The second episode in the three-part TV series ‘Books that Made Us’ was screened on ABC TV tonight. (If you live in Australia and missed it, you can catch up on iView. You can also read my thoughts on Episode One here.)
This episode, called ‘Place’, was themed around cities and landscapes that have featured so strongly in Australian fiction, but it could easily have been called ‘History’ because it covered Aboriginal dispossession and our convict past, among other changes in Australian society over the years.
There were lots of wonderful interviews with most of the authors name-checked below, including footage of the late Patrick White, after he won the Nobel Prize for Literature (the first and only Australian to achieve that honour).
The books covered in episode two
Here is a list of the books mentioned in this episode. They have been arranged in alphabetical order by author’s surname. As ever, hyperlinks take you to my reviews.
- ‘For the Term of his Natural Life’ by Marcus Clarke [read this one in my teens]
- ‘Boy Swallows Universe’ by Trent Dalton [abandoned this one, but I was reading it when I was packing up my life in the UK in 2019, so my reading wasn’t very focused at the time]
- ‘Goulds Book of Fish’ by Richard Flanagan [read but not reviewed here]
- ‘Death of a River Guide’ by Richard Flanagan
- ‘My Brilliant Career’ by Miles Franklin
- ‘Monkey Grip’ by Helen Garner
- ‘The Secret River’ by Kate Grenville
- ‘Benevolence’ by Julie Janson [on my digital TBR]
- ‘Johnno’ by David Malouf [read this one at school]
- ‘Voss’ by Patrick White
- ‘The Vivisector by Patrick White
- ‘Carpentaria’ by Alexis Wright [on my TBR]
The next episode, entitled ‘Power’, will be screened next Tuesday at 8.30pm.
Reading Matters 