We have traversed quite some terrain in the last weeks. Chose one of these topics for your blog this week: 1/ Capture the seasonal quality of the Australia bush (in Spring) in a short poem that utilizes some of the techniques of Charles Harpur’s “A Midsummer Noon in the Australian Forest”. Maybe begin your poem…
Category: Reading Australia
Welcome to Blogging in Australian Literature 2021 (Unit ENGL231 at ACU)
Hi All, Chose any of the topics listed below, or create a topic of your own – as long as it is in some way connected to the themes of our unit so far. Remember you are permitted to include personal reflections alongside your literary reflections or creations. But you must try to write as…
Cream of the Crop for Australian Literature 2019!
Thank you all for some fabulous blogging this semester. It has been a real feast to trawl through your many rich and creative insights into the literature of Australia. So many of you were able to express yourselves freely and openly, giving voice to what concerned you the most and finding ways of expressing your…
Best Australian Literature Blogs 2017
Russell Drysdale “The Mountain Has Its Own Meaning” Judith Wright An occasion for celebration: Australian Literature – a first year unit at Australian Catholic University- has again produced an extraordinary group of bloggers. Their work reveals how blogging has enabled them to connect with Aust. Lit. in a way that expands beyond the rigours of…
Reading Australia: Best Summative Blog Posts for 2017
There have been some truly fabulous Summative Blog Posts from the group of students who have just finished the third year unit Reading Australia. Such wonderful reflections that bring into focus students’ ethnicity, their appreciation of what Australian culture has to offer, but also their deep sadness at the continuing injustices, especially to indigenous people.…
David Malouf on Campus at Strathfield and at Mission Australia Surry Hills
ACU students both on and off campus had the real privilege today of interacting with David Malouf about The Conversations at Curlow Creek (Strathfield) and Remembering Babylon (Surry Hills). David was wonderfully generous both with his time and his responses and students in both locations were equally wonderful in their thoughtful preparation and deep questioning. Here are…
David Malouf Conversations at Curlow Creek- 1
Today we explored the world of this amazing novel focussing on the nature and purpose of story telling. As David Malouf has so powerfully said in a lecture to Macquarie University students: Story telling is a kind of public dreaming. But before a story can be public- be published- it has to find a place…
Francis Webb- the most unjustly neglected poet of the 20th Century (Herbert Read)
We have just spent 2 weeks exploring a huge range of Francis Webb’s poetry, from his earliest “Images in Winter” through to his last, magnificent “Nessun Dorma”. In between we have looked at his fascination with Australian exploration in Eyre All Alone and have studied his response to inmates in the hospital in which he was…
Patrick White Part 2
The focus on this week’s lecture was on the question of Patrick White’s religious outlook. His novel certainly makes many references to things that may be seen as spiritual or sacred, but he also gives conventional religion a rather scathing treatment, especially in the closing scenes of the novel where Stan Parker identifies God in…
Reading Australia Week 4
Thank you all today for your keen participation in this adventure. Reading Australia clearly has a number of connotations. Does it mean the Australian books we read, or does it mean the way that artists and writers “read” their country. In other words what attitudes, values, emotions colour the way they see the world.…
Patrick White- The Tree of Man
Patrick White aimed to transform what he saw as a materialist, self-obsessed Australia into a place where something sacred could be discovered in the most ordinary of situations. Stan and Amy Parker embody this extreme ordinariness and their lives are presented as far from ordinary. How does Patrick White achieve this? He does so by…
Awakening the Sacred in Australian Literature and Art- Keynote Address 8th July 2017
Please find in this blog the audio recording of the keynote address given by Michael Griffith at the Awakening the Sacred conference held at ACU on July 7/8 2017. You can find details about the conference here: http://www.acu.edu.au/staff/our_university/newsroom/staff_news_item/awakening_the_sacred_in_literature_and_the_arts Here is the audio of the keynote: And here are the images that accompanied the talk: Awakening the…
Reading Australia: Judith Wright
Thank you all for your searching and serious responses to all the questions posed by Judith Wright’s poetry. I really sense that her poems in their creative beauty and their imaginative power have attracted many of you. We have had such good and fruitful discussions over the last two weeks. It is almost a pity…
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