AustLit

Thylacines and the Anthropocene

Krissy Kneen's Wintering centres around the disappearance and monstrous bodily transformation of Matthew Masterton, a descendant of settler-colonists and a violent partner to protagonist Jessica Weir. As a scientist, Jessica is sceptical of local rumours about missing husbands and beastly werewolf-like thylacines, and this tension between rational truth and the supernatural is reflected in the novel's generic playfulness. Kneen draws from detective and Gothic conventions, and acclimatises European werewolf and fairy tale traditions in landscapes already transformed by the violence of Australia's colonialisation. 

Conservation and ecological themes permeate the narrative, as do anxieties around the future of logging and other "industr[ies] in decline" (139, 243). The subterranean caves of endangered glow worms and the ancient Eucalypt forests of lutruwita / Tasmania are quite literally haunted by spectre of thylacine extinction. Also interesting is Kneen's inversion of the colonial trope of the hunt—present in many thylacine narratives, like Julia Leigh's The Hunter—wherein a white male hunter pursues a nonhuman, often female, other. In Wintering, the hunted and abused Jessica becomes the hunter, pursuing and eventually killing the were-thylacine Matthew in the wild feminine space of the forest.

Wintering's troubling of boundaries—between men and monsters, wild and colonised spaces, male and female communities, love and violence, and genres—reflects the shifting conservations around human-nonhuman ecological relationships in contemporary Australia.