'In 1986, the year the Tasmanian tiger is officially declared extinct, fourteen-year-old Samson and his twin brother Jonah travel from the Sunshine Coast to the wild back country of west Tasmania to live on a mountain with a granddad they've never met. Clancy is a beat-up old man who breaks brumbies, hunts tigers, and has spent four years hunting for his missing daughter, River. The resentful, brooding Jonah, and sunny-tempered Samson, who has Down syndrome, feel very lost. The mountain isn't their home but they become entranced, in different ways, with their surroundings. While Samson finds delight all around, Jonah develops a dark obsession that ties in with Clancy's desire to bring River home. There's something out there in the bush, something that seems set on tearing this family to pieces. Sing Fox to Me is a story built from lost and stolen children, Tasmanian tigers, missing animals, Down syndrome and parents who run away. It is the symphony of three howling male voices, each hoping to find the right pack and live comfortably in their own skin.' (Publication summary)
Epigraph:
I sing The Fox Came Out
On a Chilly Night
and Bobby, my favourite
Mongoloid sings Fox to me.
–Anne Sexton
Writing Disability in Australia:
| Type of disability | Down syndrome. |
| Type of character | Primary. |
| Point of view | Third person. |
Thylacines and the Anthropocene
Sing Fox to Me is set on a Tasmanian mountain property in 1986, the same year the thylacine was declared officially extinct and fifty years after the death of Benjamin, the last known captive thylacine. The thylacine's ecological loss is entangled thematically with Clancy Fox's grief at the disappearance of his daughter some years prior, as well as the frustrations of his twin grandsons Samson and Jonah, abandoned by their own father.
Tension between the thylacine's extinction and its haunting presence in the novel is symbolised most significantly by an heirloom pelt. The pelt is from a thylacine once captured on property and it memorialises the Fox family's dominance of their wild environment. Generations of Foxes have used the pelt to shift into hybrid human-thylacine figures, blurring boundaries between human and nonhuman subjectivities.
Ways of experiencing the external world and expressing inner worlds are also explored, particularly through protagonist Samson Fox—a character with Down syndrome—and his relationships with those around him. Louis Nowra's Into That Forest is another thylacine novel to consider such complexities, when two girls raised by thylacines struggle to communicate and adjust to social expectations on their return to the human spaces.
Sing Fox to Me : An Investigation into the 'Use' of Down Syndrome in both the Down Syndrome and Gothic Novel
Kelvin Grove
:
2014
13337387
2014
single work
thesis
'This project investigates the current borders around and within, what I have in this exegesis termed, "the Down Syndrome novel", using a close reading analysis of literary texts containing characters with Down syndrome and contextualised by theoretical works drawn from both disability and literary theory. This practice-led thesis introduces and discusses select fictional characters with Down syndrome from numerous genres, revealing them as highly contained, or "boundaried", spoken for, and generally used for narrative conflict rather than included as individuals with agency and a legitimate, autonomous voice and narrative point of view. In reframing the Australian landscape as "disabled" this exegesis illustrates that the Australian Gothic novel can shift, and sometimes even remove, the boundary around characters with intellectual disabilities, allowing a space where the stories of characters with Down syndrome can emerge.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
'The Gothic lends itself to critical examinations of disabled embodiment, yet this genre has ‘hitherto been largely ignored’ by disability studies scholars (Gregory 291). This essay redresses this omission by exploring disability in three Australian Gothic novels: Elizabeth Jolley's The Well (1986), Sarah Kanake's Sing Fox to Me (2016), and Kate Grenville's Lilian’s Story (1985). On initial glance, The Well and Lilian’s Story conform to the use of disability in the Gothic as a metaphor for social and psychological deviance. However, closer inspection of these novels and Sing Fox to Me demonstrates their resistance to the Gothic’s typical use of disability in phobic ways. Hester’s disability in The Well enables her to transcend the gender prescriptions of her patriarchal Australian community, even if it is initially constructed as a physiological sign of her disturbing possessiveness over Katherine. Against the ‘dramatic and unforgiving natural settings’ of the Tasmanian Gothic (Bullock 72), Sing Fox to Me interweaves Samson’s experience of Down syndrome with perennial themes of the genre including familial haunting and the intersection of past and present. Similar to The Well, Lilian’s Story shows the politically transformative nature of disabled embodiment, wherein the titular character’s fatness and ‘madness’ allow her to achieve self-realisation while defying the gender norms of her time. Ultimately, the three novels suggest that the use of disabled characters in some contemporary Australian Gothic narratives is clearing space for less-stereotypical portrayals of corporeal and psychological variation in this genre.' (Publication abstract)
Sing Fox to Me by Sarah Kanake : Notes
Melbourne
:
CAE Book Group
,
2018
13925807
2018
single work
criticism
Examines the representation of Down Syndrome in fiction, through the American novels The Memory Keeper's Daughter and Jewel, and through reflection on the author's own novel, Sing Fox to Me.
Sing Fox to Me by Sarah Kanake : Notes
Melbourne
:
CAE Book Group
,
2018
13925807
2018
single work
criticism
'The Gothic lends itself to critical examinations of disabled embodiment, yet this genre has ‘hitherto been largely ignored’ by disability studies scholars (Gregory 291). This essay redresses this omission by exploring disability in three Australian Gothic novels: Elizabeth Jolley's The Well (1986), Sarah Kanake's Sing Fox to Me (2016), and Kate Grenville's Lilian’s Story (1985). On initial glance, The Well and Lilian’s Story conform to the use of disability in the Gothic as a metaphor for social and psychological deviance. However, closer inspection of these novels and Sing Fox to Me demonstrates their resistance to the Gothic’s typical use of disability in phobic ways. Hester’s disability in The Well enables her to transcend the gender prescriptions of her patriarchal Australian community, even if it is initially constructed as a physiological sign of her disturbing possessiveness over Katherine. Against the ‘dramatic and unforgiving natural settings’ of the Tasmanian Gothic (Bullock 72), Sing Fox to Me interweaves Samson’s experience of Down syndrome with perennial themes of the genre including familial haunting and the intersection of past and present. Similar to The Well, Lilian’s Story shows the politically transformative nature of disabled embodiment, wherein the titular character’s fatness and ‘madness’ allow her to achieve self-realisation while defying the gender norms of her time. Ultimately, the three novels suggest that the use of disabled characters in some contemporary Australian Gothic narratives is clearing space for less-stereotypical portrayals of corporeal and psychological variation in this genre.' (Publication abstract)
