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Robert Duncan Drewe (born 9 January 1943) is an Australian novelist, non-fiction and short story writer.


Biography

Robert Drewe was born on 9 January 1943 in
Melbourne Melbourne ( , ; Boonwurrung language, Boonwurrung/ or ) is the List of Australian capital cities, capital and List of cities in Australia by population, most populous city of the States and territories of Australia, Australian state of Victori ...
, Victoria. At the age of six, he moved with his family to
Perth Perth () is the list of Australian capital cities, capital city of Western Australia. It is the list of cities in Australia by population, fourth-most-populous city in Australia, with a population of over 2.3 million within Greater Perth . The ...
. He grew up on the West Australian coast and was educated at Hale School. He joined ''
The West Australian ''The West Australian'' is the only locally edited daily newspaper published in Perth, Western Australia. It is owned by Seven West Media (SWM), as is the state's other major newspaper, ''The Sunday Times''. It is the second-oldest continuousl ...
'' as a cadet reporter. Three years later he was recruited by ''
The Age ''The Age'' is a daily newspaper in Melbourne, Australia, that has been published since 1854. Owned and published by Nine Entertainment, ''The Age'' primarily serves Victoria (Australia), Victoria, but copies also sell in Tasmania, the Austral ...
'', where he became Sydney chief at the age of 21, later Literary Editor of ''
The Australian ''The Australian'', with its Saturday edition ''The Weekend Australian'', is a broadsheet daily newspaper published by News Corp Australia since 14 July 1964. As the only Australian daily newspaper distributed nationally, its readership of b ...
''.Murray Waldren
Rob Drewe: The Diviner
(1996) Interview first published in ''The Australian Magazine''. Accessed: 11 October 2007
He was a
columnist A columnist is a person who writes for publication in a series, creating an article that usually offers commentary and opinions. Column (periodical), Columns appear in newspapers, magazines and other publications, including blogs. They take the ...
, features editor and special writer on ''The Australian'' and '' The Bulletin''. Drewe won two
Walkley Awards The annual Walkley Awards are presented in Australia to recognise and reward excellence in journalism. They cover all media including print, television, documentary, radio, photographic and online media. The Gold Walkley is the highest prize and ...
for journalism while working for ''The Bulletin''. He was awarded a Leader Grant travel scholarship by the United States Government. During the 1970s he turned from journalism to writing fiction, beginning with ''The Savage Crows'' in 1976, followed by ''A Cry in the Jungle Bar'', ''The Bodysurfers'', ''Fortune'', ''The Bay of Contented Men'', ''Our Sunshine'', ''The Drowner'', ''Grace'' and ''The Rip'', as well as a prize-winning memoir, ''The Shark Net'', and the non-fiction ''Walking Ella''. ''Fortune'' won the fiction category of the National Book Council Award, ''The Bay of Contented Men'' won a
Commonwealth Writers' Prize Commonwealth Foundation has presented a number of prizes since 1987. The main award was called the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and was composed of two prizes: the Best Book Prize (overall and regional) was awarded from 1987 to 2011; the Best First ...
for the best book in Australasia and South-East Asia, and ''The Drowner'' made Australian literary history by becoming the first novel to win the Premier's Literary Prize in every state. It also won the Australian Book of the Year Prize, the Adelaide Festival Prize for literature and was voted one of the ten best international novels of the decade. ''The Shark Net'' won the Western Australian Premier's Prize for Non-Fiction, the Courier Mail Book of the Year Prize and the Vision Australia Award. ''Our Sunshine'' was made into a 2003 film, retitled ''
Ned Kelly Edward Kelly (December 185411 November 1880) was an Australian bushranger, outlaw, gang leader, bank robber and convicted police-murderer. One of the last bushrangers, he is known for wearing armour of the Kelly gang, a suit of bulletproof ...
'', directed by Gregor Jordan and starring
Heath Ledger Heath Andrew Ledger (4 April 1979 – 22 January 2008) was an Australian actor. After playing roles in several Australian television and film productions during the 1990s, he moved to the United States in 1998 to further develop his film care ...
,
Orlando Bloom Orlando Jonathan Blanchard Copeland Bloom (born 13 January 1977) is an English actor. He made his breakthrough as the character Legolas in The Lord of the Rings (film series), ''The Lord of the Rings'' film series (2001–03). He reprised his r ...
and Naomi Watts. ''The Shark Net'' was adapted for an ABC-BBC-produced international television mini-series and a BBC radio drama. ''The Bodysurfers'' also became a successful ABC and BBC TV mini-series and was adapted for radio and the theatre. Drewe was also the editor of two short-story anthologies, ''The Penguin Book of the Beach'' and ''The Penguin Book of the City'', and edited ''Best Australian Stories'' in 2006 and 2007 and ''Best Australian Essays'' in 2010. He has been a ''Sydney Morning Herald'' film critic, and his play, ''South American Barbecue'', was first performed at Sydney's Belvoir Street Theatre in 1991. He was awarded an Australian arts scholarshi

by Prime Minister, Paul Keating. He has also received an honorary doctorate in literature from the
University of Queensland The University of Queensland is a Public university, public research university located primarily in Brisbane, the capital city of the Australian state of Queensland. Founded in 1909 by the Queensland parliament, UQ is one of the six sandstone ...
, and an honorary doctorate of letters from the University of Western Australia. Drewe has been a member of the Literature Board of the Australia Council and the management committees of the Australian Society of Authors, the Sydney Writers' Festival, and the Byron Bay Writers Festival. In 2019 Drewe won the
Colin Roderick Award The Colin Roderick Award is presented annually by the Foundation for Australian Literary Studies at Queensland's James Cook University for "the best book published in Australia which deals with any aspect of Australian life". It was first presente ...
for his book ''The True Colour of the Sea''. ''The True Colour of the Sea'' was shortlisted for the 2019 University of Southern Queensland Steele Rudd Award for a Short Story Collection at the Queensland Literary Awards.


Critical responses

Literature and Journalism: The Fiction of Robert Drewe – 1989 by Bruce Bennett Robert Drewe is the author of three novels, ''The Savage Crows'' (1976), ''A Cry in the Jungle Bar'' (1979), and ''Fortune'' (1986), together with a book of stories ''The Bodysurfers'' (1983) and a forthcoming collection to be called ''The Bay of Contented Men.'' Drewe was a journalist for ten years between the ages of 18 and 28 before he determined to be a full-time fiction writer. He had started to write a novel when he was 26, parts of which found their way into ''The Savage Crows'', but for Drewe the major career change occurred when he was 29. Since the early 1970s Drewe has returned to journalism only briefly to earn money to keep himself and his family going. Yet he had built a successful career in journalism in a number of newspapers and magazines including ''The West Australian'' (1961–64), ''The Age'' (1964–70), ''The Australian'' (1970–74) and ''The Bulletin'' (1975–76 and 1980–83). Drewe won three major national awards including the
Walkley Award The annual Walkley Awards are presented in Australia to recognise and reward excellence in journalism. They cover all media including print, television, documentary, radio, photographic and online media. The Gold Walkley is the highest prize and ...
(twice), Australia's version of the Pulitzer Prize. His experience ranged from investigative reporter to literary editor and columnist. From his period with the ''Australian'' on, Drewe set his sights on becoming a fiction writer (a first abortive novel had been written while he was with the Age). His occasional returns to journalism in the 1970s and 1980s were increasingly difficult and, in his words, "soul-destroying." Birth of a novelist, death of a journalist by David Conley Drewe is Australia's most prominent journalist-novelist in that he has won awards for reportage and fiction. He has won two Walkley Awards (1976, 1981) and written five novels and two books of short stories, including ''The Bodysurfers,'' which became a TV mini-series. ''Fortune'' (1987) won the National Book Council's Banjo Award for fiction. It can be argued journalism helped prepare him for fiction and made him a better, and certainly a different, novelist than he otherwise would have been. Drewe undertook a cadetship with the ''West Australian'' on his 18th birthday and credits the profession with educating him. Becoming a journalist seemed a romantic notion. It offered travel and adventure while he was being paid for it (Hart 1988, p. 5). "Robert Drewe's Australias – with particular reference to the bodysurfers" by John Thieme Few contemporary Australian writers have explored the changing nature of the country's social mores to a greater extent than Robert Drewe. Ever since his first novel, ''The Savage Crows'' (1976), Drewe's fiction has interrogated conceptions of a unitary national identity such as that projected by the Australian legend, with its emphasis on the bush, mateship and Anglo-Celtic origins. “The lesson of the "yellow sand": Robert Drewe's dissection of "the good old past" in “The Drowner” and “Grace”” By Michael Ackland Robert Drewe’s investment in the past and history is much commented on but not always understood. Its very obviousness, together with the variety of subjects chosen, has deflected attention away from the evolving, subtly changing nature of his response to the historical record. This has, of course, ranged from the adversarial to the nostalgic and elegiac, and a similar diversity characterises the historical sources drawn on for his major fiction, beginning with genocide in Tasmania and Australia’s place in the Asia-Pacific region, through the making of national fold-heroes, to an autobiography and stories based on his early life in Perth. "The Diviner" by Murray Waldren He has always specialised in precise texts of straightforward but expressive prose, tinged with traces of black humour. In literature, his world is one in which characters barely comprehend what is happening around them, where life and nature verge on the malevolent, where shards of sudden insight illuminate the confusion. One of his strengths is an ability to pin down the fine detail of how people interact, socially and emotionally, to capture the nuance and undercurrents that exist beneath conversations. "Desert Drowning" by Michael Cathcart This is a sad, sexy and visceral novel. It is buoyed up by compassion and a clear-sighted lack of self-indulgence. This is Drewe at his very best: the world of a mature craftsman writing with cool urgency and a relish for the language of life.


Personal life

Drewe has six children from three marriages. (A son died in 2019.) He and his wife Tracy divide their time between the New South Wales north coast and
North Fremantle, Western Australia North Fremantle is a suburb of Perth, Western Australia, located within the City of Fremantle, a local government area of the state. Its postcode is 6159. North Fremantle is situated on a peninsula, with the Indian Ocean bounding the west side ...
.


Bibliography


Novels

*''The Savage Crows'' (1976) *''A Cry in the Jungle Bar'' (1979) *''Fortune'' (1986) *'' Our Sunshine'' (1991) *'' The Drowner'' (1996) *''Grace'' (2005) *''Whipbird'' (2017) *''Nimblefoot'' (2022)


Short story collections

*''The Bodysurfers'' (1983) *''The Bay of Contented Men'' (1989) *''The Rip'' (2008) *''The Local Wildlife'' (2013) *''The True Colour of the Sea'' (2018)


Non-fiction

*''Walking Ella: A Dog Day Dossier'' (1998) (later ''Walking Ella: Ruminations of a Reluctant Dog-walker'' ) *''The Shark Net: Memories and Murder'' (2000) *''The Seventh Wave: Photographs of Australian Beaches'' (with Trent Parke) (2000) *''Perth'' (with Frances Andrijich and Jeff Bell) (2005) *''Sand'' (with John Kinsella) (2010) *''Montebello: A Memoir'' (2012) *''The Local Wildlife'' (2013) *''Swimming to the Moon'' (2014) *''The Beach: An Australian Passion (2015)''


Drama

* ''The Bodysurfers: The Play'' (1989) *''South American Barbecue'' (1991)


As editor

*''Bondi'' (1984) *''Yacker: Australian Writers Talk About Their Work'' (1986) (with Candida Baker) *''The Picador Book of the Beach'' (1993) (later ''The Penguin Book of the Beach'' ) *''The Penguin Book of the City'' (1997) *''Best Australian Stories 2006'' (2006) *''Best Australian Stories 2007'' (2007) *''Best Australian Essays 2010'' (2010)


References


External links


Profile
at
Penguin Books Penguin Books Limited is a Germany, German-owned English publishing, publishing house. It was co-founded in 1935 by Allen Lane with his brothers Richard and John, as a line of the publishers the Bodley Head, only becoming a separate company the ...

Guide to the Papers of Robert DreweA Guide to Robert Drewe
{{DEFAULTSORT:Drewe, Robert Living people 20th-century Australian novelists 20th-century Australian male writers 21st-century Australian novelists Australian male novelists Australian male short story writers Journalists from Melbourne 20th-century Australian short story writers 21st-century Australian short story writers 21st-century Australian male writers 1943 births People educated at Hale School