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'This article explores literary practices placing the writer in dialogue with the places he has inhabited recently while researching the Australian novel. This includes a fictocritical engagement with place-based Australian literature (via Xavier Herbert and Randolph Stow) and a maverick whizz through deconstruction and genre studies. Written in an elegiac mode punctuated by an environmental humanities countersignature, this example of period rhetoric embodies autobiography in the Anthropocene, the event horizon of human signature.' (Publication abstract)
Notes
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Epigraph:
“It does not seem to me,” declares Austerlitz, “that we understand the laws governing the return of the past, but I feel, more and more as if time did not exist at all, only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry, between which the living and the dead can move back and forth as they like.”
— W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz
The pioneers had difficulty in establishing permanent settlements, having several times to abandon ground they had won with slaughter and go slaughtering again to secure more. This abandoning of ground was due not to the hostility of the natives, hostile enough though they were, but to the violence of the climate, which was not to be withstood even by me so well equipped with lethal weapons and belief in the decency of their purpose as Anglo-Saxon builders of empire.
— Xavier Herbert, Capricornia
