Intimate Immensities: The Poetics of Space in Contemporary Australian Literature

Abstract

Much of Australia’s literary landscape reflects a quest to represent its immense space. Empirical modes of investigation and Eurocentric literary models have resulted in alienation. Australian space, for non-Indigenous Australians, remains an unsettling and unsettled space. Colonial erasures, legal fictions and national mythologies have failed to turn space into place. Too much remains unresolved to write from the perspective of a place literature. A lack of intimacy with Australia’s immensities has led to much misrelation, with devastating consequences for Indigenous Australians and the non-human environment. The Aboriginal Turn of the 1980s and postcolonial literary theory have been invaluable to progress towards more ethical modes of representation. Yet, we live in the settler colonial present. My thesis makes connections between authors, modes and genres to offer a compelling case for a complementary poetics of space that embraces intimacy with immensity. Ross Gibson’s nonfiction, Tim Winton’s fiction and Nicolas Rothwell’s narrative essays position the reader in front of temporal and spatial hinges that need to be apprehended anew: the colonial archive, the age of exploration or the 1988 Bicentenary. Key to their poetics of space is a reorientation towards Country so that Indigenous thought and culture may reform settler society. As well as writing back to Empire, Gibson, Rothwell and Winton write from and to the settler colonial present, decolonising modes of perception, representation, time, space, the sacred, as well as relationships with Indigenous people and the non-human realm. Their works double as critical tools that serve to forge a poetics of Reconciliation. My methodology draws critically from concepts developed in the fields of postcolonial studies, ecocriticism and trauma theory. Because French philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century were instrumental in reforming spatial theory, I use concepts developed by Gaston Bachelard, Henri Lefebvre, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, to identify principles which inform contemporary spatial representations. From within the colonial present, Intimate Immensities evokes the possibility of a post-settler dynamic of non-belonging, with placelessness and movement as key markers of a renegotiated identity.