Sunlight and Gumtrees: The Australian Reading/Listening/Watching List

[joe_pike_junior]

I was asked by namasteyoga to recommend some books on Australia, and I thought, why not do a reading list instead? This is not a definitive list of Australian literature. Nor is it a definitive list of Australian writers. Rather, it's a list of books that I feel capture a certain feeling or mood about Australia and Australians -- our experiences, our people

Comments

[hannahrorlove]

I loved Cloudstreet to tiny, tiny pieces. The scene where Quick Lamb finds out about Bergen-Belsen and can't deal with it and just has to go outside and look around - there was no emotion in that one passage, just reporting, but it was such precise reporting my heart broke for him. That passage is something I cite as an example of when an author knows to pull away from a character. It was also one of the books I read as research before writing a fic about an Australian character, and it's a book I'd be happy to have read in any case.

[joe_pike_junior]

Was this a House fic? I'd like to read it even if it isn't. : )

Tim Winton treats everything with such a deft hand. His characters often respond unemotionally to tragedies, personal or historical. It's like they're helpless in the tide of history, or fortune (the hairy eye of god I think it is?) but that's ok, that's all you can be. It isn't ok, but being overwrought won't help anything. So level-headed and with such a sense of the burden of history. Sometimes you can't emote. If the writer injects emotion into a passage it's almost like they don't trust us to just read what they're writing. Winton trusts us.

There's a similar scene in The Turning where a young woman discovers her boyfriend, who she's been seeing without the knowledge of her parents, has been badly bashed. She isn't expected to be very sad about it, so she isn't. There's still a sense of the impact of the news on her, though, and written very sparely.

[hannahrorlove]

Team Fortress 2, actually; you can read it here.

Hairy hand, I think it was. And yes - Winston trusting us. It made me think of one scene I rewrote for a creative writing class where I drew back farther and farther each time, and how the scene Winton wrote was exactly how it ought to be done.

I need to do some literary research on Texas and Scotland for my next stories, actually - but Winton will be a name to remember when I want someone to show me how it should be done, and get me excited to be writing again.

[namasteyoga]

I doubt I'll be able to get to all those in three weeks before I get there. But both Cloudstreet and Eye of the Storm are available at the library. I'll check them out. (Literally.)

[joe_pike_junior]

Oh, haha! Reading them all would be over the top. But I felt like making a more-or-less exhaustive list. : )

[daasgrrl]

Hee, you are clearly much, much better versed in Australiana than I am. Personally, I feel the movies MUST include The Castle. (And Picnic at Hanging Rock, but you have that one. Proof is just a great movie; it doesn't make me feel particuarly 'Australian', it's just a great movie.)

I hate Patrick White. Sorry. Fine, I was forced to study one of his plays, and I hated it so much I actually boycotted class while we were doing it. And I don't do that kind of thing. I found The Slap very contrived; good read, but with characters crafted to represent an unlikely microcosm of Australian society, which ime is very tribal.

Music: a big yes to Flame Trees. Down Under is kitsch as hell, but it's one of those things that makes you homesick when you're overseas. As does that bloody Qantas anthem, and Tenterfield Saddler. But my absolute must-hear would be This is Australia. And the entirety of Keating!, but we're getting obscure now :)

[joe_pike_junior]

I think some of this is down to working in the bookshop. I got a sense of what was important to people, what they felt was truly representative, etc etc. And after reading a couple of "must-read" Australiana lists as research I feel much less well read -- I haven't read Eucalyptus for example, or Capricornia, or Poor Fellow, My Country...

Was the Season at Sarsparilla? I LOVED THAT. :D I was talking to my dad the other day about how Patrick White was quite catty, and how that comes across in his writing. I wouldn't blame you at all for not finding him likeable.

Yeah, I feel like my feel for Australian music is more willing to tolerate cheesiness than my music taste in general. I was going to add a few Slim Dusty songs, because he's Slim Dusty and my mum listens to him occasionally, but I don't know how he'd come across to someone from overseas. Probably not favourably. Down Under I associate with pubs. Beds are Burning's probably my all-time top Midnight Oil song. This is Australia too! And Light on the Hill I love -- you only get

[daasgrrl]

It was a play, Signal Driver. I've mostly blocked it out, but from vague memory, it's two hoboes on a nature strip talking about life and waiting for a bus, that I'm not sure ever comes. I don't know if it's meant to be an Antipodean Waiting For Godot or what. Maybe I might appreciate it more now, but at the time I was all, 'wtf, dude, really?'. I just found it Completely Pointless XD

[joe_pike_junior]

Speaking of which - LOL, Chaser boys. I haven't been watching the Hamster Wheel, even though I keep meaning to.
I'm so out of touch with television. I'm not sure if I will watch that -- I occasionally found the Chaser gang deeply annoying.

INXS! Yes! And Powderfinger also. Keating! is one of those things that's just suffused with the whole Australian sensibility that's difficult to explain. Man, I've gotta see it sometime. There's a DVD, right? My parents saw it and loved it, but I didn't because... I dunno, I was six or seven when Howard was elected (doesn't that sound like the beginning of some epic tragic novel?), so I kind of thought I'd have less of an understanding of the culture behind it all. Have you ever seen the Wharf Revue? I love that.