'A blackly funny novel about an unlikely hero, and his misadventures on the flood he has created.
'In the drought-stricken Riverland town of Bartel in South Australia, after the suicide of his wife, Merv Rossiter steals a boat. He trucks north with his eight-year-old-daughter Em into Queensland. There he blows up the dam at Waroo Station, releasing a flood through outback New South Wales into South Australia.
'As the authorities search for them, Merv and Em ride the flood south in their stolen boat, rescuing a Queensland Minister from the water, and then a young blackfella who fancies he sang the river to life all by himself.
'Meanwhile, in Canberra, the political flotsam carried by Merv's renegade ocean brings the Federal Government to its knees.
'The Last Pulse is the story of the last flood that will ever flow down the inland artery that was the Darling River. The stream is broken now and the agriculture and lives of South Australians have been appropriated with the water by a people a thousand kilometres to the north.
'Throughout their misadventures on his flood, Merv promises his daughter they will be heroes in South Australia, and that they are sailing towards victory parades and happiness. The other crewmembers, however, know he is heading towards a violent reckoning with Australia itself.
'Blackly humorous, poignant, timely, The Last Pulse is Anson Cameron's finest work to date.' (Publication summary)
'In Anson Cameron’s The Last Pulse, the monkeywrenching protagonist blasts a dam in Queensland, rides on the resulting flood southwards and spreads his solastalgia around, an affect Glenn Albrecht defines as homesickness at home induced by local ecological loss. From water disputes overseas to those between the eastern Australian states, from the character’s drought-stricken home town in South Australia to the Murray–Darling Basin, the novel allows readers to experience solastalgia as a multiscalar affect capable of mobilising environmental activism, as well as mooring in and playing with the “arts of flow” informed by Indigenous water ethics. The scale and distance-conscious method of “proximate reading” can be applied to read the dynamic of the affect in such an expanded and sentient water ecology; in this way, it can provide crucial insights into how readers’ environmental feelings and thinking are constantly reconfigured alongside shifting borders within and beyond the watershed in the novel.' (Publication abstract)
'In Anson Cameron’s The Last Pulse, the monkeywrenching protagonist blasts a dam in Queensland, rides on the resulting flood southwards and spreads his solastalgia around, an affect Glenn Albrecht defines as homesickness at home induced by local ecological loss. From water disputes overseas to those between the eastern Australian states, from the character’s drought-stricken home town in South Australia to the Murray–Darling Basin, the novel allows readers to experience solastalgia as a multiscalar affect capable of mobilising environmental activism, as well as mooring in and playing with the “arts of flow” informed by Indigenous water ethics. The scale and distance-conscious method of “proximate reading” can be applied to read the dynamic of the affect in such an expanded and sentient water ecology; in this way, it can provide crucial insights into how readers’ environmental feelings and thinking are constantly reconfigured alongside shifting borders within and beyond the watershed in the novel.' (Publication abstract)
