A Dutiful Daughter: Text Classics

Australian literature’s strangest novel, written by its most familiar novelist.It is the duty of a good child to let his parents know the second they turn into animals.Barbara Glover’s parents metamorphosed when she hit puberty, becoming bovine from the waist down. Fearful of her transformative powers, she tends diligently to them, keeping them like animals on the family’s remote farm and-along with her brother, Damian, who harbours incestuous longings for her-protecting their terrible secret from the world. First published in 1971, Thomas Keneally’s A Dutiful Daughter is strange and disturbing, and utterly unlike any other Australian novel.

Thomas Keneally was born in 1935 in country New South Wales. In 1958 he entered the seminary but left before being ordained. He published his first book, The Place at Whitton, in 1964. He won the Miles Franklin Literary Award for Bring Larks and Heroes (1967) and Three Cheers for the Paraclete (1968), and was shortlisted three times for the Booker Prize before becoming the first Australian ever to win it- for Schindler’s Ark, in 1982. Keneally has written over thirty books, both fiction and non-fiction, as well as plays and essays.