Borderlands: New Peripheries of Pastoral in Contemporary Australian Fiction

Ryan Delaney

doi:10.25907/00123

Critical discussions of Australian pastoral literature have traditionally concentrated on twentieth century non-Indigenous poets and the possibilities of a white-settler poetics of place. Radical pastoral poet John Kinsella has parodied this preoccupation with settler-belonging, arguing that, the “nationalistic agenda in Australian literary criticism, to create a distinct and authentically Australian landscape in poetry, has been as forced as trying to turn a gum tree into an evergreen” (Australian Pastoral 365). Placing the traditional preoccupation with poetry and settler-belonging to one side, this research makes an original contribution to studies of Australian pastoral by prioritising First Nations perspectives and by considering the more urgent, dystopian and at times apocalyptic depictions of the Australian farm emerging in contemporary rural fiction. In the exegetical component, I review current literature regarding the Australian pastoral and conduct a detailed analysis of five works of contemporary fiction, beginning with two novels by First Nations writers: Melissa Lucashenko’s Too Much Lip (2018) and Kim Scott’s Taboo (2017), followed by Charlotte Wood’s The Natural Way of Things (2015), Mireille Juchau’s The World Without Us (2015) and James Bradley’s Clade (2015). A close-reading of these novels reveals a politically-charged rural literature that moves beyond the ubiquitous anti-pastoral by offering more empowering and celebratory images of First Nations sovereignty, female agency and sustainable futures. I ask: how do we attend to and extend upon the increasingly radical, diverse and agency-centred engagements with pastoral emerging in contemporary Australian fiction? By centralising agency and actively decolonising the farm, these novels evoke what Terry Gifford has defined as “post-pastoral”: rural literature that reveals the violence of industrial agriculture whilst escaping the potential pessimism and determinism of the anti-pastoral mode (Green Voices 55). I argue that, while the post-pastoral provides a relevant theoretical base from which to approach these novels, the incorporation of other, more nuanced ecocritical concepts, theories and First Nations epistemologies is required in order to articulate the particularities of an Australian post-pastoral poetic. Ultimately, I argue that contemporary novelists are not only exposing the legacies of violence underpinning the Australian pastoral, but are reclaiming the farm and the pastoral mode itself as a site of anti-colonial, anti-anthropocentric and anti-patriarchal resistance. The creative artefact—a collection of short fiction/vignettes titled Borderlands—draws on paths forged by these award-winning novels whilst exploring other post-pastoral directions. In the artefact’s research through practice, I am experimenting with conventions from and inventions into the pastoral that are strongly influenced by my own site of production and speaking position as an Australian millennial, seeking to face and redress my own colonial heritage. I attempt to extend the peripheries of a contemporary Australian post-pastoral, allowing for rural landscapes as well as accounting for cityscapes and hybrid urban/rural/virtual locales to mirror the current dissolution of the city/country divide as a result of climate catastrophe, COVID-19, urban expansion, industrial agriculture and rapid technological change. I find that the interrogation of pastoral in the Anthropocene need not be limited to the farm as setting and that short fiction/the vignette may offer a way to reflect the increasingly fleeting and fragmentary way in which human subjects are currently retreating into non-human realms. I venture into what I hope is a kind of adjacent Arcadian space, where the pastoral is thread into the challenges faced by young, often city-dwelling Australians in a contemporary milieu. Such dynamic, youthful and urban-based pastorals may create alternative spaces for the Australian post-pastoral to work within, leading to new insights into the shifting and increasingly complex relationship between urban/rural and human/non-human in the 21st century.

Borderlands: New Peripheries of Pastoral in Contemporary Australian Fiction

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