Document Type
Creative Work
ANZSRC / FoR Code
1904 PERFORMING ARTS AND CREATIVE WRITING
COinS
Creative Work
1904 PERFORMING ARTS AND CREATIVE WRITING
Publication Details
Wearne, A. R. (2004). The Lovemakers. Book Two: Money and Nothing. (1 ed.) (pp. 1-398). Sydney: ABC Books.
Digital file not available. To access a copy of this book, please contact Michael Organ, Manager Repository Services: morgan@uow.edu.au.
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RESEARCH IMPACT STATEMENT
Research Background
This is the second part of my major verse novel which took 13 years to write. It is centred on the interconnecting lives of a large variety of urban and suburban Australians (mainly in Melbourne and Sydney) during the years 1960-1990. The areas covered include adolescence, the church, the underworld in particular the drug trade, the sex industry, latter day bohemia, the public service, family life, big business, Australians in South East Asia, and people in and out of love.
Research Contribution
The entire 2 volumes are the largest verse novel published in Australia and probably the largest published in English. They are also a collection of nearly 50 interconnected narrative poems and sequences/suites of poems. The Lovemakers has contributed to the genre of the verse novel by providing a contemporary Australian inflection.
Research Significance
The Lovemakers won the 2004 Colin Roderick Award and H T Priestly Medal from James Cook University as a dual winner with Tim Winton. Other notable winners of this award include writers such as Peter Carey, Tom Keneally and Ruth Park, This work is featured in an article by Christopher Pollnitz of the University of Newcastle on verse novels in the magazine Heat and in his entry on my work in the Dictionary of Australian Literary Biography. Articles by Martin Duwell (formerly of the University of Queensland) also chart similar territory.