The Complete Stories

On the 2026 VCE English and EAL text list. The Complete Stories is a List 1 collection of short stories for Reading and responding to texts and meets the Australian text requirement. Only the seven stories in the Every Move You Make section are set: The Valley of Lagoons, Every Move You Make, War Baby, Towards Midnight, Elsewhere, Mrs Porter and the Rock, and The Domestic Cantata. 2026 is its second year on the list and it is also on the 2027 list. VCAA's reference edition is Penguin (2018). In 2025, 0.4 per cent of students wrote on it in Section A. The stories deal with a shooting accident, death and grief, terminal illness and war.

The set stories in brief

The Complete Stories (2007) gathers David Malouf's short fiction in reverse order of publication, so it opens with the seven stories of Every Move You Make (2006). These are the set stories. Most are about a person at a threshold: a boy on the edge of manhood, a woman in love, a young man going to war, an ageing woman facing death. Little happens in outward terms; what matters is a shift in understanding. VCAA's annotation describes stories about the complexities of human relationships, the silences and gaps between people as the sites of our greatest grief, and places of hope in reconciliation and return.

1. The Valley of Lagoons. Angus, sixteen, narrates his first trip with his best friend Braden McGowan's family on their pig hunt into the Valley of Lagoons, a remote wetland wilderness in north Queensland he has heard about all his life. Braden's older brother, Stuart, has just been dropped by Angus's sister, Katie, which makes Angus's place in the group awkward. The land has a history most of the party have forgotten or never known. The trip turns on a shooting accident in which Stuart is hit, and Angus comes away seeing Stuart, and himself, differently, while the childhood friendship with Braden begins to shift. Malouf has said the landscape is real and that he went on a similar hunting trip there as a young man.
2. Every Move You Make. Jo falls in love with Mitchell Maze, a builder and carpenter who is capable, self-contained and private. She wants to know him completely; he keeps parts of himself closed. After Mitchell's death, Jo is left with grief and with the discovery of parts of his past he had never shared with her.
3. War Baby. Charlie Dowd, a young man from a small Queensland town, is about to be sent to the Vietnam War. The story follows the fuss around his leaving and his return about two years later. Malouf is less interested in the fighting than in the change in Charlie that others cannot share, and in a quiet moment of rain and gulls that gives him a sense that the force he has been waiting for lies within himself.
4. Towards Midnight. An older woman living alone in a villa in Tuscany, undergoing treatment for cancer and aware that she is dying, watches a young workman swim in her pool at night. She comes to see him as a herald of her own departure, and the story moves towards acceptance and even joy rather than fear.
5. Elsewhere. Andy Mayo travels with his father-in-law, Harry Larcombe, to Sydney for the funeral of Harry's estranged daughter, Debbie, who had made her life in the city. Among Debbie's city friends, both men glimpse the other life she chose, and Andy's sense of who he is, and who he might have been, is unsettled before he returns home.
6. Mrs Porter and the Rock. Mrs Porter, an elderly widow, is taken by her son, Donald, to see Uluru, which he approaches almost as a pilgrimage. As her mind loosens its hold on the present, she has visions that take her into other people's pain and towards her own death, which she meets with lightness rather than fear. The story is told in the present tense.
7. The Domestic Cantata. Sam McCall, a composer, guards his time and space for work against the noise of family life: his wife, Maggie, a soprano, their children and a houseful of visitors. A family lunch ends in disorder. The story, shaped like a cantata of several voices, ends with Maggie singing Sam's music, which joins the domestic and the artistic that Sam has tried to keep apart.

Author and context

David Malouf (1934 to 2026) was born in Brisbane to a Lebanese Christian father and an English-born mother, and he died on the Gold Coast in April 2026, aged 92. He was one of Australia's most celebrated writers: a poet, librettist and essayist as well as the author of novels including Johnno (1975), An Imaginary Life (1978), Fly Away Peter (1982), The Great World (1990), Remembering Babylon (1993) and Ransom (2009). Every Move You Make won The Age Book of the Year for fiction in 2007, and The Complete Stories won the Australia-Asia Literary Award in 2008.

Context you can use (always linked to a topic):

• Queensland and place. Malouf's Brisbane childhood and the landscapes of Queensland run through his writing. In these stories place is never just scenery: the lagoons, a country town, Uluru and a Tuscan villa each shape what characters come to understand.
• The Vietnam War. Australia fought in Vietnam from the early 1960s to the early 1970s, and conscription made it a personal question for young men and their families. War Baby uses this history to explore an experience that cannot be shared with those at home.
• Uluru. The Rock is sacred to its Anangu traditional owners and has long been a destination for tourists and seekers. Mrs Porter and the Rock sets a non-Indigenous family's search for meaning against a place whose significance belongs to others.
• Masculinity. Several stories test an Australian ideal of the stoic, capable, unexpressive man (the hunters, Mitchell, Charlie, Sam) and show what that silence costs.

Form, structure and style

• Long, accumulating sentences. Malouf's sentences gather detail and qualification, moving between physical sensation and reflection. The rhythm slows the reader down to notice what his characters notice.
• Close narration. The Valley of Lagoons is told in the first person by Angus, looking back; the others stay close to one character's consciousness, sometimes shifting between characters (Every Move You Make moves from Jo to Mitchell; The Domestic Cantata moves between family members). Mrs Porter and the Rock is in the present tense.
• Landscape and the senses. Water, heat, light, bodies and weather carry meaning: the wetland, the rain on the playground, the night pool, the Rock.
• Epiphanies. Stories often turn on a moment of sudden understanding rather than a plot climax, a technique reviewers have compared to James Joyce and Katherine Mansfield.
• Open endings. VCAA's annotation notes the ambiguities that cannot be resolved and the words that can never be said. Endings tend to open outwards (a death that feels like a beginning, a return home that is also a change).
• Australian vernacular. VCAA's annotation also points to the way Malouf weaves Australian idiom into richly imagistic prose.

Ideas, concerns and values, and how they are built

The significance of everyday life

A hunting trip, a family lunch, a swim, a funeral: Malouf finds the largest questions of love and death in ordinary events. A 2025 VCAA topic proposed that Malouf suggests everyday life can be significant.

Knowing others, and the limits of intimacy

Jo cannot reach the whole of Mitchell; Harry and Andy did not know Debbie's city life; Sam and Maggie live side by side with different needs. The gaps between people are where grief lives, as VCAA's annotation puts it, yet moments of recognition (Angus seeing Stuart's pain, Maggie singing Sam's music) show connection is possible.

Self-discovery

Angus, Charlie and Andy each discover something about themselves they could not have named before. A 2025 topic proposed that the collection shows it is harder to understand yourself than to understand others.

Silence and the unsaid

Stuart cannot express his heartbreak; Mitchell keeps his past to himself; Charlie's experience of war is beyond words. Malouf builds meaning through gesture, landscape and silence rather than confession.

Masculinity and vulnerability

The stoic male ideal is both respected and exposed: the capable men of these stories are often the least able to speak about what they feel.

Mortality and transcendence

Towards Midnight and Mrs Porter and the Rock treat approaching death with calm and even joy, as a threshold rather than an end.

Place and belonging

Characters are shaped by where they come from and changed by where they go. Mrs Porter and the Rock and The Valley of Lagoons also hint at older histories of the land that settler Australians have forgotten.

Key moments and why they matter

1. Setting out for the lagoons. Angus's long-awaited admission to the hunt is his initiation into a world of men and of the land's forgotten history.
2. The shooting accident. The hunt's violence exposes the feelings Stuart cannot put into words, and changes how Angus sees him.
3. Mitchell's death. Jo's grief is compounded by discovering how much of Mitchell she never knew.
4. Charlie's return. The change in him is real but inward, and cannot be shared with the people at home.
5. The swimmer at midnight. The dying woman's watching turns a young stranger into a messenger, and fear into acceptance.
6. The Sydney funeral. Andy and Harry meet the life Debbie made elsewhere and see their own lives from outside.
7. Mrs Porter at the Rock. A journey her son intended as his pilgrimage becomes hers, in a way he cannot follow.
8. Maggie sings. Sam's music and his family's noise come together in one voice.

How VCAA frames topics on this text

VCAA's 2024 and 2025 exam reports describe three topic types: a proposition followed by Discuss, Do you agree? or To what extent do you agree?; a quotation from the text followed by a proposition or question; and a direct question. Each text gets two narrow topics about specific ideas and values. For a collection, the exam instructions allow you to write on several stories, or on at least two in close detail.

In 2025, the first year the collection was examined, one topic proposed that Malouf suggests everyday life can be significant, and the other proposed that the collection demonstrates it is harder to understand yourself than it is to understand others. The 2025 report listed that second topic among those built on a relationship between two concepts (here, a difference between understanding yourself and understanding others), so both halves need weighing. Expect topics on everyday life, self-knowledge and knowing others, silence, relationships, masculinity, mortality and place.

Practice topics (original, not from VCAA)

These are practice topics written for this page in the VCAA style. They are not past exam topics.

1. In The Complete Stories, what is left unsaid matters most. Discuss.
2. Malouf's characters find meaning in moments rather than in achievements. Do you agree?
3. How does Malouf use place to reveal his characters' inner lives?
4. The Complete Stories suggests that we can never fully know the people we love. To what extent do you agree?
5. In Malouf's stories, endings are also beginnings. Discuss.

Planning example

Topic (practice)

The Complete Stories suggests that we can never fully know the people we love. To what extent do you agree?

Contention

Malouf shows that the people we love remain partly unknowable, and that these gaps are the source of much of the grief in his stories. But he also offers moments of genuine recognition, reached through attention, shared experience and art rather than full disclosure.

Paragraph 1: the unknowable beloved

Every Move You Make and Elsewhere. Analyse how the shift in perspective from Jo to Mitchell shows the reader what Jo cannot see, and how Debbie's funeral reveals a life her family never knew.

Paragraph 2: silence and the stoic

The Valley of Lagoons and War Baby. Analyse how Stuart's inarticulate heartbreak and Charlie's unshareable experience make silence a barrier, and how landscape carries what the characters cannot say.

Paragraph 3: recognition without explanation

The Valley of Lagoons and The Domestic Cantata. Analyse Angus's new understanding of Stuart after the accident, and Maggie singing Sam's music, as moments of knowing that do not depend on words.

Paragraph 4: knowing at the threshold

Towards Midnight and Mrs Porter and the Rock. Analyse how facing death gives the women a clarity their families cannot share, which suggests the limit is not only between people but at the edge of life itself.

Conclusion

For Malouf, full knowledge of another person is impossible, but moments of recognition are real and precious, and his open endings ask the reader to accept both.

Common pitfalls

• Writing on the wrong stories. Only the seven Every Move You Make stories are set; do not bring in Malouf's earlier stories or his novels.
• Summarising instead of analysing style. Malouf's sentences, images and endings are the evidence. Show how they create meaning.
• Reducing ambiguity to a moral. The endings are deliberately open; argue for a reading while acknowledging what remains unresolved.

Read the stories

The Complete Stories is in copyright, so this page analyses the stories without quoting them. VCAA's reference edition is Penguin (2018), available from your school or local library.

Sources

• VCE English and EAL Text List 2026 and Text List 2027, VCAA.
• VCE English 2025 examination and 2025 examination report, VCAA.
• 2024 VCE English examination report, VCAA.
• VCE English and EAL Study Design (version 1.4), VCAA.