Alex Miller. Max

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Killing the Narrator: National differences in Adaptations of Robbery Under Arms

This article is about national differences in adaptations of Robbery Under Arms

Books and Covers: Reflections on Some Recent Australian Novels

For the 2002 Miles Franklin Award, given to the best Australian novel of the year, my fellow judges and I ended up with a short list of five novels. Three happened to come from the same publishing house – Pan Macmillan Australia – and we could not help remarking that much more time and money had been spent on the production of two of the titles than on the third. These two, by leading writers Tim Winton and Richard Flanagan, were hardbacks with full colour dust jackets and superior paper stock. Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish (2001) also featured colour illustrations of the fish painted by Tasmanian convict artist W. B. Gould, the initial inspiration for the novel, at the beginning of each chapter, as well as changes in type colour to reflect the notion that Gould was writing his manuscript in whatever he could find to use as ink. The third book, Joan London’s Gilgamesh (2001), was a first novel, though by an author who had already published two prizewinning collections of short stories. It, however, was published in paperback, with a monochrome and far from eye-catching photographic cover that revealed little about the work’s content

Representations of ‘The Bush’ in the Poetry of Charles Harpur

The first month of 2013 was marked by two very different events.  On 12 January, the Governor General, stars of stage and screen, politicians and other notables attended the Sydney Theatre for the opening night of The Secret River, Andrew Bovell’s adaptation of Kate Grenville’s best-selling if controversial novel. On 23 January a much smaller group of academics and other lovers of Australian literature gathered in Canberra to celebrate the 200th birthday of Charles Harpur, Australia’s first notable poet. While the people involved in these two events were very different, with one attracting much publicity and other none, there was a link. The Secret River, as a program note testifies, ‘takes place in the Hawkesbury River region of New South Wales between 1814-15’. Charles Harpur had been born in Windsor, the major town on the Hawkesbury, a year earlier. Like William Thornhill in the play, his father Joseph was a former convict who received a free pardon from Governor Macquarie in 1815. By then he was the schoolmaster at Windsor, where he had a grant of land, so that, unlike Thornhill’s children, Harpur grew up with books as his companions. In the stage adaptation of The Secret River, Stephen Curtis’s set gives a powerful representation of the beauty and the might of the bush before white settlement, a beauty sullied at the end of the play as Thornhill draws the lines of a fence on the backcloth. For the characters in the play, the bush represents different things: it is home for the Indigenous family, the hope of a prosperous future for Thornhill, a place of fun and games for Dick Thornhill, Garraway and Narabi, but totally alien to Sal Thornhill who never stops longing for London. How did Harpur, growing up on the Hawkesbury during this period, represent the bush and its Indigenous inhabitants? This essay will focus in particular on ‘Lost in the Bush’  and ‘The Kangaroo Hunt’

Patrick White and Film

2011 saw the release of The Eye of the Storm, the first adaptation to the screen of one of Patrick White’s novels. There had been earlier attempts, in particular the long-running saga of Voss, seemingly as doomed to failure as the explorer’s own quest. White’s interest in the theatre was paralleled by his interest in film; he knew that adaptations could boost an author’s reputation and sales. Manuscripts in the National Library of Australia’s White papers reveal that he wrote adaptations of several of his short stories as early as 1963. He did not manage to sell any of these but collaboration with director Jim Sharman in the 1970s led to the production of White’s screenplay of his story ‘The Night, the Prowler’. Inspired by this, White wrote several original screenplays that were never filmed. ‘Monkey Puzzle’, intended as a full-length film, sends up the Australian literary scene as well as Australian films of the period. The shorter 'Kidults' also includes a parody of the film version of My Brilliant Career