The Dingo's Noctuary

Abstract

‘The Dingo’s Noctuary’ is an extended illustrated verse novel set in the remote Tanami Desert, addressing themes of cultural alienation, the post-colonial landscape, death and transcendence. Its temporal arc begins with Cassini’s launch from Cape Canaveral in 1997 and ends with Cassini crashing into Saturn’s atmosphere in 2017. A loose narrative follows a motorcyclist and her dog through successive central Australian deserts. Interrogating my own identity and connection to Country, as an author, allows me to occupy my ambiguity, illegitimacy—to oppose the assumption that writing out of certainty creates a better result. ‘The Dingo’s Noctuary’ is a single-authored work of visual art and poetry. Hand drawn land maps, star maps, and pressings of desert plants locate the poems in place. Designing a visual language for this book required me to invent a totally new method, which I call “Lumachrome glass printing.” This method combines photochemistry and decomposing cadavers, with historical cameraless photographic practices, collage, and traditional drawing and painting. Working this way, I created forty-seven afterlife portraits of animals and birds to accompany the text. While ‘The Dingo’s Noctuary’ is an account of personal relationships, its broader ontologies draw from a cultural horizon that predates my relationship with Warlpiri people. The idea of Country is examined through a lens of ecological emergence metaphysics and filtered through process metaphysics, neoplatonism, gnostic reversal and the Deleuzian Body without Organs. ‘The Dingo’s Noctuary’ is a story of finding belonging in non-belonging, and identity inside hybridity. It could not have been told from inside a monoculture. This verse novel is written for for those who fall into the cracks between cultures or identities, and who may never have certainty around their family history.