Issue Details: First known date: 2018... 2018 Contested Land : Country and Terra Nullius in Plains of Promise and Benang : From the Heart
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'The Mabo decision of 1992 made questions about the definition of land in Australia and its relation to humans newly significant by overturning the British legal fiction of this continent as ‘terra nullius’ (empty land) and acknowledged for the first time in Anglo-Australian law the validity of Aboriginal land claims. Alexis Wright’s Plains of Promise (1997) and Kim Scott’s Benang (1999) were written in the wake of this landmark decision. Both tell stories of children of the Stolen Generations and their ancient ties to their ancestral land, despite their severance from it. Critical scholarship on these novels has focused primarily on their human stories and been conducted in terms of postcolonial theory and discussions of magic realism. In this article I seek to complicate and expand these predominantly anthropocentric readings by drawing on ecocriticism to explore the central role of the non-human world in these novels. I argue they privilege an Indigenous understanding of two regions of the Australian continent as ‘country’ over their conception as terra nullius, a blank canvass available for colonisation and inscription by British property law and Christianity. The novels contest this concept of terra nullius by manifesting ‘country’: a vibrant, active land inextricably bound to its Indigenous people by ancient, enduring laws. They rewrite the continent as black land and suggest their protagonists’ inextricable, enduring ties to it.'  (Publication abstract)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon JASAL Recurrent Preoccupations - General Issue vol. 3 no. 18 2018 15639489 2018 periodical issue

    'This last issue of JASAL for 2018 brings together a diverse body of essays on Australian literature and critical debates. Although unanticipated, there are numerous resonances between the essays, whether in the critical approaches adopted by a critic or in the choice of texts selected.' (Tony Simoes da Silva, Recurrent Preoccupations, introduction)

    2018
Last amended 19 Feb 2019 10:31:29
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