'An unnamed man, M, arrives at a remote house on the fringe of a vast wilderness and soon disappears into a world of silence and stillness. His one mission: to find the last thylacine, the fabled Tasmanian tiger. She is said to have passed into myth but a sighting has been reported... Uncompromising and compelling, Julia Leigh's stunning first novel does not give up any of its secrets easily. The Hunter is a haunting tale of obsession that builds to an unforgettable conclusion.'
Source: Libraries Australia (Sighted 18/03/2011).
'While on his mission, the hunter lodges with a grief-ridden family of outcasts whose father has mysteriously vanished after sighting the Thylacine. The hunter succumbs more than he'd like to the family's scant charms and when tragedy strikes has to further purge his psyche to focus upon his elusive quarry. There is something tantalizing at large here as well as the mythical beast in this soul-stalking story about a group of doomed creatures whose unfortunate extinction is never really in doubt.' - Reviewed by Chris Packham, naturalist and broadcaster
Source: British Union Catalogue http://copac.ac.uk/search?rn=3&au=leigh&ti=hunter (Sighted 14/10/2011)
The Hunter
( dir. Daniel Nettheim
)
2011
Sydney
:
Porchlight Films
,
2011
Z1767310
2011
single work
film/TV
thriller
(taught in 1 units)
'Martin David, a modern-day soldier of fortune, rendezvous in Paris with a mysterious man, Jacek Koman, who hires him to travel to Tasmania and attempt to locate a Tasmanian Tiger (or thylacine) - although the animal is believed to be extinct, there are rumours that one has been sighted - and its DNA, whether the animal is dead or alive, represents a fortune to vested interests.'Thylacines and the Anthropocene
Julia Leigh's The Hunter is a significant touchstone for thylacine scholarship and fiction alike, and is perhaps the most influential representation of the thylacine figure in Australian literature. Many of its themes recur across later narratives, including a possible genetic recovery of the species, violent masculinities, domestic crises, and gendering the animal as female.
An anonymous hunter—assuming the identity of 'Martin David, Naturalist', or M for short—arrives in lutruwita / Tasmania on the trail of a thylacine, intent on harvesting her genetic material. M makes several unsuccessful expeditions into the Tasmanian wilderness to hunt, each time playing the role of a 'natural man' by masking his true purpose along with his (hu)manliness, smeared in animal scat.
M is a violent encroachment on the Tasmanian plateau, and this is most keenly expressed in thylacine's death scene. He discovers a 'lair' formed by sloping ironstone boulders—a womb-like subterranean space, with the bones of a long-dead pup—and here, lies in wait. When the thylacine returns to feed on a freshly killed wallaby, he emerges from the den to shoot her dead. M is clinical in his dissection of her reproductive organs, transitioning from something approaching grief to cold, indifferent efficiency: "...when it became a carcass he isn't sure, but the bloody gutted thing is no longer a body to him". With the deed done, and his pack heavy with the 'motherlode', M reemerges from the wild.
'Some time in the late 1990s, a man is hiking through Tasmania’s Central Plateau, hoping to kill a thylacine. He’s a mainlander, and he has come to a Tasmania that no longer exists: before MONA, before Jetstar, before secret saunas and mountain bike trails, before the Tasmanian Forest Agreement, before Richard Flanagan won the Booker Prize.' (Introduction)
'This chapter investigates the response of the Australian novel to the Anthropocene. It considers ways in which new, speculative fictions have sought to represent deep time and planetary interconnection, and interrogates how this connects to long-standing settler-colonial relations to land. It considers such writers as James Bradley, George Turner, and Tara June Winch, and emphasizes the region of Western Australia as a place of particular environmental urgency.' (Publication abstract)
'What can an environment do? And what does it mean for us, as human beings, to participate in it? While these may not be new questions, our increasing awareness of environmental changes and ecological crisis bring these to the fore. It is fitting then, that the past two decades have seen the rise of literary ecocriticism, as scholars begin to turn their attention beyond the social or individualized context of the human, to the “meta-context” of the greater biosphere (Clark 4). According to Glen Love, ecocriticism provides a “fresh look” at literature as part of a larger project of making sense of ourselves and our “place” by acknowledging physical or material context (11). To this end, unlike other modes of literary/cultural analysis, ecocriticism draws particularly on the science of ecology (Garrard 5). Ecologist Neil Evernden has argued that the humanities should have long ago included nonhuman ecology in their study, as the conception of humans as separate and discrete entities is anthropocentric and arbitrary. He questions rigid species boundaries, and even living–nonliving distinctions, arguing that “there is no such thing as an individual, only an individual-in-context, individual as a component of place, defined by place” (20). In other words, humans and nonhumans alike are not separate from their “environment,” but continuously intermingled with other forces of influence. The more recent development of ecocriticism, which takes “the basic premise of the interrelatedness of a human cultural activity like literature and the natural world that encompasses it” (Love 38) is reminiscent of Evernden’s claims.' (Introduction)
