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AbstractHistoryArchive Description
'In the dying town of Drylands, Janet Deakin sells papers to lonely locals. At night, in her flat above the newsagency, she attempts to write a novel for a world in which no one reads—‘full of people, she envisaged, glaring at a screen that glared glassily back.’ Drylands is the story of the townsfolk’s harsh, violent lives. Trenchant and brilliant, Thea Astley’s final novel is a dark portrait of outback Australia in decline.'
Source: Publisher's blurb (Text ed.)
Adaptations
- y Drylands ( dir. Bruce Beresford ) 2004 Z1137960 2004 single work screenplay
Contents
- Introduction, essay
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Other Formats
- Braille.
- Sound recording.
Works about this Work
-
Ecofeminism in Thea Astley’s Drylands
2020
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Advances in Language and Literary Studies , vol. 11 no. 3 2020; (p. 42-45)'Australian multi-award-winning novelist Thea Astley was a great writer in promoting feminism and ecofeminism in her later years’ writing. This paper analyzes her fourth Miles Franklin award novel — Drylands from the perspective of ecofeminism. From analysis, it draws a conclusion that Astley makes a lot of efforts to raise readers’ awareness that her women characters’ liberation depends on their economic independence but it will be a hard and long way to achieve the final emancipation of women and total equality between women and men.' (Publication abstract)
-
y
Writing Belonging at the Millennium : Notes from the Field on Settler-Colonial Place
Bristol
Chicago
:
Intellect
,
2019
18882857
2019
multi chapter work
criticism
'Writing Belonging at the Millennium brings together two pressing and interrelated matters: the global environmental impacts of post-industrial economies and the politics of place in settler-colonial societies. It focuses on Australia at the millennium, when the legacies of colonization intersected with intensifying environmental challenges in a climate of anxiety surrounding settler-colonial belonging. The question of what belonging means is central to the discussion of the unfolding politics of place in Australia and beyond.
'In this book, Emily Potter negotiates the meaning of belonging in a settler-colonial field and considers the role of literary texts in feeding and contesting these legacies and anxieties. Its intention is to interrogate the assumption that non-indigenous Australians' increasingly unsustainable environmental practices represent a failure on their part to adequately belong in the country. Writing Belonging at the Millennium explores the idea of unsettled non-indigenous belonging as context for the emergence of potentially decolonized relations with place in a time of heightened global environmental concern.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
-
The Death of Australian Literature in Thea Astley’s Drylands
2019
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Queensland Review , December vol. 26 no. 2 2019; (p. 256-268)'This article reads Thea Astley’s final novel in the context of rhetoric about the death of Australian literature that has been a mainstay of our national culture almost since its inception. In the early 2000s, a new round of obituarists argued that the global publishing industry, critical trends and changing educational pedagogies were eroding Australia’s literary identity. Drylands, published in 1999, can be considered a slightly prescient participant in this conversation: it is subtitled A Book for the World’s Last Reader, seemingly framing the novel in a polemics of decline. My reading, however, sees the book as the product of two correlated yet combative literary projects: the attempt by its primary narrator, Janet Deakin, to write a book after what she sees as the likely death of reading and writing; and Astley’s more nuanced exploration of the role of literature in settler colonial modernity. Reading across the seven narratives that constitute the book, I argue that Drylands performs the fraught relationship between ethics and aesthetics in the context of writing about the systemic violence of the settler colonial state, questioning literary privilege, exclusivity and complicity in ways that remain relevant to debates regarding Australian literature today.' (Publication abstract)
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Introduction
2018
essay
— Appears in: Drylands : A Book for the World's Last Reader 2018; -
Re-reading Thea Astley's Drylands
2017
single work
essay
— Appears in: Southerly , vol. 77 no. 1 2017; (p. 166-182)'On its website, the Reading Australian Literature series is advertised as offering a 'unique insight into an ongoing writerly dialogue with our literary heritage,' and so it was appropriate when first thinking about this topic I began with the idea of a conversation. the second thing that came to mind was a comment by Tegan Bennett Daylight in an essay on Helen Garner, in which she quotes Holden Caulfield, the narrator of The Catcher in the Rye. Holden says what really knocks him out 'is a book that ... you wish the author who wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could cal him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.' And Bennett Daylight herself says, 'Each time a writer writes that are making that phone call, to all the writers whose work they have read' (Bennett Daylight 25). (Introduction)
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[Review] Drylands
2000
single work
review
— Appears in: Fiction Focus : New Titles for Teenagers , vol. 14 no. 1 2000; (p. 10-11)
— Review of Drylands : A Book for the World's Last Reader 1999 single work novel -
[Review] Drylands
2000
single work
review
— Appears in: Fiction Focus : New Titles for Teenagers , vol. 14 no. 3 2000; (p. 45)
— Review of Drylands : A Book for the World's Last Reader 1999 single work novel -
Country Strife
1999
single work
review
— Appears in: The Australian's Review of Books , August vol. 4 no. 7 1999; (p. 3,27)
— Review of The Idea of Perfection 1999 single work novel ; Drylands : A Book for the World's Last Reader 1999 single work novel -
Venom of a Country Town
1999
single work
review
— Appears in: The Canberra Times , 31 July 1999; (p. 21)
— Review of Drylands : A Book for the World's Last Reader 1999 single work novel -
Life No Less Ordinary
1999
single work
review
— Appears in: The Bulletin , 17 August vol. 117 no. 6187 1999; (p. 110)
— Review of Drylands : A Book for the World's Last Reader 1999 single work novel -
The Deserted Village? Thea Astley's Drylands
2002
single work
criticism
— Appears in: 'Unemployed at Last!' : Essays on Australian Literature to 2002 for Julian Croft 2002; (p. 147-160) Explores the discrepancies between Astley's extra-fictional positive comments about country towns in Queensland and her representation of country-town culture in some of her novels, particularly Drylands, as ugly, brutal and barely literate. Hassall argues that this contradiction could be another paradoxical version of the 'Sydney or the Bush' topos in Australian literature and culture. -
Reel Time
2004
single work
column
— Appears in: The Australian , 25 August 2004; (p. 11) -
Thea Astley : Exploring the Centre
2004
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Subverting the Empire : Explorers and Exploration in Australian Fiction 2004; (p. 97-144) -
Violence, Irony and Reading Relations : Thea Astley's Drylands
2006
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Thea Astley's Fictional Worlds 2006; (p. 164-175) -
Shelf Life
2000
single work
column
— Appears in: The Age , 28 October 2000; (p. 8)
Awards
- 2000 winner Queensland Premier's Literary Awards — Best Fiction Book
- 2000 winner Queensland Premier's Literary Awards — Best Fiction Book
- 2000 joint winner Miles Franklin Literary Award
- Country towns,