Past Programs
Ethics - 2007
Gail Jones's novel Sorry
26/06/2007
Gail Jones's latest novel Sorry examines the relationship between social justice and literature. Sorry is told from the perspective of a young white girl, Perdita, growing up in the Pilbara in Western Australia in the 1930s and 40s. She lives in a remote shack with her cold parents; her mother Stella, who's always reciting Shakespeare, and her brutish anthropologist father, Nicholas.
Perdita finds more affection from her friends, Billy her deaf neighbour and Mary, the family's Aboriginal domestic servant. When Nicholas is murdered, Mary confesses and is sent away, leaving Perdita bereft, with a stutter and unable to remember the circumstances of her father's murder.
This is a novel that explores the legacy of the Stolen Generation and whether it's too late to say 'sorry'. It has an explicit political agenda and, in the post-script, Gail Jones includes an explanatory note about the national inquiry into the stolen generation that happened 10 years ago.
Gail Jones spoke to the Book Show's Sarah L'Estrange in Melbourne. She starts with a reading from the beginning of Sorry.
Charles Dickens and the international copyright act
20/03/2007
Today, we look at the legacy on present day copyright laws of the debates between Mark Twain and Charles Dickens about the need for international copyright in the 19th century. This debate raged across the Atlantic between England and America before America drew up its international copyright act to protect the work of foreign writers like Dickens.
Matthew Pearl joins us to discuss this influential debate. Matthew Pearl is a visiting lecturer at the Harvard Law School, Cambridge Massachusetts, USA, and he has written two novels: The Dante Club and The Poe Shadow.
