The Littoral Zone: Australian Contexts and Their Writers (Nature
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The Littoral Zone Australian Contexts and their Writers Nature, Culture and Literature 04 General Editors: Hubert van den Berg (University of Groningen) Axel Goodbody (University of Bath) Marcel Wissenburg (University of Nijmegen) Advisory Board: Jonathan Bate (University of Warwick) Hartmut Böhme (Humboldt University, Berlin) Heinrich Detering (University of Kiel) Andrew Dobson (Keele University) Marius de Geus (Leiden University) Terry Gifford (University of Leeds) Demetri Kantarelis (Assumption College, Worcester MA) Richard Kerridge (Bath Spa University College) Michiel Korthals (Wageningen University) Svend Erik Larsen (University of Aarhus) Patrick Murphy (University of Central Florida) Kate Rigby (Monash University) Avner de-Shalit (Hebrew University Jerusalem) Piers Stephens (Michigan State University) Nina Witoszek (University of Oslo) The Littoral Zone Australian Contexts and their Writers Introduced and edited by CA. Cranston and Robert Zeller Amsterdam - New York, NY 2007 Cover Design: Erick de Jong Cover image: Hannah Guenzel The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence”. ISBN-13: 978-90-420-2218-8 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2007 Printed in the Netherlands Contents Acknowledgements 5 Robert Zeller and CA. Cranston Setting the Scene: Littoral and Critical Contexts 7 Bruce Bennett A Beach Somewhere: The Australian Littoral Imagination at Play 31 Tony Hughes-d’Aeth The Shadow on the Field: Literature and Ecology in the Western Australian Wheatbelt 45 Tom Lynch Literature in the Arid Zone 71 Mitchell Rolls The Green Thumb of Appropriation 93 Mark Tredinnick Under the Mountains and Beside a Creek: Robert Gray and the Shepherding of Antipodean Being 123 Veronica Brady The Poetry of Judith Wright and Ways of Rejoicing in the World 145 Kate Rigby Ecopoetics of the Limestone Plains 153 Ruth Blair Hugging the Shore: The Green Mountains of South- East Queensland 177 Robert Zeller Tales of the Austral Tropics: North Queensland in Australian Literature 199 CA. Cranston Islands 219 Elizabeth Leane “A Place of Ideals in Conflict”: Images of Antarctica in Australian Literature 261 Notes on Contributors 291 List of Illustrations 297 Index 299 Acknowledgements Thanks to two scholarly Associations, the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL), and the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE), which provided the opportu- nity and continuity necessary to develop the initial debate concerning the existence, or otherwise, of nature writing in Australian Literature. And of course, thanks to those scholars — members of the above Associations — whose various interests and knowledge contributed to furthering the various discussions. In addition, thanks go to our home institutions, The University of Tasmania (Australia), and Southeast Missouri State University (USA), for technical support, and for the financial support required to attend the conferences of the above Associations. And to Dr Susan Swartwout, and Miranda J. Henley, of Southeast Missouri State University Press for assistance in proofread- ing and indexing. Acknowledgements for illustrations and copyright clearance on text: Chapter 2, Figure 2: An Open Swimmer, by Tim Winton, first pub- lished Sydney: George Allen and Unwin Australia Pty Ltd, 1982. Cover photograph by Jeremy Prince. Chapter 3, Figure 4: ‘The clear- ing line’. Satellite photo courtesy of the Australian Government Bu- reau of Meteorology; Figure 3: ‘Instant Death to the Rabbits’, from Laurie Anderson, Windows on the Wheatbelt, Bassendean, WA: Access Press, 1999, p. 197. Figure 6, facing p. 71: map of Australian deserts courtesy of the Australian Government Department of the Environment and Water Resources. Chapter 6: thanks to Robert Gray for permission to reprint ‘A Poem of Not More Than Forty Lines on the Subject of Nature’ from Afterimages, Sydney: Duffy and Snell- grove, 2002. Chapter 9, thanks to HarperCollins Publishers for per- mission to reprint ‘Looking Down on Canberra’ by David Campbell from Collected Poems, North Ryde, NSW: Angus and Robertson, 1989; and to The Estate of Michael Thwaites for permission to reprint lines from ‘Psalm for an Artificial City’ from the cycle of poems ‘A Place of Meeting’, published in The Honey Man and other Poems, Canberra: Trendsetting, 1993. Chapter 11, Figure 8: ‘Planning work 6 Acknowledgements for soldier settlement blocks at Pegarah, courtesy of the King Island Museum, PO Box 71, Currie, King Island, Tasmania; Figure 9 ‘Heavy machinery at Reekara, brought to the island to clear the land, 1962’, permission granted by Judith Payne, King Island, Tasmania. Chapter 12, thanks to the University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, for per- mission to reprint ‘Antarctica’ from John Blight’s collection Hart, originally published Melbourne: Thomas Nelson, 1975, p. 6; thanks also to Fremantle Arts Centre Press for permission to reprint Alan Alexander’s ‘Antarctica’ from Principia Gondwana, South Fremantle, WA: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1992, p. 65; and Caroline Caddy’s ‘Antarctica’ from Antarctica, South Fremantle, WA: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1996, pp. 54-55. Setting the Scene: Littoral and Critical Contexts Robert Zeller and CA. Cranston Several years ago, a series of ads promoting Australia as a tourist destination aired on North American television. In them, Paul Hogan came wading out of the surf to remind viewers that Australia is sur- rounded by water — that when they visit Australia they will be enter- ing a littoral zone. It was in the littoral zone that the first contact between white and indigenous people occurred and where the white explorers or invaders had to begin to come to terms with an almost totally alien environment. Ever since then, Australian texts have been produced out of and in response to particular places. Bruce Bennett has argued in An Australian Compass that “the study of actual places and regions, writers’ relations with them, and depictions of them, should be inserted into our national conscious- ness” (Bennett 1991: 16-17). While Bennett was interested in cor- recting what he saw as an oversimplified emphasis on a Sydney-or- the-bush dichotomy, we believe that an investigation of place has broader implications for the study of Australian writing — clarifying, for one thing, its distinctive Australian orientations, but also deepen- ing and enriching our appreciation of it as literature. We believe that the recent development in literary studies labelled ecocriticsm could be very productive in generating new insights. To begin, we should define what we mean by ecocriticism. Broadly speaking, ecocriticism engages with texts as if actual places matter (thereby setting itself at odds with poststructuralism, whose practitio- ners might characterize it as being ‘too literal’.) In Cheryll Glotfelty’s oft-quoted definition, ecocriticism is “the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment” (1996: xviii).1 While other types of criticism have drawn on disciplines such as philosophy and psychology in their analysis of texts, ecocriticism has drawn on 8 Zeller and Cranston the sciences, in particular that of ecology, with its emphasis on the connectedness of natural systems. And as the etymological connection with ecology suggests, rather than privileging the human, ecocriticism acknowledges that humans are themselves part of natural systems, affected by them and affecting them in turn — unfortunately not always in mutually beneficial ways. In fact, it was in part the growing sense of environmental crisis that fuelled the turn to ecologically informed readings of texts. It was also in part the recognition that place-based writing (sometimes dismissively called ‘nature writing’, though it can encompass many genres) had for too long been ignored by literary critics. (As we note below, its neglect in Australia is one of the factors leading to this collection.) Almost a decade after Bennett, Patrick Murphy, in Farther Afield in the Study of Nature-Oriented Literature, stated that ecocriticism has been limited by a focus on American and British literatures. In order to widen the understanding of readers and critics, it is necessary to reconsider the privileg- ing of […] certain national literatures and certain ethnicities within those national literatures. Such reconsideration will enable a greater inclusiveness of literatures from around the world within the conception of nature-oriented literature. It will also enable critics and readers […] who focus primarily on American literature to place that literature in an internationally relative and comparative framework. I see such reconsideration as one of the ways by which we can refine our awareness and expand the field of ecocriticism. (Murphy 2000: 58) Thus can the introduction of Australian literature as a body of works available for ecocritical approaches also deepen and enrich the prac- tice of such literary criticism. In the past several years, things have changed somewhat from the situation Bennett was responding to; work by Australians such as George Seddon, Peter Hay, Libby Robin, Tom Griffiths, Tim Bony- hady, Val Plumwood, and Tim Flannery has broadened our under- standing of the concept of place in Australia. These and other scholars have prepared the ground for more ecocritical study of Australian writing, though, notably, none is a literary critic. Also, in recent years there have been