakespeare coming to work with us at the end of semester. There is going to be a fabulous performance of key (Shakespearean) sections of Michael Gow’s play “Away” in later November- will keep you posted on the date and location: