by David Malouf
The stories set for VCE are drawn from the last grouping in Malouf's collected volume (his 2006–07 sequence of new work) and are quiet, retrospective pieces about Australians, mostly Queenslanders, at hinges in their lives: a boy on his first hunting trip; a widow facing her dead lover's house; an old woman dragged to Uluru by her son; a family absorbing a death. Malouf's subject is the moment ordinary life reveals its depth — a landscape, a memory, a stranger, a piece of music opening something the character cannot quite name.
The prose is unhurried and sensuous, built on long sentences and exact physical detail, and it keeps reaching past realism toward something larger: the land as half-conscious, the dead as still present, the self as continuous with the world. Read together, the seven stories form a meditation on memory, belonging, and the settler Australian's uneasy, loving relationship to place.
Confirm the set list with your teacher — VCAA specifies which stories from the volume are examinable.
Most of the stories are narrated from years later. A character revisits one formative episode and asks what it made of them; the meaning is in the looking back, not the event.
Where to look: “The Valley of Lagoons” (Angus and the hunting trip); “War Baby”.
The Australian country is vast, ancient and half-sentient. White characters feel simultaneously at home in it and like intruders on it — a tension Malouf never quite resolves.
Where to look: “The Valley of Lagoons”; “Mrs Porter and the Rock” (Uluru); the bush around Mitchell Maze's house.
Strangers, generations and temperaments meet briefly and change one another: a widow and her lover's family, an old woman and her earnest son, a woman and an American builder.
Where to look: “Every Move You Make”; “Mrs Porter and the Rock”; “Elsewhere”.
Deaths ripple through households, and the dead keep acting on the living through houses, objects and habits. Mourning is a form of continued relationship.
Where to look: “Every Move You Make” (Mitchell's house); “Towards Midnight”; “The Domestic Cantata”.
Boys are inducted into an adult male world of guns, work and silence. The young narrator watches his father and other men and measures himself against them.
Where to look: “The Valley of Lagoons”; “War Baby”.
Music and domestic ritual (the “cantata” of family life) are ways of giving chaos a shape, or holding it briefly at bay.
Where to look: “The Domestic Cantata”; “Towards Midnight”.
Malouf's method: an ordinary object or place holds the past inside it, and touching it sends the character, and the reader, back to a specific time, mood and self.
The through-line of the seven stories
David Malouf was born in Brisbane in 1934 to a Lebanese-Christian father and an English-Jewish mother — an outsider's angle on Anglo-Australia that runs through his work. He is a poet as well as a novelist (Remembering Babylon, An Imaginary Life, Fly Away Peter), and the density of the prose in these stories is a poet's.
Malouf's imaginative homeland is subtropical Queensland (Brisbane verandahs, the bush, the coast), usually seen from a distance of decades. His 1985 memoir 12 Edmondstone Street is the key to how houses and rooms carry the past in his fiction.
Written in the 2000s, during national argument about history, native title and reconciliation, the stories register white Australians' divided feeling about country — deep attachment shadowed by the knowledge of prior ownership. Uluru in “Mrs Porter and the Rock” makes that explicit.
Malouf uses the form for compression and epiphany rather than plot. Expect little external action and a great deal of interior weather; the “event” is often a shift in perception.
Sixteen-year-old Angus is finally allowed on the annual pig hunt. A story of wanting to belong to a group of men, and of a friendship that shifts under the pressure of the trip.
Jo travels to the coastal house her dead lover Mitchell Maze built. His family, his buildings and his absence work on her over a weekend.
A young man dodges the Vietnam draft; years later his choices, and his father's silence about the earlier war, are weighed.
A woman with a serious diagnosis keeps a late-night vigil; the domestic and the mortal press against each other.
Two studies of ordinary households (the small frictions, routines and music of a family) and of the effort it takes to hold them together.
Stroppy, self-centred Mrs Porter is taken to Uluru by her dutiful son Donald. The Rock becomes a mirror for everything she has not looked at.
The camp at night, the men's talk, the kill — and Angus realising his idea of who he wanted to be is already changing.
Moving through the rooms her lover designed, Jo feels him present in the structure itself; grief and architecture merge.
What is not said between father and son about war and courage carries the story's weight.
Ordinary household sounds become charged when measured against the possibility of dying.
Refusing to be impressed, Mrs Porter is nonetheless forced by Uluru's sheer presence into a reckoning with her past and her son.
An evening of ordinary family life is shaped, by the narration, into something like a piece of music — movements, voices, resolution.
Malouf's power is cumulative and syntactic — single lines lose force out of context. Build your quote bank story by story as you read, and keep 2–3 longer sentences per story that show his method: physical detail opening into reflection. Note especially descriptions of landscape, houses and the dead.
the country given agency or consciousness — land that watches, waits, or absorbs.“The Valley of Lagoons”, “Mrs Porter and the Rock”
the boy on the cattle drive learning the valley as a place and as a threshold into adulthood.“The Valley of Lagoons”
Uluru refusing to mean what the tourist wants it to mean; the rock as older than the self.“Mrs Porter and the Rock”
the vacant lot “Jacko's Reach” as the last wild ground, holding the town's secret life.“Jacko's Reach”
colonial ground soaked in a violence the settlers will not name.“Blacksoil Country”
an object or room that “holds” someone absent or dead.“Every Move You Make”, “Towards Midnight”
the murdered boy narrating his own death and its long aftermath in the family.“Blacksoil Country”
the house Mitchell built — the widow living on inside his unfinished design.“Every Move You Make”
the dead soldier / lost brother whose absence organises the living.“War Baby”, “Great Day”
the narrator naming, years later, what an episode made of him.“The Valley of Lagoons”, “War Baby”
the schoolboy and the older poet — desire, class and shame remembered from adulthood.“Southern Skies”
a single train journey that becomes the moment a life turns.“The Kyogle Line”
childhood loyalty and its betrayal replayed in memory.“A Traveller's Tale”, “In Trust”
silences and things left unsaid between family members.“War Baby”, “The Domestic Cantata”
a father's opacity; a son's late, partial understanding of him.“The Kyogle Line”, “War Baby”
the ordinary household evening that exposes a marriage's fault lines.“The Domestic Cantata”, “Closer”
the family gathering (a birthday, a holiday) that carries decades of grievance.“Great Day”
the linguist and the last speaker of a language — what dies when a tongue dies.“The Only Speaker of His Tongue”
the excluded relative — the gay uncle kept beyond the fence at the family service.“Closer”
a stranger, a hitchhiker or an intruder who unsettles a settled life.“Dream Stuff”, “Night Training”
brief tenderness between people separated by class, age or nation.“The Sun in Winter”, “A Change of Scene”
a peaceful surface with menace close under it — the reader kept slightly off balance.“Dream Stuff”, “Night Training”, “Lone Pine”
an elderly touring couple ambushed on an outback road.“Lone Pine”
the humiliation ritual of national-service training turning cruel.“Night Training”
frontier killing recalled without remorse by the settlers who did it.“Blacksoil Country”
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