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AbstractHistoryArchive Description
'These short stories cut deep into the flesh of Australian society, revealing the minor tragedies and joys of ordinary people. At their heart is a love of life and resilience against violence and loss.' (Source: WorldCat website)
Reading Australia
This work has Reading Australia teaching resources.
Unit Suitable For Senior Secondary English (Units 1 & 4)
Duration10 weeks
Curriculum Summary
Australian Curriculum content descriptions and NSW Syllabus outcomes
Themes
addiction, community, domestic violence, family, First Nations creators, gender roles and stereotypes, hope, loss, mental illness, poverty, Refugees, resilience, trauma
General Capabilities
Ethical Understanding, Personal and Social Capability
Cross-curriculum Priorities
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Histories and Cultures, Sustainability
Notes
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Dedication: For Sarah
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Epigraph:
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My father's house shines hard and bright
it stands like a beacon calling me in the night
Calling and calling, so cold and alone
Shining 'cross this dark highway where our
sins lie unatoned.
-Bruce Springsteen
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Contents
- The Last Time I Saw Cherry, single work short story
- The Day of the Hen, single work short story
- Gardening For Pleasure, single work short story
- Cartography, single work short story
- How Sweet Is the Sound?, single work short story
- The Chocolate Empire, single work short story
- Two Men and Their Dogs, single work short story
- Gifted, single work short story
- Made to Measure, single work short story
- The Ward, single work short story
- The Tern, single work short story
- Father's Day, single work short story
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Works about this Work
-
Crafting “Literary Sense of Place” : the Generative Work of Literary Place-making
2018
single work
criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , vol. 1 no. 18 2018;'This paper examines the how of literary wheres. As makers of literary works, creative writers are tasked with evoking place on the page. While the nexus of place and literature is increasingly recognised as fertile scholarly ground, the specifics of how writers actually “make” literary places remain opaque and under-researched. I seek to address this gap by exploring how literary place is constituted through creative practice. Focusing on the work of Australian writer Tony Birch, I document a range of generative tools creative writers may use to produce what I call “literary sense of place”. Drawing on interview-based case studies and key concepts from human geography, I analyse how these practitioners harness various “off-page” modes of enquiry to evoke place compellingly in textual form. While my main focus is creative practice, I also examine the resultant literary texts to help illuminate how process manifests in content. By profiling a range of “place-oriented experiential techniques (POETs)” – including site visits, memory, direct encounters, sensory attentiveness, “vicarious emplacement”, socio-cultural understandings, and happenstance – I present a fine-grained account of literary place-making from a practitioners’ perspective. I conclude that producing literary place is a generative, cumulative and associative process, in which writers mobilise a rich array of lived sensations, emotions, memories, understandings and actions. In foregrounding these “backstage” modes of creative labour, this paper helps clarify how writers deploy both personal and shared experiences to render literary place in resonant ways.' (Publication abstract)
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Place, History and Story: Tony Birch and the Yarra River
2016
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Australian Literary Studies , 2016 vol. 31 no. 2 2016; 'This essay examines the three Yarra River stories in Tony Birch’s short fiction collections. ‘The Sea of Tranquillity’ ‘The Chocolate Empire’ and ‘The Toecutters’ all question the historical inscription of the Yarra that favours the culturally dominant account by placing it in relation to alternative stories. The torsion engendered by this questioning is apparent in the stories themselves. They are simultaneously discussions of class-based social exclusion and counter-stories of settlement; settled places are re-inscribed with meanings and histories obscured by the dominant account of ‘settlement’, which it thus critiques. The structure of the contemporary short story, to reveal a truth buried under the mundane details of life, aids Birch’s purpose. The form enacts a propensity to doubling, twinning and contrasting the familiar and the strange, or being at once in the dominant reality of the settler-colonial culture and, by social imposition, in the situation of the other. Hence, Birch’s stories open into narratives drawn from a number of socially marginalised groups, according to class, gender, geography or age. In Birch’s own account of his disillusionment with the institutionally-based academic writing of the post-history wars environment he speaks of embarking on an alternative project to ‘put meat on the bones of history’, a project which involves turning from the Historian’s history to ‘the way that fiction deals with the past and its role in documenting history’: to bring history and story together (‘Trouble’ 235, 241). This essay traces that process in the three Yarra stories.' (Abstract) -
Take Three
2010
single work
review
— Appears in: Sunday Canberra Times , 24 January 2010; (p. 26)
— Review of A Woman of Seville : A Novel of Love, Ladders and the Unexpected 2009 single work novel ; Legacy 2009 single work novel ; Father's Day 2009 selected work short story -
The Emotional Lives of Men
2009
single work
review
— Appears in: The Age , 5 December 2009; (p. 27)
— Review of Father's Day 2009 selected work short story -
Cover Notes
2009
single work
review
— Appears in: The Sunday Age , 1 November 2009; (p. 21)
— Review of Father's Day 2009 selected work short story
-
Cover Notes
2009
single work
review
— Appears in: The Sunday Age , 1 November 2009; (p. 21)
— Review of Father's Day 2009 selected work short story -
The Emotional Lives of Men
2009
single work
review
— Appears in: The Age , 5 December 2009; (p. 27)
— Review of Father's Day 2009 selected work short story -
Take Three
2010
single work
review
— Appears in: Sunday Canberra Times , 24 January 2010; (p. 26)
— Review of A Woman of Seville : A Novel of Love, Ladders and the Unexpected 2009 single work novel ; Legacy 2009 single work novel ; Father's Day 2009 selected work short story -
Place, History and Story: Tony Birch and the Yarra River
2016
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Australian Literary Studies , 2016 vol. 31 no. 2 2016; 'This essay examines the three Yarra River stories in Tony Birch’s short fiction collections. ‘The Sea of Tranquillity’ ‘The Chocolate Empire’ and ‘The Toecutters’ all question the historical inscription of the Yarra that favours the culturally dominant account by placing it in relation to alternative stories. The torsion engendered by this questioning is apparent in the stories themselves. They are simultaneously discussions of class-based social exclusion and counter-stories of settlement; settled places are re-inscribed with meanings and histories obscured by the dominant account of ‘settlement’, which it thus critiques. The structure of the contemporary short story, to reveal a truth buried under the mundane details of life, aids Birch’s purpose. The form enacts a propensity to doubling, twinning and contrasting the familiar and the strange, or being at once in the dominant reality of the settler-colonial culture and, by social imposition, in the situation of the other. Hence, Birch’s stories open into narratives drawn from a number of socially marginalised groups, according to class, gender, geography or age. In Birch’s own account of his disillusionment with the institutionally-based academic writing of the post-history wars environment he speaks of embarking on an alternative project to ‘put meat on the bones of history’, a project which involves turning from the Historian’s history to ‘the way that fiction deals with the past and its role in documenting history’: to bring history and story together (‘Trouble’ 235, 241). This essay traces that process in the three Yarra stories.' (Abstract) -
Crafting “Literary Sense of Place” : the Generative Work of Literary Place-making
2018
single work
criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , vol. 1 no. 18 2018;'This paper examines the how of literary wheres. As makers of literary works, creative writers are tasked with evoking place on the page. While the nexus of place and literature is increasingly recognised as fertile scholarly ground, the specifics of how writers actually “make” literary places remain opaque and under-researched. I seek to address this gap by exploring how literary place is constituted through creative practice. Focusing on the work of Australian writer Tony Birch, I document a range of generative tools creative writers may use to produce what I call “literary sense of place”. Drawing on interview-based case studies and key concepts from human geography, I analyse how these practitioners harness various “off-page” modes of enquiry to evoke place compellingly in textual form. While my main focus is creative practice, I also examine the resultant literary texts to help illuminate how process manifests in content. By profiling a range of “place-oriented experiential techniques (POETs)” – including site visits, memory, direct encounters, sensory attentiveness, “vicarious emplacement”, socio-cultural understandings, and happenstance – I present a fine-grained account of literary place-making from a practitioners’ perspective. I conclude that producing literary place is a generative, cumulative and associative process, in which writers mobilise a rich array of lived sensations, emotions, memories, understandings and actions. In foregrounding these “backstage” modes of creative labour, this paper helps clarify how writers deploy both personal and shared experiences to render literary place in resonant ways.' (Publication abstract)
