Cirrus@Austlit

'In 1857 Louisa Atkinson became the first Australian-born woman to publish a novel, Gertrude the Emigrant. Atkinson was already an accomplished nature writer and illustrator whose botanical columns appeared regularly in the Sydney press. Her novels are notable for their detailed attention to Australian plant life, while her bushscapes are remarkably vivid, and several of her works feature dramatic accounts of bushfires. As a naturalist, Atkinson was particularly attuned to outback ecology, and fire scenes are much more than fleeting plot devices designed to bring about dramatic rescues. She resists the settler propensity to contain the landscape by representing it through a lens of the sublime, revelling in its difference, rather than attempting to understand it on European terms. Drawing on Atkinson’s nature writing as well as her fiction, this chapter will examine her depictions of bushfire and land clearances to critique settler understandings of the Australian natural world. Focusing particularly on her fire stories, it will consider how her depictions of fire are distinct from those of her contemporaries and how her writings promote respect for the bush, and critique what Rob Nixon has termed the ‘slow violence’ of settler culture.'

Source: Abstract.

'Using the fiction of Ceridwen Dovey and Eva Hornung, this essay considers animalography as a medium to represent animal emotions, particularly when ties of kinship break down. It addresses the difficulties and power dynamics associated with speaking for nonhuman others, while engaging with Cynthia Huff’s cautions regarding the posthumanist life narrative.' (Publication abstract)

'Bushfire writing has long been a part of Australian literature.

'Tales of heroic rescues and bush Christmases describe a time when the fire season was confined only to summer months and Australia’s battler identity was forged in the flames.' (Introduction)

'This article explores the significance of the campfire to Australian settler culture in the nineteenth century. Considering the paradox that campfires could be both comforting and evoke terror, the piece considers how they provided a link between the northern and southern hemispheres. Drawing on a range of primary materials — many of which have been forgotten — the article addresses the thin boundary between warmth and tragedy that came to be associated with campfires. Furthermore, it examines connections between fire and the emergence of an Australian settler identity, along with the bush dweller’s role in changing the face of the wilderness and its fire ecology.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'This collection will draw attention to new ideas in both Victorian studies and in the emerging area of literature and the environment. Adopting a broad interpretation of the term ‘environment’ the work aims to draw together new approaches to Victorian texts and cultures that conceptualise and are influenced by environments ranging from rural to urban, British to Antipodean, and from the terrestrial to the aquatic.With the pressures of industrialism and the clustering of workers in urban centres, the Victorians were acutely aware that their environment was changing.  Torn between nostalgia for a countryside that was in jeopardy and exhilaration at the rapidity with which their surroundings altered, the literature and culture produced by the Victorians reflects a world undergoing radical change. Colonization and assisted emigration schemes expanded the scope of the environment still further, pushing the boundaries of the ‘home’ on an unprecedented scale and introducing strange new worlds. These untamed physical environments enabled new freedoms, but also posed challenges that invited attempts to control, taxonomize and harness the natural world. Victorian Environments draws together leading and emerging international scholars for an examination of how various kinds of environments were constructed, redefined, and transformed, in British and colonial texts and cultures, with particular attention to the relationship between Australia and Britain.'

Source: Abstract.

'In 1871 and 1872 the novelist and travel writer Anthony Trollope visited Australia. He recorded his observations of the colony in a sequence of letters, and wrote every day for the work that would become the two-volume travelogue Australia and New Zealand (1873), which he followed up during his second visit with a series of letters to the Liverpool Mercury. This body of Australian work, to the modern reader, offers fascinating and at times devastating insights into the settler community’s impact on antipodean ecology. In particular, Trollope noted the effects of importing European plants and animals, sometimes as an advocate for acclimatisation and at others as an opponent.' (Introduction)

'Writing of Trollope’s 1859 travelogue The West Indies and the Spanish Main , Claudia Brandenstein has, in an argument influenced by the work of Mary Louise Pratt, described his approach to the landscape as a type of taking possession. For Brandenstein, Trollope engages in the ‘production of the monarch-of-all-I survey scene’ (15), depicting landscapes that are ‘feminized’ and ‘easily subdued’ (19), stemming from a feeling of proprietorial entitlement, which is underpinned by a British imperialist sense of mastery over the West Indian colonial holdings. This approach to the colonial landscape is a common feature in both painting and travel writing of the nineteenth century. Simon Ryan, for instance, has put forward a similar argument with regard to contemporary accounts of the Australian scenery. According to Ryan, explorers and other chroniclers frequently depicted the Australian countryside as ‘well adapted’ for settlement, deploying a European aesthetic lens of the picturesque as a means of taming its more confronting elements and uncanny vistas (74).'

Source: Abstract.

'Across the country, even as summer winds down, bushfires continue to burn.

'And as each summer passes, there seem to be more and more of these bushfires, of ever greater intensity.

'So are our attitudes toward the phenomenon changing as we adapt to the increasing presence of bushfire in our lives? And if so, is it possible to track these changes in Australian art and literature?'

Source: Radio National.

'This essay examines John Kinsella’s prize-winning poem “Bushfire Approaching.” Drawing on Brian Massumi’s work on anticipated disaster—in particular his attention to trauma-survivors haunted by “the smoke of future fires”—we analyze Kinsella’s treatment of debates surrounding climate change in Australia. Fire in ‘Bushfire Approaching’ is both symbolic and real, representing burning in the past, present and future. The poem’s articulation of place, space and time captures oppositions between the willed amnesia attributed to many fire survivors, along with a vision of a future punctuated by repeated climatic catastrophes. Deploying affect theory and close reading through an ecocritical lens, we interpret the bushfire as a signifier of the complex relationship between climate change and custodianship of the land. This approach situates Kinsella’s poetry within a broader discussion of the bushfire as a natural phenomenon, while we also consider the poet’s deep respect for fire and its role in Australian ecology.'

Source: Abstract.

'Drawing on Anthony Trollope's novella Harry Heathcote of Gangoil (1874), alongside more neglected material including Mary Fortune's 'Waif Wanderer' [sic] articles for the Australian Journal and J.S. Borlase's 'Twelve Miles Broad' (1885), this chapter analyses the threat posed to the home by the arsonist and the ways in which literary representations demonized the 'fire bug'. This piece also considers how fiction mediates emotional responses to fire, such as trauma and hatred, while exploring how literary representations of arsonists channelled deep-rooted anxieties about the precariousness of settler life and the vulnerability of the bush homestead. I pay particular attention to the gender and racial politics of firelighting as well as firefighting and to ways in which fictional stories of fire sought to assert the security of the (often vulnerable) homestead even as it is endangered by the appearance of an outsider.' (p.63)

'This chapter examines how the devastation of a bushfire in 1851 in Australia challenged the claims of emigration advocates that it was possible simply to pack up one's life and begin again on the other side of the world through an examination of a range of literary, journalistic and epistolary responses to bushfires. It also explains how fictional accounts of bushfires oppose themselves to newspaper stories of destruction. One of the more terrifying blazes to challenge nineteenth-century settler society was the sequence of fires that took place on what came to be known as 'Black Thursday'. Writing in Cassell's Illustrated Family Paper in 1854, William Howitt emphasized the disaster's impact on settler society by comparing it to events like the English Revolution of 1688. The main purpose of the poem by George Wright and entitled 'Black Thursday' was to encourage those who had been spared the worst effects of the inferno to provide assistance to its victims.'

Source: Abstract.