Welcome to the Teaching Australian Literature Resource

Are you teaching Australian texts in 2010? Help us update the information about your teaching activities in 2010.

The Teaching Aust. Lit. Resource is an AustLit affiliated project designed to reveal how and where Australian literary and narrative texts are being taught in universities around Australia and internationally.

Search the TAL Resource to discover information about how, and in what context, particular texts are being taught. Search for authors, titles, universities, themes, units or courses.

Read more about the project and how you might use the TAL resource.

Search this site or explore the statistics around the teaching of Australian literary texts in 2009.

Example Content

How is the subject embodied in the text? How are gender, sexuality, race & class inscribed in the autobiographical mode? This course explores practices of contemporary first-person narration through diaries, memoirs, confessional, testimonio & case histories.

By permission of the NLA

20 Mar 1934 Brisbane, Queensland

David Malouf's paternal family came to Australia in the 1880s from Lebanon. His mother's family, Sephardic Jews from Spain who had gone to England via Holland, migrated to Australia in 1913. Malouf was born at 'Yasmar', a private hospital in South Brisbane, the suburb where his childhood home in 12 Edmondstone Street was located. He has written about that home and other places of significance in 12 Edmondstone Street (1985). Scarborough, north of Brisbane, was a favourite place of childhood. His earliest writing was for a neighbourhood newspaper when he was about seven.

After he read Kenneth Slessor (q.v.), at sixteen, Malouf realised poetry could be about Australia - and about consciousness, rather than telling a story - and he started to write poetry seriously. Slessor's poem 'South Country' Malouf regards as being a crucial turning point in...

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