AustLit

'The proliferation goes on. The amount of new words being coined to name the reality and effects of our current era of natural and cultural crisis seems at times to be some kind of teeming linguistic correction to species extinction on a heating planet. I’ve listed them before in essays and reviews — anthropocene, capitalocene, ecocene, symbiocene, gynocene, chthulucene, etc. I’ve added moolacene, which employs the Wadawurrung word moola from my local region, meaning “shadow”. Moola is, of course, also the US-derived slang word for money, which many think is at the heart of the issue.' (Introduction)

'That poet John Kinsella is abrasive as a ­xanthorrhoea, electrically sensitive as a platypus bill and self-reflexively across all issues of the anthropocene is by now well integrated into his writing identity. With Open Door, the third of his Jam Tree Gully cycle, we find him returning to his family’s rural block on Ballardong Noongar land in Western Australia’s vast wheatbelt. In the place he loves and hates the most Kinsella immediately finds “a Dry as ­combustible as morality”, forcing him to fit his theme of homecoming and return through a penitential lens of empathy and rage, as he ­observes the ongoing effects of agricultural cauterisation of the landscape and the suffering of creatures in his midst. This is the poet as ­activist-crusader and student of animals, once again exhibiting his membership of a species increasingly tortured by its own culpability. As such, Open Door is ironically caged, not only by the obviousness of climate change, the bleeding obvious, but by how to write about it in the face of what amounts to a culturally arthritic denial.' (Publication summary)