VCE Literature Text List 2018
The following texts proposed by the Literature Text Advisory Panel have been approved by the
Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority (VCAA) as suitable for study in Units 3 and 4 in
2018. Texts were selected in accordance with the following criteria and guidelines.
Criteria for text selection
Each text selected for the VCE Literature text list will:
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have literary merit
be an excellent example of form and genre
sustain intensive study, raising interesting issues and providing challenging ideas
reflect current community standards and expectations in the context of senior secondary study
of texts.
The text list as a whole will:
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be suitable for a diverse student cohort from a range of backgrounds and contexts, including
students for whom English is an additional language
reflect the cultural diversity of the Victorian community
include texts by Australians, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples
include a balance of new and established works*, including a Shakespearean text
include texts that display affirming perspectives
reflect engagement with global perspectives.
*Established works include texts that are recognised as having enduring artistic value.
Guidelines for text selection
The text list for VCE Literature must adhere to the following guidelines:
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The text list will contain 30 texts.
The text list must represent a range of texts in the following approximate proportions:
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nine novels
eight plays
three collections of short stories
four other works of literature
six collections of poetry.
One-third of texts on the text list must be by Australian authors.
Approximately 75 per cent of texts on the text list would be expected to be familiar to most VCE
Literature teachers.
The text list must contain titles that are different from those on the VCE English and EAL text
list.
The text list will be reviewed annually, with approximately 25 per cent of the texts being
changed. No text will appear for more than four consecutive years or fewer than two years.
Texts will be accompanied by full bibliographic details where necessary.
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VCE Literature Text List 2018
Information for schools
Teachers must consider the text list in conjunction with the relevant text selection information
published on page 15 of the VCE Literature Study Design 2017–2020 for Units 3 and 4.
The selection must include:
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one novel
one collection of poetry
one play
two further texts selected from novels, plays, collections of poetry, collections of short stories,
other literature or films.
At least one of the texts selected must be Australian.
Students must study a sixth text for Unit 3 Area of Study 1. The text used for Unit 3 Area of Study 1
must be an adaptation of one of the five required texts selected from the text list published by the
VCAA. The text may take the form of, but is not limited to:
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a live performance by a professional theatre company
a film, including a film script
a television miniseries
a playscript.
A student adaptation cannot be used as the adaptation text for Unit 3 Area of Study 1.
The literary criticism studied for Unit 4 Area of Study 1 is not prescribed.
The selection of texts should ensure that students experience a range of literature from early to
contemporary works, dealing with a diversity of cultural experiences and a range of viewpoints.
Students are encouraged to read widely in both Units 3 and 4 to support the achievement of all
outcomes.
While the VCAA considers all the texts on the text list suitable for study, teachers should be aware
that with some texts there may be sensitivities in relation to certain issues. In selecting texts for
study, teachers should make themselves aware of these issues prior to introducing the text to
students.
The VCAA does not prescribe editions; any complete edition may be used. However, it should be
noted that the editions nominated in the text list are those from which the passages for the
examination will be selected. For collections of poetry, poems are prescribed; students must study
the poems listed in the text list.
The bibliographic information in this document is provided to assist teachers to obtain texts and is
correct, as far as possible, at the time of publication. Publishing details may change from time to
time and teachers should consult the VCAA Bulletin regularly for any amendments or alterations to
the text list.
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Key to codes
The text list is presented alphabetically by author according to text type. Abbreviations in brackets
after the titles signify the following:
(A) This text meets the Australian requirement.
(#) Bracketed numbers indicate the number of years that a text has appeared on the VCE Literature
text list; (1) for example, indicates that 2018 is the first year that a text has appeared on the text list.
Novels
Cadwallader, Robyn, The Anchoress (A)(1)
Calvino, Italo, ‘The Baron in the Trees’, in Our Ancestors, Archibald Colquhoun (trans.) (2)
Conrad, Joseph, Heart of Darkness (3)
Gaskell, Elizabeth, North and South (2)
Scott, Kim, That Deadman Dance (A)(4)
Stead, Christina, The Man Who Loved Children (A)(3)
Tomasi di Lampedusa, Guiseppe, The Leopard (3)
Vásquez, Juan Gabriel, The Sound of Things Falling, Anne McLean (trans.) (2)
Winterson, Jeanette, The Passion (1)
Plays
Aeschylus, ‘Agamemnon’, in The Oresteia, Robert Fagles (trans.) (4)
Delaney, Shelagh, A Taste of Honey (1)
Ionesco, Eugène, ‘Rhinoceros’, Derek Prouse (trans.), in Rhinoceros, The Chairs, The Lesson (4)
Reza, Yasmina, Art (1)
Shakespeare, William, Coriolanus (4)
Shakespeare, William, Twelfth Night (2)
Shepard, Sam, Buried Child (2)
Williams, Tennessee, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (2)
Short stories
Beneba Clarke, Maxine, Foreign Soil (A) (1)
Stories for study: ‘David’; ‘Hope’, ‘Shu Yi’, ‘Railton Road’, ‘Gaps in the Hickory’, ‘Big Island’, ‘The
Stilt Fishermen of Kathaluwa’, ‘The Suki Yaki Book Club’
Dovey, Ceridwen, Only the Animals (A) (1)
Stories for study: ‘Pigeons, a Pony, the Tomcat and I’, ‘Hundstage’ ‘Somewhere Along the Line the
Pearl Would be Handed to Me’, ‘Plautus, a Memoir of my Years on Earth and Last days in Space’,
‘I, the Elephant, Wrote This’, ‘A Letter to Sylvia Plath’, ‘Psittacophile’
Gogol, Nikolay, The Diary of a Madman, The Government Inspector and Selected Stories (3)
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Stories for study: ‘Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka and His Aunt’, ‘How Ivan Ivanovich Quarrelled with
Ivan Nikiforovich’, ‘Nevsky Prospekt’, ‘The Nose’, ‘The Overcoat’, ‘Diary of a Madman’, ‘The
Carriage’
Other literature
Fitzpatrick, Sheila, My Father’s Daughter: Memories of an Australian Childhood (A) (3)
Stanner, WEH, The Dreaming & Other Essays (A) (4)
Essays for study: ‘Durmugam: A Nangiomeri’, ‘The Dreaming’, ‘The Aborigines’, ‘Continuity and
Change among the Aborigines’, ‘Aborigines and Australian Society’, ‘Aboriginal Humour’
Voltaire, Candide, or Optimism (2)
Woolf, Virginia, A Room of One’s Own (1)
Poetry
Each poem listed must be studied. In the case of longer poems, extracts from the poem may be
used in the examination.
Browning, Robert, Selected Poems (3)
Poems for study: ‘Porphyria’s Lover’, ‘My Last Duchess’, ‘Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister’, ‘The
Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church’, ‘Love Among the Ruins’, ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’, ‘A
Toccata of Galuppi’s’, ‘Andrea Del Sarto’, ‘Two in the Campagna’, ‘Confessions’, ‘Youth and Art’,
‘Never the Time and the Place’
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Chang, Tina, Handal, Nathalie and Shankar, Ravi (eds), Language for a New Century:
Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond (2)
Poems for study from ‘In the Grasp of Childhood Fields’:
Joseph O Legaspi, ‘Ode to My Mother’s Hair’; Ha Jin, ‘Homework’; Tanikawa Shuntarō, ‘In Praise of
Goldberg’; Xuân Quỳnh, ‘The Blue Flower’; Romesh Gunesekera, ‘Turning Point’; Dilawar
Karadaghi, ‘A Child Who Returned from There Told Us’; Luis Cabalquinto, ‘Depths of Field’
Poems for study from ‘Parsed into Colors’:
Diana Der-Hovanessian, ‘Two Voices’; Leung Ping-Kwan, ‘Postcards of Old Hong Kong’; Ravi
Shankar, ‘Exile’; Gregory Djanikian, ‘The Boy Who Had Eleven Toes’; K Dhondup, ‘Exile’; Li-Young
Lee, ‘Immigrant Blues’
Poems for study from ‘Slips and Atmospherics’:
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, ‘The World’s a Printing House’; Arundhathi Subramaniam, ‘Strategist’;
Marjorie Evasco, ‘Dreamweavers’; Michael Ondaatje, ‘Proust in the Waters’
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Dobson, Rosemary, Collected (A) (4)
Poems for study: ‘The Fisherman and the Moon’, ‘The Ship of Ice’, ‘Painter of Umbria’, ‘The Mirror’,
‘The Tiger’, ‘Out of Winter’, ‘Annunciations’, ‘The Passionate Poet and His Muse’, ‘The Passionate
Poet and the Moon’, ‘Eutychus’, ‘Over the Frontier’, ‘The Greek Vase’, ‘The Sanctuary on Overton
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Hill, Wiltshire’, ‘The Almond-tree in the King James Version’, ‘Reading Aloud’, ‘Poems a Long Way
after Basho’
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Plath, Sylvia, Ariel (1)
Poems for study: ‘Morning Song’, ‘Sheep in Fog’, ‘The Applicant’, ‘Lady Lazarus’, ‘Tulips’, ‘Cut’, ‘The
Night Dances’, ‘Poppies in October’, ‘Nick and the Candlestick’, ‘The Moon and the Yew Tree’,
‘Letter in November’, ‘Daddy’, ‘You’re’, ‘The Arrival of the Bee Box’, ‘The Munich Mannequins’,
‘Balloons’, ‘Kindness’, ‘Words’
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Wagan Watson, Samuel, Smoke Encrypted Whispers (A) (1)
Poems for study: ‘Magnesium Girl’, ‘On the River’, ‘Waiting for the Good Man’, ‘White Stucco
Dreaming’, ‘Jetty Nights’, ‘A Verse for the Cheated’, ‘The Gloom Swans’, ‘Labelled’, ‘For the Wake
and Skeleton Dance’, ‘Cheap White-Goods at the Dreamtime Sale’, ‘Poem 9’, ‘Hotel Bone’, ‘We’re
Not Truckin’ Around’, ‘Night Racing’, ‘Deo Optimo Maximo’, ‘Jaded Olympic Moments’, ‘Smoke
Signals’, ‘Cribb Island’
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Wallace-Crabbe, Chris, New and Selected Poems (A) (3)
Poems for study: ‘Shadows’, ‘The Swing’, ‘In Light and Darkness’, ‘Genesis’, ‘Now That April’s
Here’, ‘Sacred Ridges Above Diamond Creek’, ‘The Thing Itself’, ‘An Elegy’, ‘Sunset Sky Near
Coober Pedy’, ‘Reality’, ‘Erstwhile’, ‘Timber’, ‘The Rescue Will Not Take Place’, ‘Cho Ben Thanh:
Richmond’, ‘At the Clothesline’ (in ‘The Domestic Sublime’)
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Annotations
These annotations are provided to assist teachers with text selection. The comments are not
intended to represent the only possible interpretation or a favoured reading of a text. The list is
arranged alphabetically by author according to text type.
Novels
Cadwallader, Robyn, The Anchoress, Fourth Estate, 2015 (A) 1
A scholar of medieval studies, Cadwallader writes about seventeen-year-old Sarah, living in
England in 1255. Cadwallader’s prose has been compared to Hilary Mantel’s; the story is told with
historical accuracy and the style is contemporary. Sarah voluntarily becomes an anchoress, a holy
woman who will spend her entire life locked in a small cell attached to the side of a church. This is
as much a tale of extreme isolation and self-abnegation as it is of community. Sarah gives up
sunlight, most communication with the outside world, and subjects herself to ascetic practices, as
she struggles to control her bodily needs and functions in order to experience her faith more
profoundly.
Cadwallader skilfully draws the reader into this world, depicting both the painful and transcendent
aspects of Sarah’s psychological and physical journey. Beyond her interior life, Sarah is an
important member of her village: she has two servants who communicate the outside world to her;
she challenges a predatory feudal lord; she communes with priests from the local priory; and she
dispenses guidance and prayers to villagers. Cadwallader gives the reader a portrait of English
medieval life, particularly the complex relationships between peasants, landowners, and the church,
the brutal treatment of women, and the role of faith in society.
The Anchoress provides a wonderful opportunity to explore the workings of an expansive mind and
the importance of valuing one’s voice in society. In keeping with Cadwallader’s historically accurate
depiction of medieval Christian worship, the novel contains descriptions of the effects of prolonged
fasting and self-flagellation, and teachers are advised to take these passages into consideration
when selecting this text.
Calvino, Italo, ‘The Baron in the Trees’, in Our Ancestors, Archibald Colquhoun (trans.),
Vintage, 1998 (2)
Baron Cosimo Piovasco di Rondo, on 5 June 1767, at the age of 12, rejects a plateful of snails at
the family dining table, climbs a tree and never again returns to earth. In adopting this eccentric life
in the trees, Cosimo creates a rich and adventure-filled world for himself. Italo Calvino’s ‘The Baron
in the Trees’ comes out of the author’s modernist period but looks forward to the bold experiments
in form which were to characterise his later post-modern work. Calvino makes use of allegory and
extraordinary characters and situations in order to depict the post-war loss of community and the
intellectual’s search for significance in a time of shattered illusions. No division exists between
fantasy and reality in this world. In keeping with its experimental, modernist aesthetic, the work
contains stylised depictions of sexuality, bodily functions, violence, war and death. The plot lines
invite interpretations that acknowledge the alienation and repressions framed by the discourses of
Marx and Freud but, as Calvino points out in his introduction, ‘no single key will turn all their locks’.
Calvino’s unreliable narrators expose the process of story-telling, making explicit the author’s
fascination with the writing process and his interest in the shifting nature of language.
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Conrad, Joseph, Heart of Darkness, Penguin Classics, 2007 (3)
‘And this also,’ said Marlow suddenly, ‘has been one of the dark places of the earth’. So observes
the protagonist of Joseph Conrad’s novella, Heart of Darkness, anticipating his narration of the
nightmarish physical and psychological quest endured as he voyaged into the African interior in
search of the charismatic but depraved Mr Kurtz. Despite his towering presence in the novel, Kurtz
remains enigmatic throughout. He appears to have betrayed his unnamed ‘Intended’ with an
unnamed African mistress and to have betrayed noble intentions by degenerating into a mass
murderer. However, far more is said about him than by him and, although he is described as ‘an
extremist’, it is never made clear what he believed in before he went into the jungle.
A similarly elusive quality applies to other important aspects of the text. There is a dream-like quality
to Marlow’s time in the ‘sepulchral city’ and the nature of the commission he receives there is
somewhat vague. Marlow’s story occupies nearly the entire novella, yet he is being quoted by
someone else on a ship in the Thames – the actual narrator of the text remains anonymous.
Although the text can be read as a damning indictment of the Belgians in the Congo, the river at the
centre of the story is never identified. Marlow’s musings on colonialism suggest that the quest for
power and the capacity for savagery are timeless and universal.
Gaskell, Elizabeth, North and South, Penguin Classics, 2003 (2)
North and South was first published in serial form in Dickens’ Household Words between
September 1854 and January 1855. Like Gaskell’s earlier Mary Barton (1848), North and South can
be considered a ‘Condition of England Novel’: a burgeoning genre in the 1840s and ’50s concerned
with possible solutions to social conflict created by industrialisation. Nineteenth-century readers did
not respond to Gaskell’s novel with much enthusiasm, some reviewers questioning the tastefulness
of its subject matter and others the female author’s credentials for her subject matter.
North and South can now be seen as one of the earliest industrialist novels and one that challenged
contemporary thinking about the need to defend the traditional values of the South from the ‘evils’ of
the North. The story centres on the developing relationship between the novel’s heroine, Margaret
Hale – a proud woman whose family has fallen from a position of wealth and social status – and the
self-made industrialist, John Thornton. Gaskell weaves subplots that explore the degrading effects
of poverty, the nature of honour, and the potential for self-improvement and redemption.
Scott, Kim, That Deadman Dance, Picador, 2013 (A) (4)
In his note at the end of That Deadman Dance, Kim Scott, descendant of the Noongar people
himself, writes that he ‘wanted to build a story from their confidence, their inclusiveness and sense
of play, and their readiness to appropriate new cultural forms – language and songs, guns and
boats – as soon as they became available’. Using a range of historical sources as his springboard,
Scott writes of the sealing and whaling settlement of the coastline of Western Australia around
Albany in the years prior to, and following, the founding of the Swan River colony in 1829.
The central character of the story is Bobby Wabalanginy – a smart, engaging and resourceful young
Noongar man who becomes indispensible to several of the settlers he befriends. Bobby’s youth, and
readiness to learn, mean that he traverses two cultures with ease, appropriating the language of
others, and sharing his own. As the settlement and the story progress, his situation becomes
increasingly complex, and when his proposal for a treaty in which all would have a voice is rejected
by the settlers, he is left uncertain of his belonging. Scott writes with a lyricism that values culture
and song, dance and story, but also with an edge. This novel won the Miles Franklin Award (2011)
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VCE Literature Text List 2018
and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (2011), the Victorian, Western Australian, South Australian
and New South Wales Premiers’ Literary Awards, and numerous others.
Stead, Christina, The Man Who Loved Children, The Miegunyah Press, 2011 (A) (3)
The Man Who Loved Children by Australian writer Christina Stead was first published in 1940, but it
was not until it was reissued in 1965 that it found widespread critical acclaim both within Australia
and beyond. In 2010, Time magazine included the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language
Novels from 1923 to 2005.
Set in Washington DC in the 1930s, The Man Who Loved Children is a haunting story of
dysfunctional family life. Sam Pollitt is a brilliant and wilful man, one who has failed to outgrow
childish self-centredness. Sam is both loved and feared by his five children, who are never certain of
the point at which his enchanted games will slip into terrifying and cruel torment. His invention of a
private language, comprehensible only to his family, has its playful allure, and yet it places them all
firmly under his control within a tight family circle. In his excessive and maddening presence, his
wife Henny becomes too exhausted to nurture the children, who yearn for her attention. She finally
finds a tragic resolution in suicide. It is the children in their innocent vitality who bring both humour
and pathos to the story. Louie (Sam’s daughter by his first wife) is the heroine of the novel. She finally
resists her father’s manipulation and with the words of a loved teacher in mind, walks away as a
young adolescent, armed with a burning desire to write. While Stead examines the power of
language to exclude and control, she also reminds us that language provides an escape from
oppression and an opportunity for the creation of selfhood.
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Tomasi di Lampedusa, Guiseppe, The Leopard, Vintage, 2007 (3)
The central character of this beautifully crafted novel is the Prince of Salina, the head of an
aristocratic family in Sicily. The novel examines the years from 1860 – when Garibaldi’s troops took
control of Palermo as part of the eventual unification of Italy – to 1910, by which time the family has
declined and the values for which it stood are seen as irrelevant in a changing world. The novel
portrays the opulence, decadence and extreme privilege enjoyed by the Salinas, but also
recognises the seductive beauty of this cultured but doomed world. Similarly, the Prince, a noted
astronomer and in many ways an admirable, sensitive and perspicacious character, is deeply
flawed. A clear eyed cynicism is evident in the author’s criticism both of the Church and of an
ambitious, insensitive and avaricious middle class that will eventually replace the old aristocracy.
The Leopard is concerned with change, the nature of love and the transitory nature of happiness.
Images of death recur throughout the novel, foreshadowing both the end of the old aristocratic world
and its representative, the Prince.
Vásquez, Juan Gabriel, The Sound of Things Falling, Anne McLean (trans.), Bloomsbury
Publishing, 2012 (2)
A contemporary example of Latin American literary noir fiction, The Sound of Things Falling
investigates the impact of the drug trade on the private lives of everyday Colombians. Set in Bogota
and the Colombian countryside during and after the most difficult years of the drug wars, it is
narrated retrospectively by the central character, law professor Antonio Yammara. Through the use
of flashbacks, the novel charts Antonio’s friendship with the mysterious ex-pilot Ricardo Laverde,
whose secretive past poses uncomfortable questions about expediency, corruption and thwarted
ambition. When Antonio becomes the inadvertent witness to Ricardo’s murder, the profound effect
of this shocking event on the rest of Antonio’s life, both personal and professional, forms the
backdrop of his attempts to deal with his own post-traumatic stress. As the unwitting victim of a
burgeoning wave of violence and crime that comes to shape and define their country, Antonio
perhaps typifies ordinary Colombians struggling to comprehend the escalating brutality of the drug
wars.
With echoes of the counter-culture movement of the ’60s and ’70s, when American peaceniks and
volunteers headed to the remote villages of South America, their youthful conviction is juxtaposed
with a more sinister reality. Moving between Bogota, the rural villages of Columbia and the United
States, The Sound of Things Falling is an intergenerational mystery that explores fate and destiny.
Winterson, Jeanette, The Passion, Vintage 1996 (first published 1987) (1)
The Passion is set during the Napoleonic era and is narrated by French peasant Henri and
Villanelle, a Venetian croupier. Henri’s narrative depicts the gruesome nature of war and the often
pathetic reality of life for the disempowered, as Napoleon drives his troops into Russia during the
Zero Winter. Henri is Napoleon’s chicken chef and is devoted to his leader. Villanelle’s narrative
begins in Venice, a ‘city of disguises’, where she is born the web-footed daughter of a boatman.
While working at the casino, she loses her heart to the ‘Queen of Spades’, a married woman who
ultimately does not return her love with the same intensity. Villanelle marries a rich man who
eventually sells her to the French army. The two narratives converge when Villanelle reaches
Russia and meets Henri, who falls obsessively in love with her. They escape together and return to
Venice.
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Winterson blends the magical and fabulous with the vulgar and violent, power and gender are
central concerns. Early in the novel there is an incident in which drunken soldiers visit a brothel and
their conduct is depicted with brutal realism. This scene and graphic images such as the soldier with
his feet frozen into the insides of a horse are juxtaposed with magical, fairy tale passages such as
the one in which Henri attempts to recover Villanelle’s heart from the house of her lover. The
language is economical yet richly lyrical, sensuous, and humorous. Both narratives involve
convincing and moving evocations of passion and what Villanelle calls ‘the silent space that is the
pain of never having enough.’ Winterson’s prose is assured, playful and vivacious as she tests the
boundaries of storytelling. The reader is repeatedly reminded that this is more historiographical
metafiction than history: ‘I’m telling you stories. Trust me.’
Plays
Aeschylus, ‘Agamemnon’, in The Oresteia, Robert Fagles (trans.), Penguin Classics, 1979 (4)
Aeschylus’ trilogy won first prize at the Festival of Dionysus and it remains one of the most
frequently performed Greek tragedies, with its poetic choral odes, flawed aristocratic characters and
disturbing off-stage family violence. Originally performed in 5th-century Athens BCE during the
Festival of Dionysus, ‘Agamemnon’ is the first tragedy in Aeschylus’ trilogy, The Oresteia. The play
commences after the fall of Troy, with the Greek king Agamemnon’s homecoming to Argos, ruled
during his long absence by his wife, Clytemnestra. Agamemnon brings with him his concubine,
Cassandra, a captive Trojan princess and priestess whose prophecies are cursed to be ignored.
Hence, when she foretells that the House of Atreus will be destroyed and that she and Agamemnon
will be murdered, her words are not heeded. Clytemnestra lures Agamemnon along the red carpet
to his death, taking her revenge on her husband for the sacrificing of their daughter, Iphigenia.
The action of the plot revolves around murder, punishment, revenge and a fatalistic conception of
human life. The play has much relevance for modern audiences: it is a chilling exploration of gender
roles, the pursuit of power and family betrayal and guilt, in a cycle of violence where one act of
violence leads to the next – and elicits pity and fear for the destructive forces in human nature.
Delaney, Shelagh, A Taste of Honey, Methuen Drama/Bloomsbury, 2016 (first produced 1958)
(1)
A Taste of Honey was written by 18-year-old Shelagh Delaney, allegedly because she felt she could
do better than well-known playwright Terrence Rattigan. Written in 10 days, it was her first play and
captured the ethos of the staid 1950s, poised on the brink of the ‘swinging sixties’. The play was
radical in its representation of working-class women from a working-class woman's point of view. It
also broke new ground in its sympathetic construction of a gay man and its non-stereotypical
portrayal of a black character.
Delaney’s subject matter – interracial sex, teenage pregnancy and homosexuality – taboo topics in
the conservative 1950s, is treated simply as part of life’s diversity. The central character, Jo, a
restless adolescent, lives with her somewhat vulgar mother, Helen, who is only interested in her
new boyfriend, Peter, an unpleasant but wealthy younger man. Jo meets Jimmy, a black sailor to
whom she becomes pregnant. He buys her an engagement ring and then leaves for a lengthy tour
of duty. Jo moves into a shabby bed-sit and soon meets a gay art student. He moves in with her and
offers to marry her but Helen arrives on the scene and forces him to move out. The fraught
interactions between the central characters explore ideas about mother-daughter relationships,
friendship, sexuality, homophobia and racism and the lack of options for women – especially
working-class women.
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Adapted into an award-winning film, A Taste of Honey became one of the defining plays of 1950s
working-class and feminist movements.
Ionesco, Eugène, ‘Rhinoceros’, Derek Prouse (trans.), in Rhinoceros, The Chairs, The
Lesson, Penguin Modern Classics, 2000 (4)
Romanian French writer, Eugene Ionesco is best known as a playwright and a key figure in French
Avant-garde theatre, a movement that emphasised experimental, unorthodox ways of representing
the world and, in the post-war years, was influenced by thinkers such as Albert Camus and Jean
Paul Sartre. Ionesco also wrote a novel, theoretical essays on theatre, and authored some more
philosophical writings. He was made a member of the Académie Francaise in 1970, and in his
lifetime was much awarded as a playwright across Europe and in Israel.
Ionesco sought to portray his philosophical ideas theatrically by moving away from realism, and into
a world of the imagination using allegory, symbolism, humour and absurdity to jolt the audience from
comfortable assumptions about the world. Berenger, the protagonist of ‘Rhinoceros’ (and of several
other plays – a character who has been described as a semi-autobiographical figure), must choose
to remain human or to conform and become a rhino like all those around him, including his closest
friends. His response – at times defiant, at times angry, at times confused and even frightened –
shows how hard it is to resist falling victim to ‘group think’, to collective unconscious thought. The
easy path is to drift, to let oneself be manipulated by others. Ionesco had witnessed this in the rise
of fascism in Romania in the 1930s and in French collaboration during the Nazi occupation in the
Second World War.
Questioning the insidious nature of conformity is as relevant today as it was then. Ionesco
represents it as an illness – easily caught like any contagious disease, and as dangerous to self and
society as a plague.
Reza, Yasmina, Art, Christopher Hampton (trans.), Faber and Faber, 1996 (1)
First produced in Paris in 1994, Yasmina Reza’s comedy Art is a much-awarded play in the
English-speaking world as well as in France, including a Tony Award for the Best Play (1998), the
Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Comedy (1998) and the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award
for Best Play (1998).
Three long-time friends find their friendship, values and philosophical perspectives tested when one
of them buys a large canvas by a much-celebrated contemporary artist. The work is pure white
except for some scarcely perceptible diagonal white lines. Serge proudly tells his friends that it was
a ‘steal’, at the (then astronomical) price of 200,000 francs. As an art follower and one who
embraces modernity, he is delighted with his purchase, particularly since the artist has three works
hanging in the Pompidou Centre. He is keen to show it to Marc and Yvan. Marc spares no feelings
as he accuses his friend of snobbishness, of being duped by market value, of having lost his sense
of discernment.
The dialogue between different pairings, and then between the three together, is fast moving,
searingly close to the bone as the discussion moves from aesthetics and philosophy to personal
recrimination, and very funny. This dialogue is interspersed by monologues from each of the
characters, as they reveal to the audience the vulnerabilities they’re not yet ready to share with each
other. Their taunts are expressed crudely at times, but always with a light pace and humour. Reza
raises questions of aesthetics, modernity, market value in the world of high art, and the factors
shaping ‘taste’.
Shakespeare, William, Coriolanus (The Pelican Shakespeare), Penguin Books, 1999 (4)
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Composed in the twilight of the great tragedies, Coriolanus is Shakespeare’s tragic epilogue. An
intensely political play, it lays bare the complex, often capricious relationship between the rulers and
the ruled. Caius Martius returns to Rome, having been granted his name – Coriolanus – in
recognition of his victory over the Volscians in the campaign at Corioli. This latest in a long history of
military triumphs enables him to extend his influence and the patricians want to make him consul.
He immediately comes into conflict with the starving and mutinous plebeians, whom he addresses
as ‘dissentious rogues’, but whose approval he ultimately needs in order to realise his political
aspirations. Coriolanus is encouraged in his ambition and arrogance by his all devouring mother,
Volumnia.
Coriolanus is an incisive study in the evanescence of charisma; here is a man of action seen in
action, possessed of enormous bravery and valour, yet one whose pride and obstinacy deny him
the capacity to inspire loyalty or love. He is the saviour of the city but inept at dealing with the
shifting currents of public life. Critical opinion has often characterised Coriolanus as bleak and cold
and yet the harsh poetry of the language, for all its austerity, is vivid and compelling, reflecting the
ruthless spirit of the world it describes. TS Eliot claimed to have preferred Coriolanus to Hamlet.
References to wounds, contagion and disease suffuse the play. The stinking breath of the body
politic hangs thickly in the air, as does the battlefield stench of blood and death. Coriolanus is a
bitter meditation on a man who fights alone and who chooses to find no place in the common world.
Shakespeare, William, Twelfth Night (Cambridge School Shakespeare), Anthony Partington
and Richard Spencer (eds), Cambridge University Press, 2014 (2)
Twelfth Night, or What You Will, most probably written and first performed in 1601 during the height
of Shakespeare’s career, is now considered to be one of his most popular plays – although it was
widely neglected until the mid-18th century. The play draws its title from the Elizabethan festival of
the 12th, or last, night of the Christmas festive season, which, drawing on pagan rituals of carnival
and Saturnalia, was an occasion for revelry and misrule. It is generally thought that Shakespeare
adapted his story from Barnabe Riche’s ‘Apollonius and Silla’ (1581), itself an adaptation of earlier
plots featuring a girl disguised as a boy who courts a girl on behalf of her master.
In Shakespeare’s version of the comedy, set in Illyria on the Adriatic coast, Duke Orsino pines for
the love of Countess Olivia, who has sworn to mourn her brother for seven years, while in Olivia’s
household her uncle, Sir Toby Belch, carouses with the servants and the gullible Sir Andrew
Aguecheek, who is also love-struck by Olivia. Add to this the arrival of the shipwrecked Viola, who,
believing her twin brother Sebastian drowned, disguises herself as a eunuch and enters the
employment of the Duke, with whom she falls in love. Through Twelfth Night, Shakespeare explores
love in all its manifestations. Disguises, twinning, dualities and mistaken identity all contribute to a
general sense of madness – and, for the modern audience, interesting observations about the
construction of gender.
Shepard, Sam, Buried Child, Vintage Books, 2006 (2)
First performed in 1978, Buried Child is the quintessential American tragedy. It tells of a fragmented
farming family, plagued by a secret during the rural economic slowdown of the 1970s. It won the
1979 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and established Sam Shepard’s reputation as a playwright.
Vince, the 22-year-old grandson of an ageing patriarch, returns to his grandparents’ farmhouse in
Illinois after a long absence. Although Vince is reunited with his father, uncle and grandparents, they
do not recognise him and he cannot make sense of their strange actions. On the surface, the family
had seemed like the embodiment of the American Dream, but within the walls of the house Vince
and his girlfriend, Shelley, encounter the stuff of nightmares: erratic melancholic behaviours fuelled
by alcohol escalating into verbal threats and physical violence. Vince’s relatives are divided from
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each other by conflict, but bound tightly by the dark secret they share – the child buried in the
cornfield.
These disturbing issues combine elements of family drama with American gothic and Shepard
evokes both Greek tragedy and dark comedy. In this post-modern mix, the play maintains a stark
realism: the aftermath of violence, the grip of the past on the present, the gap between dreams and
reality, and the need to confront unpalatable truths. When the buried child is unearthed, the family
curse seems to lift and corn can grow again in long-barren fields. Thus the play ends on a note of
hope, with imagery of regrowth.
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Williams, Tennessee, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Penguin Modern Classics, 2009 (2)
Winning Tennessee Williams his second Pulitzer Prize (the first being for A Streetcar Named
Desire), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, was first performed in 1955 on Broadway. It was directed by Elia
Kazan and ran for close to 700 performances. Brooks Atkinson’s review in the New York Times (25
March 1955) described the play as a ‘delicately wrought exercise in human communication, where
the characters try to escape from the loneliness of their private lives’. Set in the home of a wealthy
Mississippi cotton tycoon, the play is a social critique of nouveau-riche life in the South, and
explores issues of greed, jealousy, family secrets and repressed sexuality.
The neurotic, dysfunctional Pollitt family has gathered for the 65th birthday of Big Daddy. To ensure
a happy celebration, the family lies to Big Mama and Big Daddyabout the result of Big Daddy’s test
for terminal cancer. The family’s dishonesty and the deadly imagery of spreading cancer are
symbolic of the Pollitts’ inability to face some very uncomfortable truths, and of the destructive effect
that this has on their relationships. With its cast of vulnerable characters, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is a
poignant drama about the need for honesty and understanding, the pressures of family expectations
and the risks of admitting to failure.
Short stories
Beneba Clarke, Maxine, Foreign Soil, Hachette, 2014 (A) (1)
This collection of short stories won the Victorian Premier’s Unpublished Manuscript Award in 2013
and gained its writer a three-book deal with international publisher Hachette. Described in Overland
as ‘a small tidal wave crashed into the face of the current Australian literary landscape’, Beneba
Clarke inhabits the voice of characters from all over the world – from suburban Australia to Jamaica
to Brixton – and comes to the fore in Foreign Soil.
In ‘David’, a ‘shiny cherry-red’ bike becomes an unlikely site of connection between a young woman
of Sudanese background and an older, seemingly disapproving, ‘Auntie’. Beneba Clarke returns to
the streets of 1980s ‘suburban blond-brick Australia’ in ‘Shu Yi’, to depict the bullying meted out to a
shy and beautiful young girl when she arrives at a new primary school in a new country. Told
entirely in Jamaican patois, ‘Big Island’ explores the connection between literacy, knowledge and
restlessness, while ‘The Stilt Fisherman of Kathaluna’ is set inside Sydney’s notorious Villawood
detention centre. This story shifts in perspective between Asanka, a young asylum seeker, and his
lawyer, Loretta. The final story, ‘The Sukiyaki Book Club’, is the most openly autobiographical in the
collection. A young mother, living in a dilapidated flat overlooking the train line in Footscray,
struggles to think of an ending for a story while the trains roll by and her children watch Giggle and
Hoot.
There is some confronting language in a number of these stories that matches their confronting
subject matter, but Beneba Clarke writes in a way that is at once colourful, captivating, familiar and
disturbing.
Dovey, Ceridwen, Only the Animals, Hamish Hamilton Penguin (Australia), 2014 (A) (1)
Born in South Africa, Ceridwen Dovey spent her childhood between South Africa and Australia and
attended North Sydney Girls High School before completing a degree at Harvard University (USA)
in Anthropology and Visual and Environmental Studies. Her debut novel was the celebrated Blood
Kin (2007) and her second book, Only the Animals, was shortlisted for the 2015 Victorian Premier's
Literary Awards. With her anthropologist’s eye, Dovey looks at human beings from the viewpoint of
other species. She creates a diverse range of anthropomorphised (and also deceased) creatures
who speak eloquently about their relationships with some famous (and infamous) humans, including
Heinrich Himmler, Leo Tolstoy and Sylvia Plath. Dovey constantly blurs the boundaries between
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human and animal; it is the ‘souls’ of the creatures that tell the stories, an attribute considered
exclusively human.
One of the most compelling stories, ‘Hundstag’, is a tale of loyalty and betrayal concerning Himmler
and a German wolfhound, and it invites us to reflect on the kinds of relationships that demand
unconditional loyalty and obedience. The souls of other animals caught up in human conflict include
a mussel that hitches a ride on a US naval ship bound for a war zone and a parrot, deeply
traumatised by the mindless violence in Beirut. These highly original narrative perspectives compel
us to stand back from history and politics and consider the devastating effects of prolonged violent
conflicts on all living creatures. Only the Animals won the inaugural Readings New Australian
Writing Award 2014 and the Steele Rudd Award (Short Story Collection) at the 2014 Queensland
Literary Awards.
Gogol, Nikolay, The Diary of a Madman, The Government Inspector and Selected Stories,
Penguin Classics, 2005 (3)
Perhaps the most well-known story in the collection is ‘The Overcoat’, which establishes the humble
minion Akaky Akakievich as the central character. After saving for months to purchase a muchneeded new overcoat, he experiences an evening of joy before it is stolen from him by street thugs.
Faced with indifference from government officials and his peers, he dies cold and lonely before
returning as a ghost to punish those who failed him in life. Other stories in the collection explore
human foibles and satirise the trivial nature of human tensions and expectations.
Along with Nikolay Gogol’s novel, Dead Souls, ‘The Overcoat’ is considered to have laid the
foundations of the 19th-century tradition of Russian realism. This collection of Gogol’s tragicomic
stories is set in mid-19th-century Russian society. The characters are burdened by bureaucracy,
rigid social convention, censorship and the alienating ennui of modernity.
Other literature
Fitzpatrick, Sheila, My Father’s Daughter: Memories of an Australian Childhood, Melbourne
University Press, 2010 (A) (3)
Sheila Fitzpatrick, a world authority on Soviet Russia, writes about her upbringing in post-war
suburban Melbourne. The memoir’s main focus is on her difficult relationship with her father, Brian,
an influential historian and left-wing political dissident described by one ASIO informant as a
‘pleasant rogue’. Much of Brian’s work as a prominent libertarian activist is determined by the Cold
War and its effect on the national political climate.
Brian’s drinking and feckless disregard of family responsibilities costs the family heavily. Her father’s
reputation as a ‘commie’ leads to her memories of ostracism and harassment at school. As a largely
‘unemployed bohemian’, Brian has no car and the family live in rented accommodation. Brian talks
openly to his family about his extra-marital affairs and on one drunken occasion even addresses his
children by the names of his girlfriends. Taught to question authority, Sheila begins to question her
parents, particularly Brian. Where she once saw his actions as ‘heroic’, she begins to ask whether
his dissidence is ‘self-indulgent’. As she matures, her ambivalence gives way to hostility and rifts
between them. Her relationship with her mother, Doff, is also fraught, though for different reasons.
Fitzpatrick explores the fluidity and unreliability of memory, while addressing the complicated nature
of family relationships, grief and loss. As an evocation of a daughter’s love for her father, the
memoir is moving and at times painful, though seldom sentimental.
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Stanner, WEH, The Dreaming & Other Essays, Black Inc. Agenda, 2011 (A) (4)
WEH Stanner, Australian anthropologist and essayist, spent many decades from the early 1930s in
close contact and friendship with the peoples of the Daly River and Port Keats region in the
Northern Territory. His aim was to study religion and cultural change, chiefly among the Murinbata
people, and thus to record for a wider audience the knowledge encompassed in their language and
belief systems.
The essays collected in this volume, written between 1938 and 1972 for a general, rather than
academic audience, convey the complexity, richness and uniqueness of Aboriginal culture. The
writing is eloquent and literary, varying in tone from the dispassionate observation characteristic of
the social scientist to empathetic despair as the devastating impact of cultural change and
dispossession is revealed. The collection includes a fine account of the Dreaming, a piece on
Aboriginal humour, and a portrait of an Aboriginal warrior, ‘Durmagam: a Nangiomeri’. ‘He was such
a man’, Stanner wrote, ‘I thought I would like the reading world to see and feel him as I did’. Robert
Manne has described this as ‘the finest essay by an Australian I have ever read’.
Voltaire, Candide, or Optimism, Theo Cuffe (ed. and trans.), Penguin Classics, 2005 (2)
Voltaire was a French Enlightenment writer, historian and philosopher who promoted freedom of
religion, freedom of speech and the separation of church and state. Candide, his best known work,
was published in 1759, and Voltaire became Europe’s most famous public intellectual. The novella,
a bildungsroman, follows the journey of Candide, the eponymous hero whose sheltered life, spent
studying Leibnizian philosophy with Dr Pangloss, is thrown off course by the disappearance of
Cunégonde, a young, virtuous and beautiful aristocrat with whom he has fallen in love. As he
searches for her, Candide becomes disillusioned by the wars and natural disasters he witnesses,
including the 1755 Lisbon earthquake. With over 100,000 people killed, it is one of the most deadly
earthquakes in history. Candide’s response to the catastrophes he encounters is an attack on
Leibnizian optimism, with deeper questions raised about all accepted systems of thought and belief.
Candide is eventually reunited with Cunégonde, who has been sexually exploited and reduced to
servitude. The sight of Cunégonde, no longer innocent and beautiful, reaffirms Candide’s
pessimistic view of such an unkind world, where innocence and beauty cannot survive and it
decisively negates the Leibnizian view of the universe that God created, as the best of all possible
worlds.
Woolf, Virginia, A Room of One’s Own (1929), Vintage, 2001 (1)
Based on a series of lectures delivered at two women’s colleges at Cambridge University in 1928, A
Room of One’s Own examines the social, economic and material conditions that have, since the
time of Shakespeare, affected the ability of women to write literature. In this essay, long considered
a key work in 20th-century feminism, Woolf constructs a tradition of female writers – including Aphra
Behn, Jane Austen and the Brontës – but also explores the limitations placed upon these women as
a result of their gender.
The title of the essay relates to Woolf’s now famous observation that ‘a woman must have money
and a room of her own if she is to write fiction’ and the essay revolves around an oftentimes rather
witty series of vignettes exploring the circumstances of both real and imagined women writers.
Perhaps the most affecting of these is the story of Shakespeare’s fictional sister, Judith. Judith
Shakespeare, Woolf writes, is every bit as clever as her famous brother, but when she goes to the
theatre to enquire about becoming an actress she is propositioned by the theatre manager. She
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eventually becomes pregnant by the only theatre manager who will take pity on her and, in despair,
commits suicide one winter’s night and lies buried at some crossroads where omnibuses now stop.
Poetry
Browning, Robert, Selected Poems, Penguin Classics, 2004 (3)
Along with his contemporary Lord Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning (1812–89) is one of the most
prolific and financially successful of England’s Victorian poets. He and his wife Elizabeth Barrett
Browning are renowned for conducting much of their love affair through passionate poetry, and for
freeing themselves from family ties by living and raising their son in Italy, mainly Florence.
Browning is best remembered for his dramatic monologues – a conversational genre through which
a speaker addresses a listener (and thereby the reader) in confidential tone, in order to reveal the
nature of his characters (‘Porphyria’s Lover’, ‘My Last Duchess’, ‘Andrea del Sarto’, ‘Fra Filippo
Lippi’, for example). Ironically, his narrators are often sinister characters themselves, and through
tone, mood and disingenuous ‘objectivity’, Browning leads the reader to question the truth of their
words. This interest in the complex motives and influences of people means that in many of his
poems Browning’s own voice is disguised or hidden. This is not so, however, in all of his poems.
‘Two in the Campagna’ has been written of as ‘a poem of unexpected self-revelation’.
Browning’s form is varied. Heroic and open couplets, jaunty rhythms and rhymes, enjambment,
caesura and tongue-in-cheek tone contrast with wistful melancholy, and his concern with human
frailty, false pretences and disguise gives his poetry contemporary resonance.
Chang, Tina, Handal, Nathalie and Shankar, Ravi (eds), Language for a New Century:
Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond, WW Norton & Company, 2008
(2)
In the aftermath of 11 September 2001, Chang, Handal and Shankar (all poets who were born into
families from non-Western backgrounds) decided to respond ‘to the destruction and unjust loss of
human lives [in New York] while protesting the one-sided and flattened view of the East being
showcased in the media’. This anthology of poetry is the result. It gathers together poems written in
40 different languages (in translation), from 61 nations and from 400 poets, in the belief that these
diverse poetic voices would ‘converge in the dream of shared utterance’, confounding otherness or,
at least, writing it into visibility. ‘In putting this anthology together’, they write, ‘we had an alternative
vision of the new century in which words, not weapons, could define our civilisation’.
The poems are in many forms: lyric, narrative, dramatic monologues, prose and more. They
represent richly diverse material worlds and cultural traditions. Reading one poem alongside others,
the reader is invited to move beyond personal perceptions and understandings, and glimpse or
share sensibilities across cultures. The common ground is striking – in evocation of childhood
worlds; in relationship to homeland; in experience of loss or exile; in yearning for love, and peace
and security.
The poems chosen for study come from the first three of the book’s nine sections: ‘In the Grasp of
Childhood Fields’, ‘Parsed into Colors’ and ‘Slips and Atmospherics’. They move from the
experience/memory of ‘home’ to the experience of migration or exile, and then to the riches and
surprises of language, which make it possible to tell the story of our own life.
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Dobson, Rosemary, Collected, University of Queensland Press, 2012 (A) (4)
An award-winning Australian poet, Rosemary Dobson was also an illustrator, editor and anthologist.
At 21 a modest inheritance allowed her to enrol as a non-degree student at the University of
Sydney, and to take drawing classes with Modernist artist Thea Proctor. Her oeuvre represents a
search for illumination, born from a desire to see something more than just ‘through a glass, darkly’.
Dobson meditates on the transcendent potential of art, the paradox of time, the poignancy of
existence and the mystery of death. These ideas resonate in poems such as the haunting ‘Ship of
Ice’, which won the Sydney Morning Herald prize for poetry in 1948. Her interest in form and
language, and in the relationship between poetry and landscape, is evident in poems such as ‘The
Greek Vase’, where enjambments range across line and stanza, and words are blown, like leaves,
by the ‘wind’. Her interest in form also leads her towards haiku structure in ‘Poems a Long Way after
Basho’.
Rosemary Dobson's contribution to Australian literature has been recognised by a number of major
honours, including the Order of Australia (AO) in 1987, the Patrick White Award in 1994, and an
Honorary Doctorate from the University of Sydney in 1996.
Plath, Sylvia, Ariel, Faber Modern Classics, 2015
The American poet Sylvia Plath (1932–63) was a brilliant student who suffered all her short life from
severe clinical depression. Her father, a German professor of entomology, died when she was only
eight, yet his influence is obvious in some of her poems (for example, ‘Daddy’). Plath’s marriage to
the British poet Ted Hughes brought her great happiness for a time, but ended in their separation a
year before she committed suicide. She delighted in her two young children (see ‘You’re’ and ‘Nick
and the Candlestick’) but was often resentful of the way her domestic duties impinged on her
freedom and restricted her writing (‘Tulips’). Her poems are deeply confessional and often reflect
her despair and the appeal of the peace she imagined she would find in death. She found solace in
the natural word but, at times, when she looked into the night sky, she could find only blackness
(‘The Moon and the Yew Tree’). Her poems are beautifully crafted, demonstrating a range of forms,
and her metaphors are often startling, but strangely apposite.
The poems are accessible to students and provide opportunities for a feminist reading, among
others. Plath is acknowledged as one of the outstanding poets of the 20th century. She was
awarded a Posthumous Pulitzer Prize for her Selected Poems.
Wagan Watson, Samuel, Smoke Encrypted Whispers, University of Queensland Press, 2004
(A) (1)
Samuel Wagan Watson was born in Brisbane in 1972; he is of Birri-Gubba, Mununjali, Dutch and
Irish descent, and part of a family noted for its cultural richness, diversity and achievement. Wagan
Watson’s poetry explores his world and his responses to it. The metaphor of the journey is a
unifying strand throughout the collection. Barely punctuated, his verse slides through his
consciousness, his parameters expanding from the ‘white stucco’ of Mt Gravatt to the ‘smoke
encrypted whispers’ of ‘one of Brisbane’s least known burial grounds’, his strongly evoked sense of
place fusing with an intricate awareness of the complexities of understanding and responding to
experience. The subject matter is the man, the poet and his world, both personal and public. He
writes of the desolation and beauty of nature, of the ugliness of the urban landscape, of the trivial
and of the metaphysical, of what divides us and what connects us, of the damage done by
colonisation, and of the irrepressibility of the human spirit.
He acknowledges the influence of Japanese poet Basho, who relinquished his sword to spend his
life wandering and writing poetry.
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His voice is engaging, evoking the riotous energy of ‘The Happy Dark’ symbolised by his ‘White
Stucco Dreaming’. Such is the vitality with which he creates the icons of his suburban roots that he
can claim that the ‘police cars that crawled up and down the back streets’ were ‘wishing they were
with us’. Wagan Watson’s fresh and unconventional use of language can jerk readers into fresh
realisations about a landscape with which they are familiar.
Wallace-Crabbe, Chris, New and Selected Poems, Carcanet, 2013 (A) (3)
Chris Wallace-Crabbe AM is an Australian poet and Emeritus Professor in the Australian Centre,
University of Melbourne. He began publishing poetry while still an undergraduate and, over the
years, has won a number of prizes. His Selected Poems: 1956–1994 won both the Dinny O'Hearn
Poetry Prize and the 1995 Age Book of the Year Award. Wallace-Crabbe was born in Richmond and
his poems are often set in Melbourne. In ‘Cho Ben Tanh: Richmond’, for example, a miscellany of
vibrant images creates a bustling multicultural landscape. His wide-ranging poetic concerns are
centred on the world of everyday experience – its quotidian beauty, its sensuous complexity and the
multifaceted, rapidly changing reality it offers us.
Wallace-Crabbe’s exploration of the forms, colours and modes of experience lead to meditations on
place, existence and relationships, and the glimpses of these we are offered are always tentative
and provisional of meaning and truth. His poems test the power and the limits of language as he
moves from serious to comic and between hope and despair. His poetic voice, sometimes innocent,
sometimes urbane, is always alive to the miracle of life, yet in some of his later poems an
awareness of mortality emerges: a shadow under a clothesline, for example, evokes a quiet
reflection that ‘all things pass’.
Poet and critic Lisa Gorton (winner of the Victorian Premier's Prize for Poetry) said that WallaceCrabbe ‘marked the suburbs out as a place for poetry’, but not in an ‘enclosed’ way because his
poems have ‘a suddenness and strangeness’. She describes him as one of the great Australian
poets and an influential mentor and teacher.
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