y separately published work icon The Littoral Zone : Australian Contexts and Their Writers anthology   criticism  
Issue Details: First known date: 2007... 2007 The Littoral Zone : Australian Contexts and Their Writers
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Contents

* Contents derived from the Amsterdam,
c
Netherlands,
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Western Europe, Europe,:Rodopi , 2007 version. Please note that other versions/publications may contain different contents. See the Publication Details.
A Beach Somewhere : The Australian Littoral Imagination at Play, Bruce Bennett , single work criticism
A remarkable array of late twentieth and early twenty-first century Australian novelists and short story writers have presented images of West Australian beaches and coastlines. These authors include Robert Drewe, Jack Davis, Randolph Stow, Peter Cowan, Dorothy Hewett, and Tim Winton. Their human dramas have a peculiar poignancy when played out against the natural elements of these Western coasts. Sexual, emotional, or spiritual crises occur in maritime settings that both enhance their memorability and reveal humanity's fragile hold on the continent. (abstract taken from The Littoral Zone)
 (p. 31-44)
The Shadow on the Field : Literature and Ecology in the Western Australian Wheatbelt, Tony Hughes-d'Aeth , single work criticism
Satellite images show a sharp line marking the end (or beginning) of the country cleared for farming in south-western Australia. It is the most visible clearance line on the planet and demarcates an area the size of Scotland from which, in the space of two generations, the native vegetation was almost entirely stripped. This chapter attempts to trace this far-reaching ecological event in the creative literatures of those generations, focussing on the inter-war years. (abstract taken from The Littoral Zone)
 (p. 45-69)
Literature in the Arid Zone, Tom Lynch , single work criticism
This chapter surveys and assesses from an ecocentric perspective some representative literary portrayals of the Australian deserts. Generally, it contrasts works that portray the desert as an alien, hostile, and undifferentiated void with works that recognise and value the biological particularities of specific desert places. It explores the literature of three dominant cultural orientations to the deserts: pastoralism, mining, and traversal. It concludes with a consideration of several multi-voiced and/or multi-genred bioregionally informed works that suggests fruitful directions for more ecocentric literary approaches. (abstract taken from The Littoral Zone)
 (p. 70-92)
Under the Mountains and Beside a Creek : Robert Gray and the Shepherding of Antipodean Being, Mark Tredinnick , single work criticism
This chapter explores the agricultural and literary metaphors of pastoralism; it takes a traditional ecocritical approach, focussing on how the land has affected the poet and his writing. In Australia, whose economy has so long depended on the pastoral industry, there has developed a different kind of pastoral poetry, exemplified by the poetry of Robert Gray. Drawing on his experience of the North Coat of New South Wales, Grays poetry has matured as he has become an exemplar of what Martin Heidegger terms the 'shepherd of being'. from The Littoral Zone.
 (p. 123-143)
The Poetry of Judith Wright and Ways of Rejoicing in the World, Veronica Brady , single work criticism
Poetry, as W. H. Auden said, 'makes nothing happen'. But it can alter our ways of seeing and thus of being in the world. The poetry of Judith Wright, for example, can 'persuade us to rejoice' in the world - another task of poetry as Auden sees it - thus helping us to fulfil the essential task of people in a relatively new settler society like Australia to learn to dwell in rather than merely build on the land. From the beginning of her career she set herself to this task, challenging the 'masculine' separation of self and world to explore a deeper 'feminine' relationship with it, setting the self within the larger life of the universe and celebrating its beauty and terror.
 (p. 145-152)
Ecopoetics of the Limestone Plains, Kate Rigby , single work criticism

The Limestone Plains is the name given by British explorers in the 1820s to the area in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales, where the city of Canberra would later be built. Watered by the Molonglo, a tributary of the Murrumbidgee, and ringed by wooded hills, this area was a significant meeting place of several Aboriginal tribes, whose fire-stick farming practices had shaped its flora and fauna over the millennia. In the nineteenth century, the Canberra area provided a living for pastoralists and selectors, whose activities altered the local ecology and had a devastating impact on Indigenous people. The city that was founded on the Limestone Plains in 1913 in turn displaced this rural way of life, although remnants of pastoralism persisted beyond the urban fringe into the twenty-first century. Canberra's 'bush capital' was conceived as a city in and of the landscape, and it remains a place where town and country interpenetrate to a remarkable degree. As well as providing something of a haven for wildlife, Canberra and its surrounds have also nurtured numerous writers. In this essay, I will investigate the ways in which explorers and settlers construed the Limestone Plains as a locus of pastoral dwelling, before proceeding to consider how some more recent writers have responded to this place in literary form by attending to the more-than-human world that persists both within and beyond the city. (from The Littoral Zone)

 (p. 153-175)
Hugging the Shore : The Green Mountains of South-East Queensland, Ruth Blair , single work criticism
Extrapolating from their observations of the relationship between the Blue Mountains and the New South Wales coastline, David Foster and Martin Thomas have concluded that the sea and the mountains represent a 'fundamental divide in the mental geography of Australia'. The south-east Queensland coast presents a different experience of the relationship between sea and mountains. Here, from northern New South Wales to Noosa, north of Brisbane, the mountains, clearly visible from ocean, bay, and shore, are an intrinsic part of the coastal experience. This chapter looks at some writing about two of the coastal mountains with substantial national park areas: Lamington and Tamborine. It considers how writing about these areas reflects on the process of engagement with the natural world, the process by which settlers become dwellers, and the particular understanding of our place in the world that can evolve out of the experience of 'the frontiers between the wild and the cultivated'. (from The Littoral Zone)
 (p. 176-197)
Tales of the Austral Tropics : North Queensland in Australian Literature, Robert Zeller , single work criticism (p. 199-218)
Islands, C. A. Cranston , single work criticism
This chapter investigates the impact of literary tropes on island topography. The survey approach of island literature is abandoned in favour of ecocritical praxis, examining instead the literature of selected temperate islands (with populations varying from 2 to 20,000). Cattle farming, ideological disjunction, and mortality are explored in two settler autobiographies set in 'paradise' (Three Hummock Island); 'descent with modification' is traced in the text and the farming practices (sealing, Soldier Settlement pastoral, and salvage) in a work of fiction based in 'Eden' (King Island); and in the final work (indigenous autobiography and myth set on North Stradbroke Island), the politics of the 'land ethic' and land rights confront a sea country pastoral. (from The Littoral Zone)
 (p. 219-260)
'A Place of Ideals in Conflict' : Images of Antarctica in Australian Literature, Elizabeth Leane , single work criticism
This chapter examines Australian literature (poetry, fiction, and plays) dealing with Antarctica, focussing on each text's engagement with the Antarctic environment and the debates surrounding it. Beginning with two late nineteenth-century Antarctic utopias, the survey moves through the work of well-known writers such as Douglas Stewart and Thomas Keneally in the mid-century to more recent writing by Dorothy Porter, Les Murray, Caroline Caddy, and others. Less familiar material, such as poetry by Antarctic expeditioners themselves, is also discussed. The essay traces a rough progression in Australian representation of the far southern environment, from an initial utopian approach to an emphasis on its stark, 'timeless' icescape as a minimalist backdrop for human dramas to an appreciation of its changeability, complexity and fragility. (from The Littoral Zone)
 (p. 261-290)
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