Teachers Talk Texts

This week's episode focused on Joan London's novel, 'The Golden Age', and Clare is joined by Pauline Canty and Angela Pane, who have both taught the text for many years. The conversation begins by exploring the roles of the three mothers in the text: Ida, Margaret and Sister Penny, and the importance they hold in representing the different concepts of womanhood in 1950s Austral...

Clare speaks with the very knowledgeable Allie Baker this week, exploring the text pairing of Malala Yousafzai's 'I am Malala: The Story of the Girl Who Stood Up for Education and was Shot by the Taliban' and the 2014 film 'Pride', directed by Matthew Warchus. The conversation delves into the points of similarity between the two texts in revealing the untold stories of ind...

This week, Clare speaks with Nathan Jackson about Christine Piper's award-winning novel, 'After Darkness'. The discussion focuses on the trauma experienced by the protagonist, Tomokazu Ibaraki, and how Piper utilises the fractured narrative structure to represent the impact one's past can have on their memories, and their lives. While Ibaraki undoubtedly achieves some redemptio...

Clare is joined by Cora Alvarez and Lisa Hanlon to talk about Alfred Hitchcock's film 'Rear Window' in this episode. Together, they investigate how pertinent Hitchcock's film is even today for a modern teenage audience, and how accurately it reflects the zeitgeist of the COVID-19 world. With discussions of the parallels between Jeff's sneering and sanctimonious attitude to...

In this episode, Clare speaks with Kirsty Murphy about the text pairing of Jhumpa Lahiri's 2003 novel 'The Namesake' and Magda Szubanski's 2015 award-winning memoir 'Reckoning'. The conversation begins first with a deep dive into the three (or four) namesakes in Lahiri's novel: Ashima, Ashoke, Gogol (and Moushumi), and then compares to the three characters who ex...

Hannah Warner joins Clare to discuss the first comparative pairing of the season - David Malouf's 'Ransom' and Stephen Frear's film 'The Queen'. When Hannah speaks about these texts, she communicates with clarity, confidence and knowledge, and is supremely generous with both her time and the ideas she has been discussing with her own students. Sharing detailed insight...

Carla Ziino joins Clare to discuss Anthony Doerr's Pulitzer Prize winning novel, 'All The Light We Cannot See' - a text that ultimately explores what makes us human. The discussion traverses a lot of ground in an hour, focusing especially on the binary nature of the two young protagonists - Marie-Laure and Werner: girl and boy, French and German, disabled and able. Carla's know...

In this discussion, Clare speaks with Prue Bon about 'Pride and Prejudice' by Jane Austen. Topics covered include the constructed nature of the text, and the reality that Austen was ultimately producing popular fiction in her day, the feminist elements of the novel, and an examination of a series of characters, including Charlotte, Lydia, Mr & Mrs Bennet, Elizabeth, Darcy and Lady Ca...

Philip Thiel and Lauren Wade join Clare to discuss Euripides' bleak lament, 'Women of Troy'. The discussion spans the course of the play, focusing in on the perspective of Queen Hecuba, labelled the 'favourite grandmother in lit', the lack of support provided by the gods to these women left behind after their men failed them, and some differing perspectives on how to read...