'‘Hello. Jessica Weir? I’m sorry, miss, but this was the last number—’ ‘Matthew’s on his way home. He should be here soon.’ And only the ocean breathing into the silence as if her own chest were rising and falling without fail. As if his heart were still beating. As if nothing in the world had changed. ‘We’ve found a car, miss. No sign of a driver.’
'WHEN Jessica’s partner disappears into the dark Tasmanian forest, there is of course the mystery of what happened—the deserted car, the enigmatic final image on his phone. There is the strange circle of local women, widows of disappeared men, with their edgy fellowship and unhinged theories. And the forest itself: looming over this tiny settlement on the remote tip of the island.
'But for Jessica there is also the tight community in which she is still a stranger and Matthew was not. What secrets do they know about her own life that she doesn’t? And why do they believe things that should not—cannot—be true? For her own sanity, Jessica needs to know two things. Who was Matthew? And who—or what—has he become?'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
Dedication: For my father, Barry Elphick, my heart in the deep south.
Thylacines and the Anthropocene
Krissy Kneen's Wintering centres around the disappearance and monstrous bodily transformation of Matthew Masterton, a descendant of settler-colonists and a violent partner to protagonist Jessica Weir. As a scientist, Jessica is sceptical of local rumours about missing husbands and beastly werewolf-like thylacines, and this tension between rational truth and the supernatural is reflected in the novel's generic playfulness. Kneen draws from detective and Gothic conventions, and acclimatises European werewolf and fairy tale traditions in landscapes already transformed by the violence of Australia's colonialisation.
Conservation and ecological themes permeate the narrative, as do anxieties around the future of logging and other "industr[ies] in decline" (139, 243). The subterranean caves of endangered glow worms and the ancient Eucalypt forests of lutruwita / Tasmania are quite literally haunted by spectre of thylacine extinction. Also interesting is Kneen's inversion of the colonial trope of the hunt—present in many thylacine narratives, like Julia Leigh's The Hunter—wherein a white male hunter pursues a nonhuman, often female, other. In Wintering, the hunted and abused Jessica becomes the hunter, pursuing and eventually killing the were-thylacine Matthew in the wild feminine space of the forest.
Wintering's troubling of boundaries—between men and monsters, wild and colonised spaces, male and female communities, love and violence, and genres—reflects the shifting conservations around human-nonhuman ecological relationships in contemporary Australia.
'Krissy Kneen’s novels have often centred on bodies, how they morph and constrict, how they can offer transcendence or be prisons for the soul, how they merge into other shapes, beyond desire, beyond gender, beyond human. In her latest, Wintering, she continues these themes, leading to an isolated shack on the Tasmanian coast, a place where devils roam, men disappear and strange creatures are glimpsed in the twilight out of the corner of the eye.' (Introduction)
'Krissy Kneen’s novels have often centred on bodies, how they morph and constrict, how they can offer transcendence or be prisons for the soul, how they merge into other shapes, beyond desire, beyond gender, beyond human. In her latest, Wintering, she continues these themes, leading to an isolated shack on the Tasmanian coast, a place where devils roam, men disappear and strange creatures are glimpsed in the twilight out of the corner of the eye.' (Introduction)
