Robert Drewe

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Robert Duncan Drewe (born January 9, 1943 in Melbourne ) is an Australian novelist, journalist and short story writer.

Life

Drewe was born in Melbourne but moved to Perth with his parents at the age of six . He went to Hale School, an independent Anglican private school. After leaving school, he stayed in Perth and started working as a reporter for The West Australian newspaper in 1961. When he later got a job with The Age newspaper , he returned to Melbourne. He was head of the feature pages of the newspaper The Australian from 1971 to 1974. He then worked as a freelance writer.

Drewe has seven children from three marriages. In 2005 Drewe went with his wife Candida Baker and their two children to the far north of New South Wales near Byron Bay. He justified this, among other things, with "wanting to write more there."

Robert Drewe has twice received the Walkley Award, an Australian award for excellence in journalism.

Works

By 2010, Robert Drewe had published six novels, four volumes of short stories and two non-fiction books. He is the editor of another five volumes of short stories or other prose. His novel Our Sunshine was used as a template for a film script that was processed into a film in 2003 under the title Ned Kelly . His novel The Shark Net was the template for a short series in three parts for television.

Robert Drewe's collected manuscripts are available for scientific evaluation in the “Scholars' Center” of the University of Western Australia Library . Robert Drewe's works have not yet been translated into German (2010).

The Savage Crows

The debut novel Drewes reflects the situation of the indigenous population of Australia in the work of the protagonist Stephen Crisp on his dissertation. The novel joins the literary processing of the history of Australia, specifically the interaction of European immigrants with the Aborigines and ultimately the almost complete extermination of this ethnic group in Tasmania. The novel thus becomes part of the critical reappropriation of Australian history after the arrival of the Europeans, which received a lot of attention around the 200th anniversary of Australia in 1989.

Two narrative threads alternate: The first narrative thread of the novel describes the private and relationship life of the young historian Crisp in Sydney. Crisp works on his failed relationship privately. On a further level, Crisp's preoccupation with the texts of the benevolent but incompetent George Augustus Robinson , which were written around 1830, is described. In the papers cited by Crisp, Robinson describes his efforts to first teach the Aborigines on Bruny Island, located on the D'Entrecasteaux Canal and off Tasmania, European and Christian behavior and life. Robinson's efforts have dire effects, and the locals die on short intervals if they cannot escape. The presentation of the essentially political-historical criticism as a quote from a sober historical report creates a strong contrast between the pleasant life of the urban scientist with his private and relationship problems and the brutal realities of pioneering life and the situation of the Aborigines. The book also gets its reality content through precise, geographically and historically clearly identifiable detail in its historical narrative.

The Bodysurfers

Drewe's first volume of stories, “The Bodysurfers”, is credited with raising awareness of the beach as a formative experience in Australia. The people in "The Bodysurfers" look out to sea. In the stories in “The Bodysurfers” “… which show a kind of Australian hedonism, Drewe was one of the first to address the formative Australian cultural experience, which is not related to the interior but to the beach.” The counterpoint serves as a counterpoint The story "The Last Explorer", in which the main character, who has spent most of his life in the outback, turns his bedside away from the window while still in hospital so as not to see the sea and hear the sound of the waves.

The title and cover photo of the book edition of Robert Drewe's first collection of short stories based on a painting by Charles Meere already indicate this context of the stories: With one exception, they are playing in Australia, they are all playing by the water, it is midsummer. The main characters in the stories are men of the Lang family who are at fault lines in their lives. Relations with her wives are in a problematic phase. The content of all individual stories is related to people from the Lang family. Some stories have a strong sexual aspect. Autobiographical echoes and suggestions also play a role - as they did later in Drewe's stories.

An example of this is the first story in the volume, 'The Manageress and the Mirage', in which the recently widowed main character and his three children have lunch on Christmas Day. The first-person narrator speaks from the perspective of one of the children. The father tries to cheer up the children, but has overcome his grief better than the children first suspected: the manager of the hotel is already very close to him. Drewe later said in an interview: “I'm interested in the man around fifty. That means looking at how we actually really live. Most of us belong to the middle class and live close to the water. ”The collection takes up essential narrative elements of the short story: Laconic speech gesture, the narrated time is very short, surprising short turns of the plot at the end or open ending, short sentence structure. The book is reprinted over and over again.

The Shark Net

The Shark Net is a semi-autobiographical novel, from the time of Robert Drewes childhood and youth. It is perhaps best characterized as a fictional memoir. It became the template for a TV mini-series by ABC . The title of the novel, Shark Net, is a metaphor for the actions of a main character in the story of serial killer Eric Edgar Cooke, whose paths crossed with Drewe's paths several times in his childhood. It can also be interpreted as reliance on false security. Tensioning a shark net is a common way on Australian beaches to limit the number of shark attacks on people. It works on the principle of "fewer sharks, fewer attacks", but does not provide absolute security.

The novel describes Drewe's life from his earliest memories in Melbourne, his childhood in Perth, attending school at Hale School and his relationships with his father, a senior employee at the rubber goods manufacturer Dunlop . It also includes the themes of growing up and adolescence, as well as the story of Eric Cooke who was an associate of Drewe's father at Dunlop. Cooke's story details are based on interviews with his family and personal experience as a reporter for The West Australian newspaper . He reported on the arrest and later the trial.

The novel is currently (2009) used as reading material in English in schools in the Australian states of New South Wales, South Australia, Western Australia, Victoria and Tasmania.

Grace

Grace is Drewe's novel about the beginning of the 21st century. In it he described the things "he is passionate about ... like relationships, politics, environmental issues, human rights ... and things that I think are going in the wrong direction and are changing the face of Australia to his detriment". He was, as he said himself, stimulated by his anger over "our disgusting treatment of asylum seekers and those hapless illegal fishermen in their fragile boats". It has been described as a partly detective novel, partly a road movie.

bibliography

Novels

Collections of short stories

As editor

  • Bondi (1984)
  • The Picador Book of the Beach (1993) (later The Penguin Book of the Beach )
  • The Penguin Book of the City (1997)
  • Best Australian Stories 2006 (2006)
  • Best Australian Stories 2007 (2007)

Plays

  • South American Barbecue (1991)
  • The Bodysurfers: The Play (1989)

Non-fiction books / memoirs

  • Walking Ella (1999)
  • The Shark Net (2000)
  • The Shawshank Redemption 2 (2010)

literature

  • Janet Hawley: On fertile ground . In: Good Weekend , July 23, 2005, p. 38 ff.
  • Peter Pierce (Ed.): The Cambridge History of Australian Literature . Cambridge University Press, Port Melbourne 2009

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Hawley (2005) p. 38
  2. ↑ Maxine McKew: The Shark Net premiered on ABCV-TV on Sunday, August 10, 2003 at 8.30pm. In: The Bulletin , August 12, 2003
  3. ↑ cf. Peter Pierce: The Cambridge History of Australian Literature , p. 513
  4. ↑ See u. A. also Robert Hughes: The Fatal Shore , London 1987, which deals with the situation of the convicts, but also illuminates the situation of the Aborigines after the arrival of the Europeans, in particular pages 272 ff, as well as Verity Burgmann , Jenny Lee (ed.) : A most valuable acquisition. The Epic of Australia's Founding (sic!). McPhee Gribble / Penguin, Fitzroy, Vic. 1988, ISBN 0-14-011055-0
  5. ^ "... the thrust of the novel as a whole is inescapably political." In: Adam Shoemaker, Black Words White Page: Aboriginal Literature 1929–1988 , Canberra 2004. Electronic Version, Chapter 6. Views of Australian History in Aboriginal Literature
  6. ↑ cf. z. B. Geography of Bruny Island, "Australian Chart No. AUS 173, D 'Entrecasteaux Channel, Hobart to South East Cape "or" Australian Chart No. AUS 794, Approaches to Hobart, South East Cape to Cape Pillar “Ed. Of Hydrographer of the RAN
  7. ↑ In these stories, which offer a kind of celebration of Australian hedonism, Drewe was one of the first to identify the dominant Australian cultural experience, which is drawn not from the bush, but from the beach. ”, Robert Drewe Biography (1943– ) , Australian, Age, Bulletin, The Savage Crows, A Cry in the Jungle Bar, The Bodysurfers, Fortune, download February 16, 2010
  8. ^ Also: Leone Huntsman, Sand in our Souls: The beach in Australian history, Carlton: Melbourne University Press Reprint 2004, especially 131 ff.
  9. ^ "The Bodysurfers", p. 147 ff.
  10. ↑ cf. Peter Pierce: The Cambridge History of Australian Literature, p. 444
  11. ^ Charles Meere, Australian Beach Pattern 1940, Art Gallery of NSW
  12. ↑ "Beyond the high expanse of windows the ocean glistened into the west, where atmospheric conditions had magically turned Rottnest Island into three distinct islands." Rottnest Island is off the coast of Western Australia, not far from Fremantle, The Bodysurfers, p. 13. See also interview with Ramona Koval from March 10, 2000 in: Robert Drewe interview by Ramona Koval - "books and writing" radio show printed in " Australian Book Review "
  13. ↑ "She was combing his hair where his party hat had ruffled it." The Bodysurfers, p. 13
  14. ↑ "I'm interested in mid-century man. That has meant looking at the way we actually live. Most of us are middle class and live near the coast. "(In: The Bulletin, August 12, 2003, interview with Maxine McKew)
  15. ↑ ibid .: "... passionately interested in ... relationships, politics, the environment, human rights ... and things that I believe are wrong and are changing the face of the Australia we used to respect".
  16. ↑ ibid .: "... our appalling treatment of asylum seekers, and those hapless illegal fishermen in flimsy boats".
personal data
SURNAME Drewe, Robert
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Drewe, Robert Duncan (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Australian novelist, journalist and short story writer
DATE OF BIRTH January 9, 1943
PLACE OF BIRTH Melbourne