Cirrus@Austlit

'Ecopoetics has to do with the realisation of the relationship between human beings and the biosphere. It reflects on what it might mean to dwell with the earth. Before one's country can become accepted as a dwellilng place for the writer's imagination, it must first be discerned, experienced, expressed, and as it were fully engaged. The foreignness of the Australian environment as envisaged by the early European settlers, together with the exploitive ideology of colonialism, proved challenging for colonial writers such as Charles Harpur who felt a sense of connection to the place.This paper examines Harpur's work to determine if it qualifies as ecopoetics as understood in recent studies of literature in relation to the environment. It also seeks to establish his work as a resource for current environmental thinkers, as a point of reference for the consideration of the pre-colonial communicative exchange with this land. His emphasis is on vision: both in a temporal and a transcendental sense.' (Publication abstract)

'Eco-centric ideologies recognise humans as an interdependent part of a larger biotic community and the biophysical systems that support them. Constructions and narratives of one’s ‘spiritual home’ in the environment by authors and critics can challenge colonial and postcolonial understandings, of — in this instance — Australia. Vance Palmer, Australia’s leading man of letters of the inter-war period, claimed his was a generation seeking to find ‘harmony’ with the environment; Nettie Palmer believed that writers’ powers depended on their capacity to find a spiritual home in place. Without the literary imagination, people and places appear ‘uncanny and ghostlike’, and Nettie evolved a schema in and through language to help others learn how to dwell in the land. In a time of rapid environmental change, this essay re-visits these writers, that is, Vance and Nettie Palmer, Katharine Susannah Prichard and others of their generation, and it investigates their important initiatives in challenging dominant and habitual ways of understanding and seeing the natural environment. Often as a result of their beliefs they sought out remote country locations and ‘wilderness areas’ in which to live and write about. Two key texts, Working Bullocks (1926) by Prichard and The Man Hamilton (1928) by Palmer, can be explored in context of recent discourses on ecological sensibilities, identities of place and transnational cosmopolitanism, home and homecoming in the literary imagination, and rapid change through climate change. Building on earlier literary critiques and gender analysis, very different readings of the environmental imagination at play in these texts are possible.' (Publication abstract)

'This paper will be concerned to analyse what is almost certainly the earliest Australian climate change dystopia. In 1985 George Turner published a short story, The Fittest, in which he began to explore the fictional possibilities of the effects of global warming. He quickly expanded this story into a full-length novel published as The Sea and Summer in Britain and as Drowning Towers in the United States. The Sea and Summer is set mainly in Melbourne, a vividly described, particular place, terrifyingly transformed into the utterly unfamiliar. Turner’s core narrative describes a world of mass unemployment and social polarisation, in which rising sea levels have inundated the Bayside suburbs; the poor ‘Swill’ live in high-rise tower blocks, the lower floors of which are progressively submerged; the wealthier ‘Sweet’ in suburbia on higher ground. The paper will argue that Turner’s novel is long overdue a positive critical re-evaluation.' (Publication abstract)