AustLit

'One of the debates which Australia continues to witness with various degrees of intensity involves the complex ways of articulating settler (un)belonging in the postcolonising settler nation. While one of the most significant moments which re-defined settler-Indigenous relationship took place around the turn of the twenty-first century, the critical scholarship examining settler anxieties regarding the sense of (un)belonging is flourishing in the post-Mabo period, as is the production of cultural and literary narratives engaging with this topic. This article explores two recent memoirs of settler belonging in Australia and contextualises them in a broader tradition of settler memoirs in the first decade of this century. By comparing and contrasting Tim Winton’s Island Home (2015. London: Picador) and Kim Mahood’s Position Doubtful (2016. Melbourne: Scribe), the article demonstrates a visible shift from earlier forms of writing settler (un)belonging, which often thematised settler anxiety and desire to belong through various acts of appropriating Indigenous ways of belonging. Winton’s and Mahood’s memoirs, however, offer a different vision of settler belonging: one that is deeply embedded in local, bioregional and environmental histories, recognition of Indigenous knowledges as significant agents shaping post-Mabo aesthetics and politics, and a commitment to transformation of settler relationship with the land from territory to Country.' (Publication abstract)

'This article contemplates ecobiography, a little-researched form of life writing which depicts how human selves are supported and shaped by their environment. It details the author’s ecobiography of botanist Georgiana Molloy (1805–1843) and the plants she collected from the Southwest Australian Floristic Region, alongside an analysis of an Australian ecobiography, Kim Mahood’s Position Doubtful.' (Publication abstract)

'In Position Doubtful Kim Mahood, a Canberra-based visual artist and teacher, describes how since 2004 she has travelled each year to spend time in Mulan, a Walmajarri community in Western Australia, close to the Mongrel Downs station where she spent her childhood, and which has since been returned to the traditional owners. An intensely personal memoir, she describes how she grew up between two cultures. Her interest lies in exploring ‘what happens when the unconscious mind experiences a fundamental displacement … when the body feels an almost cellular affinity to a place that has been constructed by a different cultural imagination’ (p. 296). The result is a book that is fascinating on many levels, but is particularly valuable for the insights it brings to themes relevant to those working in archives and memory institutions – issues such as identity, memory, the meaning and interpretation of records (maps in particular), the importance of place, and cross-cultural relations.'  (Introduction)