Cirrus@Austlit

'There are important connections between human and nonhuman animals in quarantine that have implications for biosecurity laws and the loss of biodiversity in Australia. The laws typically function as thinly disguised quarantine legislation and are wide-sweeping, manifestly averse to biodiversity, and mostly supportive of the primary animal agriculture industries of cattle and sheep farming. The undeclared and evident hostility to biodiversity that the laws represent is increasing, not reducing the risk of pandemics. Zoonosis, or the transfer of a disease from a nonhuman to human animal, triggers pandemics, and diseased animals are rife in animal agriculture, in other areas of food production where nonhuman animals are trafficked, and in rural and other outback environments where animal agriculture interests are eroding or deeply compromising biodiversity. Reducing the phenomenon of humans in quarantine means questioning animal agriculture and the biosecurity laws that support it. This kind of questioning appears in aesthetic responses to animal agriculture and the ecophobic, speciesist, and anthropocentric contours of that agriculture. The crime thriller film Mystery Road, directed by First Nations Australian filmmaker Ivan Sen, represents that questioning. Subtly but powerfully, the film castigates animal agriculture’s targeting of wild dog and other wild animal populations for eradication and cows and sheep and other industrially farmed animals for reduction to lumps of meat. This targeting foments antagonisms between biosecurity and biodiversity, legitimizes the practices of quarantining many animals for much of their lives, and paves the way for humans serving time in quarantine.' (Publication abstract)

'Packing Death in Australian Literature: Ecocides and Eco-Sides addresses Australian Literature from ecocritical, animal studies, plant studies, indigenous studies, and posthumanist critical perspectives. The book’s main purpose is twofold: to bring more sustained attention to environmental, vegetal, and animal rights issues, past and present, and to do that from within the discipline of literary studies. Literary studies in Australia continue to reflect disinterest or not enough interest in critical engagements with the subjects of Australia’s oldest extant environments and other beings beside humans.

'Packing Death in Australian Literature: Ecocides and Eco-Sides foregrounds the vegetal and nonhuman animal populations and contours of Australian Literature. Critical studies relied on in Packing Death in Australian Literature: Ecocides and Eco-Sides include books by Simon C. Estok, Bill Gammage, Timothy Morton, Bruce Pascoe, Val Plumwood, Kate Rigby, John Ryan, Wendy Wheeler, Cary Wolfe, and Robert Zeller. The selected literary texts include work by Merlinda Bobis, Eric Yoshiaki Dando, Nugi Garimara, Francesca Rendle-Short, Patrick White, and Evie Wyld.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'The argument of this paper is that Mary Hare, one of the four principal characters in a slightly later novel by White, Riders in the Chariot, is the most pronounced of White's ecological avatars. She is a green interloper in the "glass house" (RC35) of Xanadu, an imposing estate on the outskirts of Sydney, built by Mary's father Norbert. Norbert's metaphysical pretensions, like the metaphysical pursuits of Voss, are deeply anthropocentric and blind him to the ecogenic subject of the ecogenic environment around him. He exploits it or disregards it in his design of Xanadu. The ecocritical content of Riders in the Chariot, and of White's writing as a whole, hardly has been spoken to by scholars. I argue this is central to any discussion of White and, further, that this content is central to White's metaphysical themes.'

Source: Colloquy : Text Theory Critique, no.12 November 2006 Sighted: 12/07/2007