AustLit

'In Australian ecocriticism, farming is understood as a destructive colonial extraction of wealth that has obliterated the pre-colonial Aboriginal relationship with nonhuman nature. This view is problematic for those seeking to recognise positive changes in farming practices or to develop alternative literary conceptions of farming. This chapter recognises the transmission of Roman culture to Australia by juxtaposing Virgil’s Georgics with three Australian novels and exploring how the georgic mode is registered. A focus on farming practices in Ronald McKie’s The Crushing (1977), Jean Devanny’s Cindie: A Chronicle of the Canefields (1946), and John Naish’s The Cruel Field (1962) enables an ecocritical reading that counters findings by Shirley McDonald (2015) of British colonists in Canada as practising sustainable agriculture. How Aboriginal characters interact with farming and are excluded from or included in the georgic mode is also discussed. Together these novels depict Aboriginal dispossession and marginalisation, large-scale transformation of pre-existing landscapes, and destruction of coral reefs. This chapter makes use of readings of Virgil’s Georgics as a reflection of Roman imperialism, a scientific text, and a portrayal of chaos and human limits to contribute new understandings of the Australian sugarcane novel and to, perhaps, enable the creation of new versions.'

Source: Abstract.

'This essay examines the representation of early twentieth-century Australia in three novels, The Mango Tree, The Crushing, and Bitter Bread, which were published in the1970s by the well-known journalist Ronald McKie. The novels make the catastrophes of World War I and the Great Depression, and the frenzies of the intervening Jazz Age palatable and engaging for a later, comparatively comfortable Australian readership. They seek further to reconcile readers with the pain of living by promoting ethics of courage, kindness and decency. The novels assume and defend a central Anglo-Celtic identity for Australians. While they reject English cultural and political control, they value the input of Continental European and Asian immigrants. Living Aboriginal people are a notable absence from all three novels, but The Mango Tree seeks to appropriate Aboriginal feeling for country for the native-born descendants of settlers. Through comic-satiric depictions of life in rural Queensland communities McKie’s fiction warns of the dangers of insularity for the nation as a whole.' (Publication abstract)