Tag: Marie Munkara

Chrubblsum Fonetics

SoutherlyBlog

by Marie Munkara   To learn to read must be one of the most exciting and useful things we can do in our lives and maybe for some the hardest as well. Although I had a basic idea of what reading was about before I went to school, I was taught the fundamentals of reading and writing at a Catholic Primary school in the mid nineteen sixties. And there was no shirking in Sister Damien’s class; we studied our nouns and verbs as rigorously as if we were studying Latin declensions at Oxford. If our brains struggled to retain her…

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Alice in Wonderland – Wish I’d Never Met You

SoutherlyBlog

by Marie Munkara Written by the English author Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (better known as Lewis Carroll) and published on the 26th of November 1865, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (later known as Alice in Wonderland) was given to me for my tenth birthday. By this age I was rarely without a book in my hand. My first “real” book at the age of seven had been Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies and from there the whole collections of both Famous Five and Secret Seven had been devoured before making way for the likes of The Silver Brumby. So needless to say…

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“From the Spear to the Pen”: How Indigenous writing has enriched our literary landscape

SoutherlyBlog

by Marie Munkara From the noble savage to the dull witted primitive the representation of indigenous people in literature by the non-indigenous has provided interesting reading since the days of early settlement in this country. But one can only ponder how much of the colonial depictions were based on scientific theory as naturalist Charles Darwin’s belief that the Australian Aborigine was only one rung up the evolutionary ladder from the great apes must have shaped the attitudes of many in the new penal colony. His comment in 1835 that “All the aborigines have been removed to an island in Bass…

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June Monthly Blogger – Marie Munkara!

SoutherlyBlog, News

An enormous thanks to Luke Carman for his excellent posts. This month our blogger is Marie Munkara. Her bio is below: Marie was born on the banks of the Mainoru River in Arnhemland and spent her early years growing up on Bathurst Island. Her first Novel Every Secret thing (UQP) won the David Unaipon Award in 2008 and the NT Book of the Year in 2010. Her two children’s books (Laguna Bay) Rusty Brown and Rusty and Jojo, were released in January 2014, and her second novel A Most Peculiar Act in April 2014. Marie has recently completed her memoir…

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