Cirrus@Austlit

'Kim Scott’s novel Taboo (2017) centres on the Kukenarup massacre, which followed the fatal spearing of John Dunn in 1880 on the ancestral lands of the Wirlomin Noongar people. Taboo traces the dynamics of silence that run through the lives of Noongar and settler descendants in the wake of massacre. What the novel underscores is that while a massacre may be located at a particular site and commemorated by public gestures (plaques, memorials and ceremonies), its reality cannot ultimately be separated from the inner lives of the survivors and their descendants. This article argues that the terrain of massacre is shown in Scott’s novel to be quintessentially extimate, a word that Jacques Lacan coined to describe the intimate exterior of psychic reality. As a concept, the extimate helps name the space that is routinely excluded by the deployment of public and private domains in the liberal capitalist order, whereby social suffering is consigned to a privatised interior, and private violence is made banal by empty public utterance.' (Publication abstract)

'During the twentieth century, the southwestern corner of Australia was cleared for intensive agriculture. In the space of several decades, an arc from Esperance to Geraldton, an area of land larger than England, was cleared of native flora for the farming of grain and livestock. Today, satellite maps show a sharp line ringing Perth. Inside that line, tan-coloured land is the most visible sign from space of human impact on the planet. Where once there was a vast mosaic of scrub and forest, there is now the Western Australian wheatbelt.

'Tony Hughes-d’Aeth examines the creation of the wheatbelt through its creative writing. Some of Australia’s most well-known and significant writers - Albert Facey, Peter Cowan, Dorothy Hewett, Jack Davis, Elizabeth Jolley, and John Kinsella - wrote about their experience of the wheatbelt. Each gives insight into the human and environmental effects of this massive-scale agriculture.

'Albert Facey records the hardship and poverty of small-time selection in Australia. Dorothy Hewett makes the wheatbelt visible as an ecological tragedy. Jack Davis shows us an Aboriginal experience of the wheatbelt. Through examining this writing, Tony Hughes-d’Aeth demonstrates the deep value of literature in understanding the human experience of geographical change.' (Publication summary)