'As Preternature ends its fifth year, I am pleased to present our special issue on “Preternatural Environments.” Over the last decade or so, scholarship in many fields across various disciplines, including the humanities and social sciences, has increasingly drawn our attention to the importance of spaces and their contexts, the stories we tell about them, and our interactions with them. This volume focuses on the preternatural aspects of both natural and unnatural environments, with essays investigating the connections among preternatural landscape elements and artistic, historical, literary, psychological, and religious points of view.' (Editor's introduction)
'The Jenolan Caves, west of Sydney, Australia, first came to the notice of European settlers in the late 1830s. Their “discovery” and exploration was presented as a tale of daring settlers, intrepid travelers, desperate bushrangers, and even a medieval demonic figure drawn from the European Christian imaginary, for whom a large cavern was named the Devil’s Coach House. Also evident, however, is a silence regarding the Indigenous history of this area—until the discovery in 1903 of the bones of an Indigenous person calcified into the floor of a cave, consequently named the Skeleton Cave. Yet the history of New South Wales in this period was one of bloody massacres of Indigenous people. This article explores how this history, though repressed, erupts in the naming processes of the Jenolan Caves, and how the Indigenous reappears as a revenant, displaced onto other aliens of settler society—bushrangers, convicts, and the Devil himself.' (Publication abstract)
'This article examines the use of preternatural landscapes within the Australian novel Plains of Promise(1997) by the Aboriginal author Alexis Wright, exploring her themes of memory, reconciliation, and connection to “place.” The novel is concerned with the traumas of three generations of Aboriginal women who have been forcibly separated and displaced from their traditional homeland. There is a sense in which haunted and “sacred” country coincide, and at times, uncanny nature is able to empower the dispossessed via its role of witness. Rather than a relationship to country being represented as a special spiritual capacity of Aboriginal people, however, connection to place is productively utopian. Discussing the uses and limits of such labels as the “Postcolonial Gothic” and considering the preternatural’s role, I argue that the novel provides a space for the unknown as Wright portrays the freedom to maintain difference as a kind of resistance to colonialism.' (Publication abstract)
