Packing Death in Australian Literature

Ecocides and Eco-Sides

Iris Ralph

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000226720
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

Packing Death in Australian Literature: Ecocides and Eco-Sides addresses Australian Literature from ecocritical, animal studies, plant
studies, indigenous studies, and posthumanist critical perspectives. The
book's main purpose is twofold: to bring more sustained attention to environmental,
vegetal, and animal rights issues, past and present, and to
do that from within the discipline of literary studies. Literary studies in
Australia continue to reflect disinterest or not enough interest in critical
engagements with the subjects of Australia's oldest extant environments
and other beings beside humans. Packing Death in Australian Literature:
Ecocides and Eco-Sides foregrounds the vegetal and nonhuman
animal populations and contours of Australian Literature. Critical studies
relied on in Packing Death in Australian Literature: Ecocides and
Eco-Sides include books by CA. Cranston and Robert Zeller, Simon C.
Estok, Bill Gammage, Timothy Morton, Bruce Pascoe, Val Plumwood,
Kate Rigby, John Ryan, Wendy Wheeler, and Cary Wolfe. The selected
literary texts include work by Merlinda Bobis, Eric Yoshiaki Dando,
Nugi Garimara, Francesca Rendle-Short, Patrick White, and Evie Wyld.

1 Introduction

Australian Ecocriticism and Animal Studies

This book addresses plants and animals in Australia and its literature. The floral subjects of the book mostly refer to pre-1788 species; the fauna refers to pre- and post-1788 animals inclusive of the animals conceived and slaughtered in industrial farming facilities and hunted and killed in rural areas and remote bush. I write about these subjects from the critical perspectives of animal studies, ecocriticism, ecofeminism, environmental history, plant studies, and posthumanism. My purpose in doing so is to add to other studies of Australian literature that sustain the cynosure of beings that as a society we more often than not neglect, dismiss, exclude, and exterminate under lightweight and threadbare, speciesist, moral, and ethical frameworks. The words “packing death” in the title of this study refer to those frameworks, or to the all but thoughtless commercial packing, and packaging, of ecocide (killing of the environment) in Australia. In Australian English slang (“Strine”), “packing death” is a common expression for fear or anxiety. The words mean that here, too, and they mean states of trepidation in both nonhuman beings and human beings. The words “packing death” in this study also refer to the literary record of ecocide and so to the eco-sides of that record, for along with death this record reflects the many efforts, often accompanied by mammoth losses and against great odds, to slow and even halt many ecocidal policies and practices.

CA. Cranston and Robert Zeller’s edited The Littoral Zone: Australian Contexts and Their Writers is one of the most important studies for scholars interested in bringing attention to and supporting work in defense of Australia’s beings beside humans. Contributors to the anthology examine such iconic authors as Jack Davis, Randolph Stow, Dorothy Hewett, Tim Winton, Ray Lawler, Robert Gray, Miles Franklin, Oodgeroo Noonucaal, and Judith Wright in the context of the writers’ portraits of and relationships with such environments as the wheat belt in Western Australia, the limestone plains of New South Wales, the McPherson Range that straddles Queensland and New South Wales, the tropics of North Queensland, and the island of and seas around Tasmania. The last four environments mentioned might also be called natural or ecogenic (nonhuman-made) environments in order to distinguish them from human-made or anthropogenic environments, which include the wheat belt in Western Australia. Natural environments have not been intensely cultivated or otherwise significantly transformed by humans to the extent that they have become more anthropogenic. The word “environment” in this study usually refers to such environments, and the words “nature” and “natural” in this study thus refer to things and beings that are relatively more ecogenic than anthropogenic. However, the given distinction, and many others like it that divide ecogenic and anthropogenic matter, caves in with the slightest of poking and prodding. The distinction assumes in effect that humans and their anthropogenic extensions are not part of the environment, or are not environmental. Colonial powers nefariously relied on this assumption and claim to rationalize the seizure of the Australian environment in 1788. It was not until 1992, the year Australia’s High Court recognized Aboriginal rights to land after Eddie Koiki Mabo successfully claimed “uninterrupted ownership of his people’s traditional land at Mer Island,” that the Australian government admitted, if only on an anthropocentrically logical grounds of admission, “the falsehood of the claim” that Australia was terra nullius (Heiss and Minter 6). Since then, the government has only marginally entertained the idea that the environment itself has rights and is not merely a tabula rasa waiting to be written into existence by the human.

Australia’s oldest people understood that the natural world was full of creatures, individuals, groups, existences, histories, creativities, choices, wills, joys, and sorrows; they chose, therefore, to cooperate with rather than beat that world into submission. Such cooperation allowed their own species, the human species, to thrive alongside other species. The oldest Australians did not irresponsibly control or interfere in the ecogenic agencies of those species to the extent that later generations of Australian people desired and sought to oversee the environment. A minority of Australians today are paying heed to and promoting pre-1788 human–environment relationships. Cranston and Zeller’s ecocritical study The Littoral Zone exemplifies such relationships in Australian literary studies contexts.

Environmental historian Bill Gammage’s The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia, indigenous studies scholar Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu. Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident?, ecocritic Kate Rigby’s Dancing with Disaster: Environmental Histories, Narratives, and Ethics for Perilous Times, and regenerative agriculturalist Charles Massey’s Call of the Reed Warbler also make up the small, but significant, body of criticism that recognizes how and why Australia’s oldest people gave country a fair go. These authors lay out and point to evidence for the careful management of the island-continent of Australia and its smaller islands and marine environments by humans, “the people of 1788,” Gammage’s descriptive for the oldest Australian people, before the arrival of “newcomers,” Gammage’s term for Australia’s colonial-settler people, in 1788. After that fateful year, large areas of the Australian continent and its isles were mismanaged out of a mixture of antipathy, greed, and sheer ignorance.

Mark Tredinnick’s edited A Place on Earth: An Anthology of Nature Writing from Australia and North America, Tom Bristow’s The Anthropocene Lyric: An Affective Geography of Poetry, Person, Place, and Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin’s Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment are additional important key texts for scholars interested in the subject of fairer relations between humans and the environment in the context of Australian literary studies. Tredinnick writes about the influence of place on the poetry of Tim Winton, Charmian Clift, Barbara Blackman, and Patrice Newell. Bristow focuses on “place perception,” “more-than-human worlds,” and “Anthropocene emotion” in his discussion of a selection of British and Australian poets, the latter group of which include John Kinsella. Huggan and Tiffin, analyzing the ideological links between genocide and ecocide and racism and speciesism, and arguing that genocide and ethnocentrism are inseparable from ecocide and speciesism, discuss the work of Judith Wright, Oodgeroo Noonuccal, J. M. Coetzee, and Peter Goldsworthy (the last author of whom is represented in the penultimate chapter of the present study).¹

Green Sense: The Aesthetics of Plants, Place and Language and Posthuman Plants: Rethinking the Vegetal World through Culture, Art, and Poetry are two studies of the plants of southwestern Australia by critical plant studies scholar John Ryan. They are important texts for scholars of Australian literature who are interested in human–environment relationships in Australian literary studies contexts. Working through principles of “cultural botany” and “cultural ecology,” Ryan discusses such plant texts as William Hart-Smith’s (1911–1990) poem about the “iconic red and green flower,” the kangaroo paw (Mangles paw, Anigozanthos manglesii), a plant that has been the floral emblem of Western Australia since 1960 and once grew “thick on the sides of the road” (Posthuman Plants 113); poems by Judith Wright (1915–2000) about the many orchid species that thrived before the advent of Anglo-Europeans (115); Andrew Lansdown’s (1954–) “A Few Weeks Later I Returned to Find,” a poem about the grasstree or balga (Xanthorrhea preissii), “a primordial and profoundly slow-growing” tree species that has a lifespan of 500 years and was decimated when pastoralists from England and other countries in Europe arrived in Australia and embarked on the agricultural transformation of the southwest region of Australia (xi, 120); Charles Harpur’s (1813–1868) poetic tributes to the casuarina (or she oak or swamp oak) (117); and a poem by John Kinsella (1963–) about a pincushion lily plant (belonging to the Borya species) that is commonly called a “resurrection plant” because of its ability to survive long periods of drought (121). In commenting on these and other plants in his work, Ryan makes an argument that parallels the claims of Gammage, Pascoe, and Rigby: newcomers by and large misunderstood, took for granted, dismissed, or too lightly recognized both the astonishing pre-1788 vegetal power of Australia and the work of the people of 1788 who respected and cultivated that power.

In The Green Thread: Dialogues with the Vegetal World, an anthology coedited by Patrícia Vieira, Monica Gagliano, and John Ryan, the editors and other contributors explore the ways in which histories of ecophobia and ecocide intersect with those of racism, xenophobia, and sexism. Guinevere Narraway and Hannah Stark make that argument (in the chapter entitled “Vital Plants and Despicable Weeds in Ray Lawrence’s Lantana”) in the specific context of director Ray Lawrence’s film Lantana (adapted from the play Speaking in Tongues by Andrew Bovell), the main trope of which refers to a plant that has been “largely condemned” for being one of Australia’s 20 “most invasive imported plants” and now is classified as a “Weed of National Significance” (183). The authors critique the “usual discursive encoding [of lantana] as unproductive weed” (183) toward understanding how and why plants are enlisted in the articulation of “political attitudes toward foreignness” and “difference” (Vieira, Gagliano, and Ryan xvii).

For environmental humanities scholars who are interested in animal studies publications that address the question of human animal– nonhuman animal relationships in Australian cultural, if not manifestly Australian literary, contexts, Adrian Franklin’s Animal Nation is a noteworthy study.² Franklin is critical of what he calls “eco-nationalism,” or the “mutually reinforcing symmetry between nationalism and ecology” (4). He rejects the claim that “any lasting notion of Australian nationhood must arise from an intimate understanding of Australian ecosystems” (Flannery qtd. in Franklin 4).³ His argument is “Australian nationhood” must be understood essentially in symbolic and social terms (25).

The arguments that I make in the present study go against the grain of Franklin’s contention; they also owe to it in the sense that Franklin usefully alerts one to the concern of superficial green initiatives and rhetoric that pit affluent middle-class interests against the interests of poor and politically powerless communities. That betrayal is dealt with in depth by scholars situated in the areas of environmental justice studies and postcolonial ecocriticism. As Franklin’s study also reflects, relatively recent notions of wilderness ignore the issue of indigenous people’s coexistence with and custodianship of the Australian environment for tens of thousands of years before the discovery and takeover of this environment by newcomers. Franklin’s study thus brings to mind Ursula K. Heise’s study entitled Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global, a critique of localism in the context of nationalistic movements that meretriciously use “local” and “green” rhetoric to preserve and sustain insular xenophobic, racist, speciesist, and sexist political agendas.⁴

Carol Freeman, Elizabeth Leane, and Yvette Watt’s edited anthology, Considering Animals: Contemporary Studies in Human-Animal Relations, is another important study for scholars of Australian literature who are interested in underst...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Permissions
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Genocide and Ecocide
• 3 (Post-)pastoral
• 4 Veggie-Might
• 5 Language, Translation, and Communication
• 6 Conclusion
• Works Cited
• Index