Maps for the Lost

Edith Cowan University Research Online Theses: Doctorates and Masters Theses 2015 Maps for the lost: A collection of short fiction And Human / nature ecotones: Climate change and the ecological imagination: A critical essay Susan Heather Greenhill Edith Cowan University Recommended Citation Greenhill, S. H. (2015). Maps for the lost: A collection of short fiction And Human / nature ecotones: Climate change and the ecological imagination: A critical essay. Retrieved from https://ro.ecu.edu.au/theses/1701 This Thesis is posted at Research Online. https://ro.ecu.edu.au/theses/1701 Edith Cowan University Copyright Warning You may print or download ONE copy of this document for the purpose of your own research or study. The University does not authorise you to copy, communicate or otherwise make available electronically to any other person any copyright material contained on this site. 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If the user desires to publish a paper or written work containing passages copied or closely paraphrased from this thesis, which passages would in total constitute and infringing copy for the purpose of the Copyright Act, he or she must first obtain the written permission of the author to do so. Maps for the lost A collection of short fiction - and - Human / nature ecotones: Climate change and the ecological imagination A critical essay This thesis is presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Susan Heather Greenhill Edith Cowan University Faculty of Education and Arts School of Communications and Arts 2015 ii Abstract The thesis comprises a collection of short fiction, Maps for the Lost, and a critical essay, “Human / Nature Ecotones: Climate Change and the Ecological Imagination.” In ecological terms, areas of interaction between adjacent ecosystems are known as ecotones. Sites of relationship between biotic communities, they are charged with fertility and evolutionary possibility. While postcolonial scholarship is concerned with borders as points of cross-cultural contact, ecocritical thought focuses upon the ecotone that occurs at the interface between human and non-human nature. In their occupation of the liminal zones between human and natural realms, the characters and narratives of Maps for the Lost reveal and nurture the porosity of conventional demarcations. In the title story, a Czech artist maps the globe by night in order to find his lover. The buried geographies of human landscapes coalesce with those of the non-human realm: the territories of wolves and the scent-trails of a fox mingle imperceptibly with nocturnal Prague and the ransacked villages of post-war Croatia. In “Seeds,” a narrative structured around the process of biological growth, the lost memories of an elderly woman are returned to her by her garden. “The Skin of the Ocean” traces the obsession of a diver who sinks his yacht under the weight of coral and fish, while in “Drift,” an Iranian refugee writes letters along the tide-line of a Tasmanian beach. The essay identifies the inadequacy of literature and literary scholarship’s response to the threat of climate change as a failure of the imagination, reflecting the transgressive dimension of the crisis itself, and the dualistic legacy which still informs Western discourse on non-human nature. In order to redress this shortfall, which I argue the current generations of writers have an urgent moral responsibility to do, it is critical that we learn to understand the natural world of which we are a part, in ways that cast off the limitations of conventional representation. Paradoxically, it is the profoundly disruptive (apocalyptic?) nature of the climate crisis itself, which may create the imaginative traction for that shift in comprehension, forcing us, through loss, to interpret the world in ways that have been forgotten, or are fundamentally new. By analysing Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book, and Les Murray’s “Presence” sequence, the essay explores the correlation between imaginative and ecological processes, and the role of voice, embodiment, patterning and story in negotiations of nature and place. In the context of the asymptotical essence of the relation between text and world, and the paradox of iii phenomenological representation, it calls for a deeper cultural engagement with scientific discourse and indigenous philosophy, in order to illuminate the multiplicity and complexity of human connections to the non-human natural world. iv The declaration page is not included in this version of the thesis Acknowledgements Many thanks to my supervisor Associate Professor Jill Durey for her advice, encouragement and patience during the creation of this thesis. I am very grateful to Edith Cowan University for granting me a scholarship, and for their flexibility in enabling me to work from a remote location and through a number of personal challenges. Thanks too to Sarah Kearn, the Co-ordinator for Research Support, for answering my many questions. Acknowledgement must also go to the University of Tasmania, where the initial stages of this project began during the writing of one component of my Honours thesis, and to Dr. Danielle Wood for her attentive supervision and creative eye. I also wish to thank Dr. Peter Hay for steering me towards the work of Romand Coles, and for his inspirational, honest teaching. In terms of my fiction, I would like to extend warm thanks to Rachel Edwards and Ben Walter for their continuing support of my writing, and for the many ways they have contributed to the community of emerging writers in Tasmania. Most of all, my love and gratitude go to my family, Daniel and Julia in particular, and the dear friends who have supported me during this journey. vi Contents Maps for the Lost…………………………….............. 1 Maps for the Lost……………………………………..3 Forest………………………………………………… 14 Cloud Polishing……………………………………… 23 Seeds…………………………………………………. 25 The Skin of the Ocean……………………………….. 44 Shelter………………………………………………... 56 This Butterfly………………………………………… 58 The Catch…………………………………………….. 68 Drift…………………………………………………... 71 Stillness, Smallness…………………………………... 80 River Water…………………………………………... 86 Unravelling…………………………………………...104 It will not be Enough…………………………………109 Human / Nature Ecotones: Climate Change and the Ecological Imagination……. 113 Introduction…………………………………………... 115 Chapter One: The Land……………………………….121 Place………………………………………………….. 122 Horizons……………………………………………… 127 Boundaries…………………………………………… 130 Chapter Two: Ecotones………………………………. 136 Anthropomorphism…………………………………... 136 Text / World………………………………………….. 141 “Presence”……………………………………………. 144 Chapter Three: The Imagination……………………... 150 Patterning…………………………………………….. 151 Natural Order……………………………………….... 153 Continuity……………………………………………. 157 The Role of Writers………………………………….. 161 The Swan Book………………………………………..167 Conclusion…………………………………………… 173 Works Cited………………………………………….. 179 Extended Bibliography………………………………. 188 vii viii For my daughter Lily, who arrived during the writing of this thesis, and for my father, John, who left. ix x Maps for the Lost 1 2 Maps for the Lost Most nights, he walks until the dawn light seeps into the laneways of the city, until the industrial drone of street-sweepers fills the calm of Wenceslas Square, and commuters, shops and cafés spill out onto the pavements and lanes of Staré Mesto. He doesn’t remember when it was that the city changed, if there was one fated moment when its spirit – sealed safe beneath the gunnels of a rowing boat – had drifted out, wide into the currents of the Vltava, and left behind a daylight world of vague and soulless beauty. What remains is a Prague built of surfaces and names: a metropolis of tourist sites, while life retreats into the darkness and the forests. At midnight, the streets stir with wanderers and thieves, and the river, which pulses through the heart of the city like a question, becomes lithe and glows with moonlight and reflections of stone and lime. Tomaš walks for miles along the banks of the Vltava, through the streets of Mala Strana, and deep into the labyrinthine old town, Staré Mesto, where the names of lanes have changed so many times in the past century alone that becoming lost is inevitable, and vanishing is easy. It’s August, and the late summer heat stretches deep into the night like an east wind, heavy with citrus from the hill gardens of Hradcany. It throws light onto the skin, breath and curves of his memory where she still lives, where the juice of blood oranges runs down her wrists and into his sleep-heavy mouth, and the skies over Dubrovnik are still clear, the blue world still whole. On the embankment, the leaves of a plane tree, withered with age, are already beginning to turn. The quietest things remind him of her. In Dubrovnik – that distant, circled city – in the first days of autumn he’d moved into her stone flat, high above the street. He’d found work as a diver on the Adriatic coast, and spent most of his days beneath the surface of a sea that seemed to him eternally blue. On weekends, they slept through the heat of the sun, and cooked paella with shellfish from the mouth of the Neretva, bartered from the fishermen who set up their stalls under wide red umbrellas in the shade of the wall. 3 They were imperfect, tempestuous lovers. They’d moved in together only days after meeting. He had a life in Prague but it paled in comparison to the touch of this clear-hearted, Nereidian girl.

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