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.
Young Charlie Dowd, in the shadow of a father who fought in an earlier war, eagerly ships out to Vietnam expecting it to “give his life direction”. He comes home changed, alienated and quietly damaged instead.
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 Dulcie Porter is taken to Uluru by her aesthete son Donald, who reveres the Rock as a kind of secular altar. Her mind is fracturing with dementia across the visit, and she wanders from the motel into the desert.
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.
Charlie expects Vietnam to give his life direction rather than let him go on “stumbling about in a maze that had no end” — the hope the rest of the story quietly dismantles.
Ordinary household sounds become charged when measured against the possibility of dying.
Refusing to be impressed by Donald's reverence for the Rock, Dulcie Porter is nonetheless unravelling — her dementia advancing across the visit until she wanders from the motel into the desert.
An evening of ordinary family life is shaped, by the narration, into something like a piece of music — movements, voices, resolution.
All seven set stories were first published together in the 2006 collection Every Move You Make. Malouf's power is cumulative and syntactic — single lines lose force out of context, so build your own quote bank story by story as you read. Where this guide has a confirmed line it's given in full; the rest is a finding map naming the story so you can pull the exact wording yourself.
the country given agency or consciousness — land that watches, waits, or absorbs.“The Valley of Lagoons”, “Mrs Porter and the Rock”
Angus on the cattle drive, learning the valley as both a real place and a threshold into adulthood — Malouf drew the landscape from his own pig-hunting trip at twenty.“The Valley of Lagoons”
Uluru refusing to mean what the tourist (or Donald's reverence) wants it to mean; the Rock as older than the self.“Mrs Porter and the Rock”
Dulcie's flat, unimpressed verdict against her son's florid appreciation of the Rock.“Mrs Porter and the Rock”
“For a moment he entirely yielded, and she felt, in his sudden cry, and in the completeness afterwards with which he sank into her arms, that she had been allowed into a place that in every other circumstance he kept guarded, closed off.”Jo and Mitchell Maze (real name Bobby Kohler) — “Every Move You Make”
the house Mitchell built — Jo living on inside his unfinished design, grief merging with architecture.“Every Move You Make”
Dulcie Porter's dementia-driven disappearance into the desert around Uluru — the story's bleak, largely unstated ending.“Mrs Porter and the Rock”
an object or ordinary household sound that carries unbearable weight once mortality is in the room.“Towards Midnight”
the narrator naming, years later, what an episode made of him.“The Valley of Lagoons”, “War Baby”
Charlie expecting Vietnam to “give his life direction” rather than leave him “stumbling about in a maze that had no end”.“War Baby”
the returned Charlie's glimpse of “how small the pressures might be that determine the sum of what is and what we feel”.“War Baby” — closing
silences and things left unsaid between family members.“War Baby”, “The Domestic Cantata”
Charlie's father, shaped by an earlier war he rarely speaks of, and what Charlie thinks he owes that unspoken history.“War Baby”
the ordinary household evening, arranged almost like movements of music, that exposes a family's fault lines and its bonds together.“The Domestic Cantata”
the small frictions and routines of a household in “Elsewhere”, and what holding them together costs.“Elsewhere”
Jo among Mitchell's family and friends after his death — an outsider absorbed briefly into a life she can only reconstruct secondhand.“Every Move You Make”
Donald's care for his mother reframed, by the story's end, against what he could not see or prevent.“Mrs Porter and the Rock”
a household member who unsettles or clarifies a family's routines from just outside it.“Elsewhere”, “The Domestic Cantata”
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