Issue Details: First known date: 2023... 2023 Extractivist Imaginaries in Australia's Latrobe Valley : Slow Violence and True Crime in Chloe Hooper's The Arsonist and Tom Doig's Hazelwood
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'This essay consider the active legacies of Australia's colonial extractivist imaginaries in the context of the nation's refusal to adequately acknowledge the current climate crisis. It explores these legacies through two recent works of Australian narrative non-fiction writing, Chloe Hooper's The Arsonist (2018) and Tom Doig's Hazelwood (2020), both of which address major fire events in the Latrobe Valley, a region in south-eastern Australia profoundly shaped by mining and other extractivist practices. While histories of genocide and dispossession are commonly disconnected from the discourse of Australia's current environmental crisis, Hooper's and Doig's texts connect climate crisis to manifestations of colonial-capitalist violence and examine the contemporary experiences of a community living in the midst of extractivism's material realities. Hooper and Doig present the fires and their consequences as true crime accounts of extraordinary events in which the site of culpability seems initially apparent. Through narrative strategies that bring the reader close to what happened, however, Hooper and Doig suggest that, in the face of extractivist colonial legacies, the answer to "who did it?" becomes much less clear. These texts ultimately ask us to consider our complicity in these crimes and the environmental imaginaries that inform them, while pointing to the possibility of alternative imaginaries that co-exist in the shadows of extractivism's continued dominance.' (Publication abstract)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

Last amended 14 Feb 2023 15:15:59
27-54 Extractivist Imaginaries in Australia's Latrobe Valley : Slow Violence and True Crime in Chloe Hooper's The Arsonist and Tom Doig's Hazelwoodsmall AustLit logo Ariel : A Review of International English Literature
Subjects:
  • La Trobe Valley, Gippsland, Victoria,
Newspapers:
    Powered by Trove
    X