Background:
BackgroundRobert Gray was born in 1945 and grew up in Coffs Harbour, New South Wales. He is an Australian poet whose work has for many years been taught for the Higher School Certificate. Robert Gray trained as a journalist and worked in Sydney as an editor, advertising copywriter, reviewer, buyer for bookshops and teacher of creative writing. He has been a writer-in-residence at several universities throughout Australia and across the world. Robert Gray has won numerous awards including the Adelaide Arts Festival award and NSW and the Victorian Premier’s awards. In 1990 he received the Patrick White Award; in 2011 he was the Australia Council Emeritus Award winner for literature; and in 2012 he won the Philip Hodgins Memorial Prize. His memoir, The Land I Came Through Last, received the Copyright Agency Limited/Waverley Library prize and earned him a Doctorate of Creative Arts from the University of Technology Sydney. In 2014 he was a 2014 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards judging panellist.
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Syllabus AnnotationsThe following annotations are based on the criteria for selection of texts appropriate for study for the Higher School Certificate. Merit And Cultural Significance
- Robert Gray is an award-winning Australian poet, writer, editor, teacher and critic.
- He has been acclaimed by his peers Kevin Hart and Les Murray respectively as ‘an Imagist … without rival in the English-speaking world’ and ‘one of the contemporary masters of poetry in English’.
- The poems selected for study are: ‘Journey: the North Coast’, ‘The Meatworks’, ‘North Coast Town’, ‘Late Ferry’, ‘Flames and Dangling Wire’, ‘Diptych’.
- Students will be engaged by the minutely observed scenes and encounters that Gray portrays in his poems, and the precision of his language.
- Gray’s poetry evokes images of the Australian landscape, people and ways of life that are drawn from his own experiences and perspectives.
- Students could investigate the influences of East Asian cultures and philosophy in the themes and forms of the poems.
- Students can examine Gray’s visual imagery, his preference for similes over metaphors, and other techniques used in the poems to represent the uniqueness and variety of the Australian environment and aspects of contemporary Australian life, to gain a deeper understanding of his approach to poetry and ideas about life and humanity.
- In their responding and composing, students will move from the images created in the poems to discover deeper levels in the poetry and insights about themselves, their attitudes to life and their world.
- Gray’s poetry invites comparison with other writers and texts that represent individuals’ experiences of nature, and Australian landscapes in particular.