Author: Laurie ClancyPublisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 15
Book Description
Discussion Notes on Thea Astley's The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow
Author: Laurie ClancyThea Astley, The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow
Author: The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow
Author: Thea AstleyPublisher: Text Publishing
ISBN: 1925626601
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 303
Book Description
There are distant shouts, rifle shots, the pounding of feet across the bridge, the sound of running. A woman’s scream carves the night then bubbles away. In 1930 the superintendent of a mission on a Queensland island, driven mad by his wife’s death, goes on a murderous rampage. Fearing for their lives, the other whites arm a young Indigenous man and order him to shoot Uncle Boss dead. The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow traces the lead-up to this bloody showdown and the repercussions in the years after—for Aboriginal people and the colonial overseers. Thea Astley was born in Brisbane in 1925. Her first novel, Girl with a Monkey, was published in 1958 and her third, The Well Dressed Explorer (1962), won the Miles Franklin Literary Award. Many notable books followed, among them the groundbreaking A Kindness Cup (1974), which addressed frontier massacres of Indigenous Australians, and It’s Raining in Mango (1987). Her last novel was Drylands (1999), her fourth Miles Franklin winner. Her fiction is distinguished by vivid imagery and metaphor; a complex, ironic style; and a desire to highlight oppression and social injustice. One of the most distinctive and influential Australian novelists of the twentieth century, Astley died in 2004. A lifelong chain-smoker famed for her sharp wit, Thea Astley died in 2004, the year after her husband died. She remains one of the most distinctive and influential Australian novelists of the twentieth century. ‘Passion, brilliance and originality.’ Sydney Morning Herald ‘Formidable...Uniquely provocative, acerbic and glittering.’ Australian
The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow
Author: Thea AstleyPublisher: Penguin Books
ISBN: 9780140267556
Category : Atrocities
Languages : en
Pages : 296
Book Description
In the small hours of a January morning in 1930, on an island off the Queensland coast, a man goes berserk with a rifle and a box of gelignite. Is he evil? Or crazy? His violence is in fact a mirror for the brutality of Australian life - and is a dim reflection at that, in a country where atrocities by whites against blacks are so ingrained few question them. The effects of the rampage ripple out from the island to link the fates of those who witnessed it, across the north and down through the decades. It is a time when silence in the face of tyranny is at its loudest. When allegiance to English niceties is confounded by the landscape and by the weather. And change is a slow wind that brings little real difference.
Drylands
Author: Thea AstleyPublisher: Text Publishing
ISBN: 192562661X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 259
Book Description
This will be a book for the world’s last reader, she decided, chewing pen-end over an open exercise book. In the dying town of Drylands, Janet Deakin sells papers to lonely locals. At night, in her flat above the newsagency, she attempts to write a novel for a world in which no one reads—‘full of people, she envisaged, glaring at a screen that glared glassily back.’ Drylands is the story of the townsfolk’s harsh, violent lives. Trenchant and brilliant, Thea Astley’s final novel is a dark portrait of outback Australia in decline. Thea Astley was born in Brisbane in 1925. Her first novel, Girl with a Monkey, was published in 1958 and her third, The Well Dressed Explorer (1962), won the Miles Franklin Literary Award. Many notable books followed, among them the groundbreaking A Kindness Cup (1974), which addressed frontier massacres of Indigenous Australians, and It’s Raining in Mango (1987). Her last novel was Drylands (1999), her fourth Miles Franklin winner. Her fiction is distinguished by vivid imagery and metaphor; a complex, ironic style; and a desire to highlight oppression and social injustice. One of the most distinctive and influential Australian novelists of the twentieth century, Astley died in 2004. ‘It is impossible to put this book down. It seethes with energy and passion.’ Herald Sun 'Wonderful.' Australian
Reaching Tin River
Author: Thea AstleyPublisher: Text Publishing
ISBN: 1925603555
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 260
Book Description
• This May, Text will concurrently publish four Text Classics by the prolific and highly awarded Thea Astley • As with previous suites of Text Classics by Randolph Stow, Christina Stead, Amy Witting and Robin Klein, the concurrent publication of these four Astley novels demonstrates Text’s belief in the importance of this author • Astley is among the most significant Australian woman writers of the twentieth century—typified by her ironic style and her social consciousness, particularly of the injustices faced by indigenous Australians • At the time of her death in 2004, she held the record for the most Miles Franklin Literary Award wins by one author, a record she now jointly holds with Tim Winton • Collectively these four works of fiction are an opportunity for readers to rediscover parts of Astley’s catalogue that have been unjustly out-of-print, guided by two established and two emerging contemporary Australian woman authors • Reaching Tin River won the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction when first published in 1990 • A woman becomes obsessed with the story of a long-dead colonial pioneer, and her research becomes a way of coming to terms with her own past • This Text Classics edition will be introduced by Sydney Morning Herald 2017 Young Novelist of the Year and author of Our Magic Hour and Pulse Points, Jennifer Down
Thea Astley
Author: Karen LambPublisher: University of Queensland Press
ISBN: 0702255017
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 391
Book Description
This is the first biography of one of Australia's most beloved novelists, Thea Astley (1925–2004). Over a 50-year writing career, Astley published more than a dozen novels and short story collections, including The Acolyte, Drylands, and The Slow Natives, and was the first person to win multiple Miles Franklin Awards. With many of her works published internationally, Astley was a trailblazer for women writers. In her personal life, she was renowned for her dry wit, eccentricity, and compassion. Karen Lamb has drawn on an unparalleled range of interviews and correspondence to create a detailed picture of Thea the woman, as well as Astley the writer. She has sought to understand Astley's private world and how that shaped the distinctive body of work that is Thea Astley's literary legacy.
The Mystery of a Hansom Cab
Author: Fergus HumePublisher: LA CASE Books
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 492
Book Description
A new edition of the classic work of nineteenth century mystery fiction, The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, by Fergus Hume (1859-1932). Originally published in 1886, and set in Victorian-era Melbourne, Australia, The Mystery of a Hansom Cab is the story of a mysterious body discovered in a hansom cab. The ensuing homicide investigation, led by our protagonist Detective Gorby, draws us into the long buried secrets of the rich and influential Frettlby family and the class struggles that divide the rich and poor in Victorian-era Melbourne, Australia. A lively and engaging novel, The Mystery of a Hansom Cab is still a sensational read for lovers of mysteries stories, and is also a must-read for fans of the genre as a pivotal example of the evolution of the genre from sensationalist crime literature to complex detective thrillers. The Mystery of a Hansom Cab was Australia's first international bestselling novel and remains one of the bestselling detective novels of the 19th century. Published one year prior to Arthur Conan Doyle's A Study In Scarlet, it was ground-breaking and genre-defining, and in fact old-sold this first of Doyle's Sherlock Holmes novels.
Cultural Memory and Literature
Author: Diane MolloyPublisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004304088
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 239
Book Description
Cultural memory involves a community’s shared memories, the selection of which is based on current political and social needs. A past that is significant to a national group is re-imagined by generating new meanings that replace earlier certainties and fixed symbols or myths. This creates literary syncretisms with moments of undecidability. The analysis in this book draws on Renate Lachmann’s theory of intertextuality to show how novels that blur boundaries without standing in for history are prone to intervene in cultural memory. A brief overview of Aboriginal politics between the 1920s and the 1990s in relation to several novels provides historical and political background to the links between, and problems associated with, cultural memory, testimony, trauma, and Stolen Generations narratives, which are discussed in relation to Sally Morgan’s My Place and Doris Pilkington’s Rabbit-Proof Fence. There follows an analysis of novels that respond to the history of contact between Aboriginal and settler Australians, including Kate Grenville’s historical novels The Secret River, The Lieutenant, and Sarah Thornhill as examples of a traditional approach. David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon charts how language and naming defined our early national narrative that excluded Aboriginal people. Intertextuality is explored via the relation between Thea Astley’s The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow, Chloe Hooper’s The Tall Man, and the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. Kim Scott’s Benang: from the heart and That Deadman Dance and Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria reflect a number of Lachmann’s concepts – syncretism, dialogism, polyphony, Menippean satire, and the carnivalesque. Suggested is a new way of reading novels that respond to Australia’s violent past beyond trauma studies and postcolonial theory to re-imagine a different, syncretic past from multiple perspectives.
The Slow Natives
Author: Thea AstleyPublisher: [Sydney] : Angus and Robertson
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 210
Book Description