AustLit

'As with "Australia Zoo," "Brisbane River" invites us not only to praise our now tamable, now untamable, above all coeval, ecosystems but also to consider how we have-at best poorly repaid, at worst bankrupted-our squarings (to adapt the title of Seamus Heaney's finest sonnet sequences). (10) The dialectics of "Australia Zoo," "Brisbane River," and "The Flood"-and Riordan's poetry as a whole-invites an ecopoetically foundational question: did nature hit us, or did we hit nature?' (Publication abstract)

'In this significant critical work, Michael Farrell offers up a dialectical method (not announced as such), which I daresay is not unworthy of such a one as Lionel Trilling. In chapter 1, "The Hunted Writer," Farrell provides a bracing reading of unsettlement through both The Jerilderie Letter by Ned Kelly—"the notorious bushranger" (I1)—and also Bennelong's "Letter to Lord Mr Philips, Lord Sidney's Steward." By pairing these particular texts—so historically fecund as regards the discursivity of settler-hunter (Kelly) vis-à-vis Indigenous travel (Bennelong)—in a poetics of unsettlement, Farrell maintains that "these two colonial writers were participants, as both protagonists and victims" (13). The integrity of Farrell's readings stands on their own merits: there is no need to "pun"—for Farrell has already criticized others for exploiting the "affective, punning quality" of the word "unsettlement" (7)—to tell us that that the protagonist/victim synchronicity that Kelly and Bennelong apparently sham is an "unsettling fact" (13) that informs Farrell's readings. Indeed, to unsettle so iconic a figure as Kelly is not just a dialectic but also a dialogue among genres: cinematically, as Farrell points out, Kelly has been played on film "by both Mick Jagger and Heath Ledger," while culinarily Kelly's "image is used to sell pork in Castlemaine" (13). (Introduction)

' (Introduction)