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Sue Woolfe

How can Australians write fiction about Indigenous Australia? It is one of the most contentious literary questions today. There aren’t any rules, but writers – particularly white writers – are driven by a strange mix of passion and caution.

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In some ways, Sue Woolfe’s new novel, The Secret Cure, deals with similar themes to her last novel, the award-winning Leaning Towards Infinity (1996). The central character of the novel is a young laboratory technician, Eva, unqualified but desperate to be a scientist. She nurses an obsessive love for a professor of immunology who has a professionally disadvantageous but compelling desire to find a cure for autism. Like the mother and daughter amateur mathematicians in Leaning Towards Infinity, the passion for research is transmitted unwittingly by the parent figure (in this case the professor and lover) to the younger. Eva takes up the professor’s genetic research into autism long after he has given up, defeated by academic and professional enmities. Each has a deeply personal reason for wishing to find a cure: the professor has the disease himself, and so does the daughter Eva has from their affair.

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As Large as Alone by Gibson and Murdoch Copeman & Mainly Modern by John and Dorothy Colmer

by
June 1979, no. 11

Soon after our Dip.Ed. begins, I solemnly warn my students that, when they go out into schools for their English teaching practice, they will be asked to teach poetry: indeed, in many cases, the poetry they present will be the only poetry those classes will have for the whole year. They smile and even laugh indulgently, and we talk about why teachers wouldn’t want to teach poetry. It’s a pleasant academic point. But when the students come back in late April after some weeks in schools, their eyes are wide and they say, ‘It’s true. We have to teach the poetry!’.

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