Born: Established: 21 Dec 1938 Nowra, Nowra area, Shoalhaven area, South Coast, New South Wales, ; Died: Ceased: 26 Jun 2022 Sydney, New South Wales,
Gender:
Male
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Details of Works Taught
| Text | Unit Name | Institution | Year |
|---|---|---|---|
y
Cold Light
North Sydney
:
Knopf
Vintage Australia
,
2011
Z1811619
2011
single work
novel
historical fiction
(taught in 1 units)
'It is 1950, the League of Nations has collapsed and the newly formed United Nations has rejected all those who worked and fought for the League. Edith Campbell Berry, who joined the League in Geneva before the war, is out of a job, her vision shattered. With her sexually unconventional, husband, Ambrose, she comes back to Australia to live in Canberra. 'Edith now has ambitions to become Australia's first female ambassador, but while she waits for a Call from On High, she finds herself caught up in the planning of the national capital and the dream that it should be "a city like no other". 'When her communist brother, Frederick, turns up out of the blue after many years of absence, she becomes concerned that he may jeopardise her chances of becoming a diplomat. It is not a safe time to be a communist in Australia or to be related to one, but she refuses to be cowed by the anti-communist sentiment sweeping the country. It is also not a safe time or place to be "a wife with a lavender husband". After pursuing the Bloomsbury life for many years, Edith finds herself fearful of being exposed. Unexpectedly, in mid-life she also realises that she yearns for children. When she meets a man who could offer not only security but a ready-made family, she consults the Book of Crossroads and the answer changes the course of her life. 'Intelligent, poignant and absorbing, Cold Light is a remarkable stand-alone novel, which can also be read as a companion to the earlier Edith novels Grand Days and Dark Palace.' (From the publisher's website.) |
Writers at Work: Fiction | University of Sydney | 2012 (Semester 2) |
| Text | Unit Name | Institution | Year |
|---|---|---|---|
|
y
Forty-Seventeen
Frank Moorhouse
,
Ringwood
:
Viking
,
1988
Z356438
1988
selected work
short story
(taught in 1 units)
'He is a failed writer turned diplomat, an anarchist learning the value of discipline. He moves in a world which takes him from the Australian wilderness to the conference rooms of Vienna and Geneva; from the whore-house to warzone he feels the pull of the genetic spiral of his ancestry. At the sharp axis of his mid-life he scans the memorabilia of his feelings in the hope of giving answers. In his first full-length novel Moorhouse presents a roving, dissatisfied man entering middle age in a house-of-mirrors portrait: fragmentary and multifaceted. Sean, a hard-drinking, hard-living Australian, has just turned 40; the other half of the title refers to a precocious schoolgirl who is one of his many liaisons. The most important of the other women who drift into and out of his life include his ex-wife Robyn, now unflinching in the face of cancer; Belle, Sean's fellow sexual adventurer; and Edith Campbell Berry, an aging iconoclast whom Sean encounters in Vienna and Israel. Forty-Seventeen is told with characteristic Moorhouse style — candid, wryly insightful and morbidly comic— and, in this resonant and acclaimed book, achieves a new virtuosity.' (Publication summary) |
Australian Literature | James Cook University | 2012 (Semester 2) |
