AustLit

'Georgiana Molloy, one of the first wadjelas (white people) to encroach on Wardandi Noongar country in the nineteenth century, collected seeds and specimens for Captain James Mangles, a botanical connoisseur living in London. In 1840 she wrote to him, ‘I discovered a plant I have been almost panting for, a very small neat white blossom, on a furze looking Bush’. Molloy’s use of the verb ‘panting’ indicates the depths of her obsessive acquisitiveness, which was informed by a nexus of loneliness, boredom, and her ‘prevailing passion for Flowers’ (as she described it in another letter of 1840), as well as the wider colonial project of collecting.'  (Introduction)  

'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)

'When I first sat down with Vanessa Berry’s collection of essays, Gentle and Fierce, we were in the midst of another destabilising Covid wave. One of the images from her collection that stayed with me was the latticework of letters on Sylvia Plath’s grave, which Berry visited in Yorkshire. The notes, left on Plath’s grave by admirers, had been eaten by snails. One handwritten co-contribution reads Sylvia, know that your words live on, even though you are gone, with the words ‘even though’ interrupted by ‘a string of irregular, squarish holes with curled edges, the work of snails’. While a slow-moving gastropod differs from a rapidly replicating virus, I could not help but think of the gaps the virus has created, not just through death, but in supply chains, leadership, our patience. And while a virus is not an animal, insect, or gastropod, it has forced us to pay attention to the fact that the nonhuman world has intentions of its own. Berry’s collection of essays likewise compels its readers to attend to the presence of our nonhuman companions.' (Introduction)   

'Within the first few pages of Richard Flanagan’s The Living Sea of Waking Dreams, one encounters a raft of losses. The book, which centres around three siblings, Anna, Tommy and Terzo, and their mother Francie, opens with the vanishing of Anna’s middle finger; Tommy recounts the loss of ladybirds, soldier beetles, bluebottles, earwigs, Christmas beetles, flying ant swarms, frogs and cicadas and their songs, emperor gum moths, Persian rug wings, quolls, potoroos, pardalotes, swift parrots, great kelp forests, abalone, and crayfish; and it becomes known that there is a fourth sibling, Ronnie, who died in his teens.' (Introduction) 

'I closed the pages of Briohny Doyle’s Echolalia with a sigh of satisfaction at its beautiful construction and timeliness. The actions of her protagonist, Emma, seem a pertinent reaction to our zeitgeist: a world in which our flaccid government cannot mount a response to the recent IPCC report, which warns that ‘with further global warming, every region is projected to increasingly experience concurrent and multiple changes in climatic impact-drivers’. At the same time, I experienced a spell of disquiet at the way the novel mobilises disability to symbolise something that everyone, whether abled or disabled, should be able to recognise: the impact of our actions on the future.' (Introduction)

'Life Writing in the Anthropocene is a collection of timely and original approaches to the question of what constitutes a life, how that life is narrated, and what lives matter in autobiography studies in the Anthropocene. This era is characterised by the geoengineering impact of humans, which is shaping the planet’s biophysical systems through the combustion of fossil fuels, production of carbon, unprecedented population growth, and mass extinction. These developments threaten the rights of humans and other-than-humans to just and sustainable lives.

'In exploring ways of representing life in the Anthropocene, this work articulates innovative literary forms such as ecobiography (the representation of a human subject's entwinement with their environment), phytography (writing the lives of plants), and ethological poetics (the study of nonhuman poetic forms), providing scholars and writers with innovative tools to think and write about our strange new world. In particular, its recognition on plant life reminds us of how human lives are entwined with vegetal lives. The creative and critical essays in this book, shaped by a number of Antipodean authors, bear witness to a multitude of lives and deaths.

'The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies.' (Publication summary)

'Krissy Kneen’s grandmother, Lotty Kneen, once built papier mâché dinosaurs ‘that didn’t fit inside the house. They were built in sections that could be taken apart, crammed inside my mother’s VW van and driven one at a time to the Sydney Museum for its dinosaur displays’. While these were Lotty’s most famous works, she ‘was fonder of the fairytale characters they made for book week at the local library. She would look at different artists’ impressions of Snow White, the Little Match Girl, Sleeping Beauty, then translate these to her own versions’. However, the female characters ‘ended up looking more like younger versions of herself than like the illustrations in the original books.’ When Kneen, who inherited her Slovenian grandmother’s ‘small round face, big eyes and plump cheeks’, stepped into the loungeroom, ‘a dozen versions of myself used to stare back at me.’ Here is a metaphor for the difficulties Kneen faced in trying to locate her history in a family that offered her scant details. She looks for the truth but finds only constructions, and each time the tale is different. She is modelled and controlled by an artist who did not let her out of her sight.'  (Introduction)

'On the second day of 2020, my partner and I caught a train through the suburbs of Munich  to Dachau, then a bus to the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site. It was bitterly cold, the morning air nipping our cheeks. Frost crunched beneath our feet and weak sunlight drifted through clouds. At the site, we passed beneath the grim words ‘Arbeit macht frei’, soldered onto the entrance gates (as they also were in Auschwitz and other concentration camps). We moved slowly through the rectangular buildings, reading squares of information about the inhumane treatment of the prisoners. By the time we emerged from the last building, we were weighed down with horror.' (Introduction)