Memoirs of Settler (National) Belonging : Tim Winton's Island Home and Kim Mahood's Position Doubtful
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| Year of publication | 2018 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | In the presentation I compare and contrast two recently published "landscape memoirs" - Island Home (2015) by Tim Winton, and Position Doubtful (2016) by Kim Mahood - from the perspective of how they portray personal and national belonging. Firstly, they will be contextualized withing the tradition of what Gillian Whitlock calls "the white intellectual memoir". Then, it will be shown how both texts emphasize geography and poetics of the country as the main coordinates for outlining ways in which the quintessential landscape shapes people's identities as Australians. Finally, I will argue that although Winton's and Mahood's narratives share a number of common themes, such as their love of (outback) landcapes, appreciation of its aesthetics, uneasiness about the troubling history of frontier violence, and environmentalist concerns, they communicate different sensibilities: while Winton's text seems to be saying that for settler Australians to reach a mature sense of belonging (as people and nation) they need to stop exploiting the land as "territory" and develop a responsible and caring relationship to it as "country", Mahood's text offers a more ambivalent and less resolved account of ways of settler belonging, thematizing vulnerability and anxiety of the precarious settler presence in the Australian outback. |
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