Clare Archer-Lean

Australian author Charlotte Wood has been described as a subversive writer, challenging patriarchy, ageism and the human treatment of animals. Her novel Animal People is centrally concerned with this latter theme, and Wood has said she is 'interested in why we need animals to … be a kind of repository of all these feelings we seem unable to bestow on human beings' (Wood in Fidler 2012). At first glance, her satire of infantilising domestic pets and the converse brutality towards other species, in Animal People, is a critique of modernity's entwined anthropocentricism and anthropomorphism, a challenge to the projection of human needs onto animals. But the relationship between animal representation and meaningful critique in Wood's oeuvre is problematic. Animal imagery abounds in Wood's The Natural Way of Things. Ironically, considering Wood's earlier critique of the projection of human values on animal subjects these animal images are often read as only metaphors for human experience. That is, as symbols for the degradation of the women interred in a dystopian camp (Osbourne 2015) or, alternatively, as symbols of tenderness, a relief from the horror, violence and misogyny of the rest of the textual action (Newman 2016). There lies some potential for empathy in this connection: woman and animal as allies under linked systems of oppression. The Natural Way of Things illuminates the intricately connected systems of patriarchy and speciesism, yet it is also replicates it. Wood's stance is further complicated by her cook books: carnist recipes as salve 'to nourish the soul'. This paper will examine the connected human/animal subjectivities in Wood's work as both action and distraction, a testimony to some of the paradoxes and limits in contemporary, literary discourses on non-human animals.

Remembering Babylon pits characters' interactions with the natural world in diverse ways and the culminating impression is far from idealistic or apolitical. Ultimately, the novel's complex rendering of human relationships with place and the non-human animal offers a specific challenge to romanticised, pastoral visions of place. This argument is counter to some criticism of the novel as idealisation of the natural world at the expense of historically salient political considerations. In a recent research project, this work was reconsidered by regional book clubs with the question: is this a work of environmental significance? The responses very much focused on the pastoral connection via the meaning of authorial choices in the epigraph, the significance of the title and reader reflections on the parallels between their own transformative experiences with nature and non-human animals and those represented in the novel. This paper takes these reader responses as a starting point to further scrutinise the relationship the novel Remembering Babylon has with the pastoral tradition. In so doing it finds the novel revises an idealising vision of nature and gently parodies the notion that nature is separate from or a tool of human, cultural concerns, particularly through its figurative and literal foregrounding of the nonhuman animal. The epigraph provides a deliberate and significant signal of Malouf's challenge to pastoral understandings of nature, because the poets cited within it, William Blake and John Clare, arguably offer in their wider body of work what might be termed a post-pastoral ethos that evokes, challenges and thus adapts pastoral idealism of nature. The paper suggests that Remembering Babylon expresses such a post-pastoral ethos, if in a very different context and form from Blake and Clare.

Montaigne once said 'Everyman has within himself the entire human condition'. The trialling of ideas and positions via a subjective experience reveals broad philosophical considerations. Personal essays firmly entrenched in the literary tradition, including writings by Charles Lamb, Virginia Woolf and George Orwell, are characterised by conversational, free form, confessional, and aesthetic style. They feature comment on the human condition, and use irony, inter-textuality and self-argument. This same approach is now being embraced by some contributors from a discipline traditionally (in the last century at least) opposed to such an artful process. Popular science writing essays now share much more, stylistically and audience wise, with other non-fiction genres (for example, travel writing, autobiography, and creative historical non-fiction) than with science writing in the academy. The key examples of this phenomenon to be analysed in this paper are select works by Oliver Sacks, Robert Sapolsky and Natalie Angier. Such works juxtapose corporeal and visceral creativity, detached empirical evaluation and, most interestingly, an almost hyperbolic reference to texts themselves: a heightened textual self-referentiality or poioumena. In popular science we see interplay between the text, in a literary and aesthetic sense, and science, in the empirical and quantitative sense. But story becomes more than a device for elucidating the empirical; there is a suggestion of the human as story and philosophical comment on the nature of humanity.

Mudrooroo's Master of the Ghost Dreaming series pits identity as a journey and is more interested in the notion of re-presentation than representativeness. This paper draws on notions of the trickster (a deliberately incoherent, non-archetypal, and slippery figure) alongside the symbolic ramification of water (representing fluidity, movement and impermanence) to read Mudrooroo's use of the journey motif. As both trickster and water are neither purely disruptive nor creative, so too is this literature neither purely disrupting colonial textuality and presence nor attempting to purely create or represent colonised presence. In a sense, the use of trickster and water motifs allow for a textualisation of the 'messiness' and 'liminality' which identity in the twentieth century came to embody. In addition, contemporary concepts of 'trickster discourse', particularly the work of Gerald Vizenor aid analysis of Mudrooroo's fictional journeying as a physical, psychic, supra-textual celebration of chance, ambiguity and repetition to evade fixed notions of identity. The combining of the terms 'trickster' and 'discourse' also allows for a focus on language in a reading of Mudrooroo's novels. This is because trickster is the language, as Doueihi asserts, or the 'mind trickster' as Vizenor terms it, never fixing meaning or representation because it is continually being enunciated and re-enunciated. Mudrooroo's 'trickiness' is to create a pastiche of intra-textual and intertextual ambiguous and moving images. That is, the emphasis on movement is enacted within the structure of the texts with references to canonical, colonial and Indigenous referents and to other elements within the larger oeuvre of his own work. The strategic repetition and ambiguity characteristic of trickster discourse allows for the 'world' to be re-traveled endlessly.