AustLit

'Investigating transcultural encounters between Europe and Australia in Murray Bail's Eucalyptus through an ecocritical lens, this essay re-evaluates the act of naming trees with regard to the status of the character symbolically called Holland. Critics have underlined how, in colonial contexts, the naturalist taxonomy of the environment partakes of the settlers' conquest of new colonies: Jamaica Kincaid's assertion 'to name is to possess' crystallises this cultural process of ecological imperialism. While I acknowledge this phenomenon, a re-appraisal of the naming practice in Eucalyptus allows us to transcend the legacy of polarised colonial and anthropocentric perspectives. Holland's status may be interpreted positively in view of Neil Evernden's concept of 'man-in-environment': if so, the act of naming represents the individual's constructive attempt at establishing a sense of place within a new territory. Bail's protagonists exemplify different stages in this process of interrelatedness between the human and non-human realms, one which resists a conventional subject-object relationship. Whereas the ambivalent Holland embodies a factual and existential naturalism, the imaginative approach to the treescape of his daughter Ellen and her storytelling suitor fully emancipates them from the commodifying effect of Holland's naming competition. Bail's aesthetics reflects the dissolving boundary between the self and environment: deployed in the suitor's fable-like stories and Bail's rich prose, the ecopoetic devices of anthropomorphism and zoomorphism defy the rational laws of Western realism. This ecopoetics of interrelatedness restores the agency of the eucalypts while negating the concept of a traditionally dominant human presence in the environment. In Eucalyptus, taxonomy reveals the reciprocal dynamics of a genuine interpenetration: Holland's 'bush garden' becomes a global space that combines European (symbolised by Holland and the stories) and Australian (the eucalypts) identities. Thus, Bail projects a creative site of transcultural dialogue at the level of the terrain through the complementary processes of physical and subjective interrelatedness.' (Publication abstract)

'In Carpentaria (2006) and The Swan Book (2013), Alexis Wright establishes an allegorical mode where she reimagines Europeans' first encounters with Australia from an Aboriginal environmental perspective. In this narrative system, the discovery of Australia is not realised by exploring colonisers, but by vulnerable strangers who apprehend the continent both experientially and linguistically. In Carpentaria, the Stranger-figure of Elias Smith is left amnesic after surviving a shipwreck during a cyclone; his first encounter with Australia is extremely violent and results in a loss of personal (hi)story. In The Swan Book, the character of Bella Donna seeks refuge in the nostalgia of swan stories after the disappearance of her native lands due to climate change; her first encounter with Australia is characterised by slow violence and results in a profusion of stories. In this essay I argue that by drawing attention to the interweaving of language and experience and by dramatising the relationship between organism and environment, ‘ecopoetic encounters’ allows readers to rediscover major episodes of Australian environmental history. Indeed, through the experiential and poetic meetings of Stranger-figures with Australia, Wright does not depict the initial moment of discovery as a nation-building event; rather she re-narrates it as a counterdiscursive episode of environmental historical rediscovery. Journeys of migration, environment transformations, and the marginalisation of populations are translated in an Aboriginal allegorical mode that allows European readers, through self-reflexivity, to rediscover the Australian continent through the perceptions, actions and emotions of Stranger-figures.' (Publication abstract)