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This Girl Came to Our School single work   short story  
Issue Details: First known date: 1949... 1949 This Girl Came to Our School
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'There was girl came to our boarding school whose home was in Java. Her name was Josepha - Josepha de Vries. She was small with delicate wrists and ankles; her eyes, soft and dark, were mostly downcast above high cheekbones and her full mouth drooped pathetically. The bloom on her skin was neither gold nor olive, but something approaching both, and her hair was black with mahogany lights in its deep waves.' (Introduction)

Notes

  • Broadcast on various radio stations in the evening of 2 August 1949.

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

Date: 1949
  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Hecate Excess and Desire vol. 42 no. 2 2016 12293517 2016 periodical issue

    'This issue of Hecate, as well as the one to follow (43.1), prints some papers from the  "Excess, Desire and Twentieth to Twenty-First Century Women's Writing" conference held at The University of Queensland in February 2017. A common feature of the articles in this issue is that they investigate various possibilities of resistance to and agency against white supremacist, capitalist, imperialist, patriarchal, repressive regimes, both institutional and ideological - as their operations are recounted in women's writing and/or as they are examined/focused through a subversive feminist lens - the author's or the critic's.' (Editorial)

    2016
    pg. 62-65

Works about this Work

'Unlovely and Unloving' : An Introduction to Dorothy Blewett's 1949 Story 'This Girl Came to Our School' Kerry Kilner , 2016 single work criticism
— Appears in: Hecate , vol. 42 no. 2 2016; (p. 55-61)

'Dorothy Blewett's story, 'This Girl Came to Our School' broadcast on the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) in 1949 and published here in print for the first time, is a more complex work that it seems on first reading. Into its mere 1,600 words are packed themes of colonisation and its collapse, racism and prejudice, guerrilla warfare, constructed white privilege with its perception of the threat of miscegenation, and the enduring impacts of schoolgirl bullying on both the bullied and the bully. The story, written in the late 1940s, is a psychological study of the narrator's dawning recognition that her racist behaviour has, in part, fed into the creation of a revolutionary engaged in a battle against European culture and its colonial enterprise.

'The story was submitted to an ABC short story competition in 1949. Although it didn't win. the story was one of four commended submissions purchased by the ABC and broadcast around Australia in July and August 1949. The story was broadcast in Sydney, Darwin, Adelaide and Melbourne and is likely to have been broadcast across the entire ABC network in Australia.' (Abstract)

Radio Short Story Winners 1949 single work column
— Appears in: The Age , 12 July 1949; (p. 5)
Radio Short Story Winners 1949 single work column
— Appears in: The Age , 12 July 1949; (p. 5)
'Unlovely and Unloving' : An Introduction to Dorothy Blewett's 1949 Story 'This Girl Came to Our School' Kerry Kilner , 2016 single work criticism
— Appears in: Hecate , vol. 42 no. 2 2016; (p. 55-61)

'Dorothy Blewett's story, 'This Girl Came to Our School' broadcast on the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) in 1949 and published here in print for the first time, is a more complex work that it seems on first reading. Into its mere 1,600 words are packed themes of colonisation and its collapse, racism and prejudice, guerrilla warfare, constructed white privilege with its perception of the threat of miscegenation, and the enduring impacts of schoolgirl bullying on both the bullied and the bully. The story, written in the late 1940s, is a psychological study of the narrator's dawning recognition that her racist behaviour has, in part, fed into the creation of a revolutionary engaged in a battle against European culture and its colonial enterprise.

'The story was submitted to an ABC short story competition in 1949. Although it didn't win. the story was one of four commended submissions purchased by the ABC and broadcast around Australia in July and August 1949. The story was broadcast in Sydney, Darwin, Adelaide and Melbourne and is likely to have been broadcast across the entire ABC network in Australia.' (Abstract)

Last amended 30 Nov 2017 09:56:09
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Subjects:
  • Java,
    c
    Indonesia,
    c
    Southeast Asia, South and East Asia, Asia,
  • c
    Australia,
    c
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