Thank you all for your keen participation and all your answers to questions as we were going around the Australian sections of the NSW Art Gallery. I hope you all got a sense of how important it is to get a sweeping picture of the development of Australian painting from its Aboriginal origins through to…
Tag: Kim Scott
Bobby Wabalanginy’s challenge to Xenophobic Australia
From Lin Onus’s “Hills Hoist” – NSW Art Gallery. Kim Scott’s Bobby Wabalanginy is a character who dares to confront the hardened utilitarianism of the European invaders with dance, humour and song. The closing scenes of the novel in which Bobby does a hambone (striptease) -bar his bright red underpants- in front of a kangaroo…
Kim Scott That Deadman Dance 1
Kim Scott standing under the “skirt” of a Black Boy/ Grass Tree (Xanthorea Australis)- Courtesy of Australian Book Review. Thank you all for your participation in today’s lecture and the tutorials. It was good to see such an engagement and an interest in the plight of our Indigenous cousins. And clearly it is powerful for us…
That Dead Man Dance
Hi All, I trust you are making good headway with That Dead Man Dance! This is a wonderfully relevant novel to Australia today with its still unresolved relationship to its indigenous inhabitants. I was struck especially by an article that was written yesterday about the statue of Captain Cook by Stan Grant: I passed by Hyde…
Week 2 Summer/Autumn Semester
Another fabulous week of literature and life! I thoroughly enjoyed my time exploring Kim Scott’s That Dead Man Dance with Oz Lit students today. This is an amazing work that really brings to life an indigenous experience of life in relation to landscape and everything in it. It does this so powerfully through the sharp contrast…
Oz Lit Week 2: Bobby Wabalanginy Fights Back!
We had a fabulous time exploring the core differences between the way indigenous Australians and European intruders experience the world around them. Kim Scott has done a fabulous job in using language that in its texture indicates the kinds of experience that his characters have. As a blog topic for next week, Try to describe…
Art & Spirit
This week in all our units we have been exploring the relationship between Art (poetry, painting, prose, music…) and that part of human nature that is termed Spirit. For William Blake and for D.H.Lawrence the division between Body and Spirit -central to many religious traditions- was something they wanted to challenge. As Blake pronounced in…
