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The image at the top of this site is Budjwa Bay as it manifested itself on this cold, wet winter morning. But the stillness, the freshness was deafening, except for the multi-coloured calls of the Lyre Birds from across the water. Here is a place to sit and absorb the quiet round about and hear the quiet inside. What…
Made it to the top of the ridge above Galston, early on Saturday morning. The air was fresh and there were beautifully icy mists swirling up from the Gorge to the valley tops (click on all images to get stunning resolutions): On the ridge tops there was an amazing array of winter flowering plant life:…
Arthur Enfield (Stained Glass) The Seven Ages of Man (Shakespeare As You Like It), State Library of NSW. What a fabulous outcome! All our doubts, uncertainties, wrestling with difficult words, produced an amazing and satisfying presentation of sections of As You Like It. This was the culmination of our course Introduction to Literature which ran for 12 weeks: 4…
In July this year (23-26) we are co-ordinating an international conference on the links between Literature, the Arts and the Sacred. We have an amazing line-up of participants including David Malouf, Genevieve Lacey, Kevin Hart, Vivien Johnson, Kathleen Deignan, David Jasper, Imam Afroz Ali, Maeve Heaney, Carmel Bird, Michael McGirr, Joelene Griffith and many more.…
In The Tempest Shakespeare takes on all the hostility in the world and uses the extraordinary magic of his art to transform hostility into love- then and now! This is in fact the signature of all his comedies and romances and maybe even the implied cathartic outcome of that series of desperate tragedies (Othello, King Lear,…
In 3 weeks time the Clemente/ Catalyst students have to present extracts from As You Like It to a public audience at the MAC (Mission Australia Centre) Surry Hills. We are going to begin with a dramatised reading of Jacques’s speech (perhaps the most famous speech in all of Shakespeare): “All the world’s a stage, And all…
Falstaff is one of those amazing characters who, although from many points of view, is just a “bad” man, from other points of view he is the life of the party! Intelligent, witty, full of good humour, full of appreciation of the good things in life and scathing about those things that drive ambition: “honour”,…
One of the most exciting things I do several times each year is conduct literature students to the NSW Art Gallery to explore the ways in which paintings and sculptures can hugely expand our understanding of the way literature communicates meaning. One of my students (thank you Joey!) right at the start of our tour…
What a great introduction to our imminent study of/ participation in a production of scenes from Shakespeare’s As You Like It! Thank you Julie for your wonderful tour of the resources in the Mitchell Library, the Dixon Library and the Shakespeare Room itself! We were taken through the Mitchell (fabulous space for letting the creative spirit soar!)…
Tolstoy was passionate about uncovering those aspects of a human being in society that prevented him or her making contact with something true or real. He saw people in the law courts, in families acting out a kind of public drama which put each person centre-stage, totally ignorant of the other. It was like a…
Today we had some fabulous tutorials exploring the kind of language Shakespeare uses in the opening scenes of Henry IV. Here is the king trying to bind together his empire with a proposal that all the civil warmongering British unite in one force and go on a crusade to rescue Jerusalem from the “infidels”. This is such…
My students are performing miracles with their blogs. They are grasping and extending the content of the literature they are studying in the most creative ways. Poems and prose creations -giving expression to their own experience- are being grounded on traditional models from Shakespeare through to Charles Dickens & Matthew Arnold. Along with this they are…
At the State Library Today, we also genuflected in front of these amazing words from that extraordinary 19th Century wordsmith, the historian Charles (to whom Dickens dedicated his Hard Times). To anyone who still reads and benefits from the written word, these words carved in Sydney sandstone inside the vestibule to the Mitchell Library will have a…
Thank you all for your keen participation in today’s visit to the Renaissance section of the NSW Art Gallery. We all got a very good taste of the range of art work from the period and the connections of all this work to Shakespeare’s imagination. Most powerfully this painting by Jacques Blanchard Mars and the Vestal…
We visited the Shakespeare Room in the State Library today. This room is a wonderful expression of how much Shakespeare has meant to the Australian colony since the time of Captain Cook. One of the first plays ever to be produced in Sydney was in fact Henry IV with a complete convict cast! When you get to…
Check out the big party at the Shakespeare Folger Library! And here is Anthony Burgess’s novel about Shakespeare’s love life.
We tackled this question in our class this week. Here is a very simple way of showing the differences. We drew attention to these differences initially with special reference to Shakespeare. We have all just been to see As You Like It with John Bell in a leading role. We were trying to identify why and…
What a fantastic session we had this week with Henry Lawson and Robert Frost. Both these poets display such a deep insight into the human condition but do it in such dramatically different ways. …
What a fantastic performance by the Bell Shakespeare Company at the Opera House Drama Theatre. Around 60 students from ACU and another 20 or so from the Clemente program witnessed this great event. Thank you all for attending. Shakespeare’s As You Like It is a play that appeals above all to our sense of order, our…
Shakespeare’s contemporary Pietro da Cortona The Golden Age Arthur Golding’s translation of Ovid’sMetamorphosis (1565) has this wonderful description of the four ages of man on earth: the golden age, the silver age, the brazen age and the iron age. The golden age – as here described- is a wonderful period in which humans lived in harmony with…
Dawn over Kuring-gai Chase- North of Sydney 5 new students last night! That was fabulous and we had some really great discussions on what poetic language can do through its use of sound patterning, its use of connotations (rather than denotations) and its use of imagery (visual, tactile, kinetic etc)… And we had a wonderful…
The Clemente Program being run from Australian Catholic University in close partnership with range of Welfare Organizations such as Mission Australia, was started some years ago by an American, Earl Shorris. Shorris had a vision that poverty stricken Americans needed a way in which they could reclaim their dignity, their creative spirit, their intelligence. He wrote a…
At every moment of his writing Shakespeare tries to shake us out of our habitual ways of thinking and being. He is in anarchist in the sense that he wants us to look critically at the way we are controlled by our prejudices. In his sonnet “My Mistress’ Eyes Are Nothing Like the Sun” (Sonnet 130) he…
Elizabeth the First’s poem “On Monsieur’s Departure” shows well how literature of the Renaissance was so often deeply concerned with the inner workings of the human soul. The rich texture of the language, dramatising her conflicted nature in loving the French Duke of Anjou, draws the reader in to her effort to understand by describing…
Hi All, I am looking forward very much to working with you in all of the following units: Nineteenth Century Literature (ENGL200); Shakespeare & The Renaissance (ENGL210); Introduction to Literature (Clemente- Mission Australia Students, ENGL104); Learning in the Community (HUMA247)and (ARTS232). This is the space where I will be posting my weekly reflections on our…
