AustLit

'Andrew McGahan's final novel, The Rich Man's House (2019), collates many of the preoccupations of his literary career: power, the environment, and the precarious foundations of colonisation in Australia. This paper posits that the novel's commentary on human overreach is an alternative history that encapsulates the Anthropocene and explores the problematic, gendered dimensions of conquest and its representation. Situated within a broad and growing literary scholarship that explores the innovative application of ecological frameworks, the paper interrogates the novel's critique of intersecting erasures of coloniality, masculinist domination and historical certitude. It suggests that the disaster visited upon the characters of The Rich Man's House is a demonstration of a specific phenomenon: ecologist Barry Commoner's fourth rule of ecology - nature always bats last. This paper also contributes to scholarship on McGahan's oeuvre, noting that his final work is prescient in its awareness of increasing climate disaster.' (Publication abstract)