Be True to the Earth

COLLOQUY text theory critique issue 12, november 2006 Be true to the earth guest edited by Kate Rigby with Samantha Capon, Peter C. Coleman, Barbara Ghattas Editorial Committee: Editorial Board: Geoff Berry Bill Ashcroft Mark John Crees Andrew Benjamin Michael Fitzgerald Andriana Cavarero Rhiannyn Geeson Joy Damousi Leah Gerber Alex Düttmann Barbara Ghattas Jürgen Fohrmann Rhonda Khatab Sneja Gunew Jenny Kohn Kevin Hart Hamish Morgan Susan K. Martin Keith Redgen Steven Muecke Carlo Salzani Paul Patton Robert Savage Georg Stanitzek Dimitris Vardoulakis Terry Threadgold Advisory Board: Axel Fliethmann Rose Lucas Alison Ross COLLOQUY text theory critique 12 (2006). © Monash University. www.colloquy.monash.edu.au/issue12.pdf ISSN: 13259490 Issue 12, November 2006 Editorial 3 Introduction Kate Rigby 5 ARTICLES Nietzsche contra Lawrence: How to be True to the Earth Greg Garrard 9 A Green Flaw in the Crystal Glass: Patrick White’s Riders in the Chariot Iris Ralph 28 “Keep Close to the Earth!” The Schism between the Worker and Nature in Katherine Susannah Prichard’s Novels Karen Barker 43 Salt-lakes and Swamps: Michael Meehan’s Australian Environments Greg Pritchard 59 Alice and the Wolf: Exploring Dennis Danvers’ Wilderness Peter C. Coleman 75 Are Rats Comrades? Some Readings of a Question in Orwell Robert Savage 83 Talking about Native Plants… Kylie Mirmohamadi 91 How to Reinvent the World: The Hope of Being True to the Earth Veronica Brady 103 Longing to Belong: Judith Wright’s Poetics of Place Jenny Kohn 114 The Degradation of Land and the Position of Poetry Martin Harrison 125 Human Rights: An Earth-based Ethics Rebecca Garcia Lucas Rose 138 The Artistic and the Literary Imagination in Australia and Beyond Nonie Sharp 154 COLLOQUY text theory critique 12 (2006). © Monash University. www.colloquy.monash.edu.au/issue12/contents12.pdf 2 Contents ░ REVIEWS Freya Mathews. For Love of Matter: A Contemporary Panpsychism. Al- bany: SUNY Press,2003; and, Reinhabiting Reality: Towards a Recovery of Culture. Sydney: UNSW Press, 2005. Peter C. Coleman 172 Thomas M. Wilson. The Recurrent Green Universe of John Fowles. Am- sterdam: Rodopi, 2006. Chris Coughran 176 Gersdorf, Catrin and Mayer, Sylvia (eds). Nature in Literary and Cultural Studies: Transatlantic Conversations on Ecocriticism. Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, 2006. Iris Ralph 181 Lawrence Buell. The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. Rebecca Garcia Lucas Rose 186 Editorial Issue 12 of Colloquy: text theory critique publishes the proceedings of the conference Be true to the earth, which took place at Monash University on March 31-April 1, 2005 and which was co-organized by Colloquy. The collection of papers, edited by Samantha Capon, Peter Coleman, Barbara Ghattas and Kate Rigby, focuses on eco-criticism and eco-philosophy and contains articles on a wide range of topics, from Nietzsche to Patrick White, from Orwell to Judith Wright, from landscape and poetry to earth-based ethics. A number of people made possible the realization of this issue, first and foremost the referees who reviewed the articles and whom the editors want to thank. Colloquy is presently seeking submissions for Issue 13, a general issue to be published in May 2007. The deadline for submissions is January 15, 2007. Academic articles, review articles, reviews, translations and crea- tive writing will be considered. Issue 14, to appear in November 2007, will be the proceedings of the conference Imagining the Future: Utopia, Dystopia and Science Fiction, which was held at Monash University on December 6-7, 2005. It will be co- edited by Andrew Milner, Matthew Ryan and Robert Savage. The present issue is the last one that sees Dimitris Vardoulakis as general editor of Colloquy. During the past six years, Dimitris poured an in- credible amount of time, enthusiasm and passion into the journal, determin- ing its actual shape and helping raise it to international standards and make it one of the leading postgraduate journals in English. He was also able to create around the journal a strong group of postgraduate students. We all COLLOQUY text theory critique 12 (2006). © Monash University. www.colloquy.monash.edu.au/issue12/editorial12.pdf 4 Editorial ░ thank him and wish him all the best for a successful and brilliant career. After long months of uncertainty, Colloquy finally has a new web ad- dress. We all hope that the new site will allow the journal to work smoothly and maintain the standard it has achieved so far. THE EDITORS Geoff Berry Mark John Crees Michael Fitzgerald Rhiannyn Geeson Leah Gerber Barbara Ghattas Rhonda Khatab Jenny Kohn Hamish Morgan Keith Redgen Carlo Salzani Robert Savage Dimitris Vardoulakis Introduction Kate Rigby This special issue of Colloquy is devoted to the proceedings of last year’s Colloquy conference, “Be true to the earth” (March 31-April 1, 2005), which was the inaugural conference of the recently founded Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (Australia-New Zealand). As the founding President of that Association, I was extremely grateful to Dimitris Vardoulakis and the rest of the Colloquy editorial team for offering to host our first major international gathering, and I am honoured to have the opportunity to guest edit the wonderful issue of the journal that has re- sulted from it, ably assisted by Peter Coleman, who led the conference or- ganisation, Samantha Capon and Barbara Ghattas. “However the call to ‘be true to the earth’ is to be understood and em- bodied […], responding to it has almost certainly become more difficult in the century or so since the wayward German philosopher [Friedrich Nietzsche] first framed it: not only because we inhabit a social world that puts people at an ever greater remove from the earth; but also because the earth itself seems to be turning against us.” I wrote these words in 2004 in extending an invitation to participate in the forthcoming conference. What I was referring to in that last clause, of course, was global climate change: something that is bound to have catastrophic consequences for a great many beings, human and otherwise, on this beleaguered planet. There is, it seems, no justice in nature’s retribution, or if there is, it is of the roughest kind, akin to that encountered in Greek tragedy, when the chorus of inno- cents goes down along with the protagonists, whose folly has brought on the disaster! By the time of the conference itself, however, the earth itself had shrugged, as it does from time to time, and hundreds of thousands of people, along with countless other creatures, died as a consequence. In ac- COLLOQUY text theory critique 11 (2006). © Monash University. www.colloquy.monash.edu.au/issue12/introduction.pdf 6 Kate Rigby ░ counting for the magnitude of the human death toll in the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, commentators pointed to a variety of social, ecological and tech- nological factors, including the overpopulation of vulnerable coastal re- gions, the clearing of mangrove swamps, and inadequacies in the commu- nication systems that warn of the tsunami risk from submarine earth- quakes, while others suggested that paying greater heed to the behaviour of free roaming animals might have saved many who were at liberty to run while they still could. However that might be, this largely natural disaster reminds us that, quite apart from any specifically human folly, life on earth is inevitably fraught with apparently random violence, unmerited suffering, and the omnipresence of death: life, as Derrida writes, cannot be thought rigorously other than as lifedeath; our earthly existence is no less dire than (potentially) delightful. In view of this dire dimension of earthly existence, is there not something endearing about the human impulse, one that is admittedly fostered more in some cultures than in others, to imagine a world in which life, love, and justice finally prevail over violence, suffering and death? Maybe.Yet, at least in the history of the West, such otherworldly imaginings, whether framed in terms of a heavenly beyond or a techno-scientifically and socially transformed future, have created a dominant culture in which the earth is commonly construed disdainfully as a place of exile or an object of human power/knowledge. In seeking to overcome this flawed quest for transcen- dence and/or domination of the earth, is it possible to cultivate a properly earthian identity, affirming our continuities with and ethical obligations towards, the wider matrix of earth life, while nonetheless holding true to what might be a peculiarly human desire for the seemingly impossible: a world of peace, love and justice; a world that appears just as remote today as it was when, to recall the biblical origins of one powerful version of this utopian impulse, Jesus of Nazareth conjured a subversive vision of the kingdom of God in a land subjected to the empire of the Romans? Or is keeping faith with the earth that which is truly impossible for us as human? Do we not betray the earth each time we break into speech and enter the realm of the Symbolic, a world of words that are exclusively human, all-too-human? And have we not always already been cast into this realm before we ever even say a word? Or does this construction of the fundamentally linguistic nature of human being not rely upon an age-old assumption of human apartism that blinds us to continuities between human speech and the manifold signifying systems of our earth others? A human apartism, moreover, that deafens us to those other-than-human voices in the parliament of beings, which might be heard calling to us now for justice and compassion, or maybe, simply, calling us home? This is cer- ░ Introduction 7 tainly my view.

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