AustLit

'Embracing the environmental, eco-materialist and planetary turn in the humanities, prompted by the Anthropocene, this paper offers a reading of Voss as an environmental and planetary epic. The unique environmental qualities of Patrick White’s writing, and his later-life activism, have perhaps suffered due to a focus on the psychological and spiritual aspects of his biography. Reading Voss as a journey ‘into the dust’ (213), away from colonial Sydney, and associated Eurocentric forms, this paper argues that the very material and elemental nature of the Australian environment emerges as an agentive and subversive presence, suggested by the insidiously small, yet itinerant dust. White’s journey inland, into the ‘kingdom of dust’ (297), shatters, fragments, and erodes the stable, the terran and the fixed, but through that very reduction, the story becomes engrained in elemental and planetary forces. The disruptive aesthetics, connected to the drying of the material environment and the desert, immerses the reader in an errant environment in motion. This paper argues that the epic qualities of the story are imparted through this very contact with the environment, the elemental and the planetary, positioning Voss as a planetary epic.' (Publication abstract)