Dust Country: Stories from a Shifting Land

Abstract

This thesis traces the movement of dust through Australian literature and across the continent, establishing both its prevalence and distinctiveness as a literary presence. I propose Dust Country as a framework through which to connect different texts, unravelling constructions of place, space, and landscape in the process, providing a unique aperture through which to explore the relation between land, country, and its representation, inevitably delving into questions of poetics and aesthetics. Dust has a long history in Western literature, textually and geographically reaching back into the drier East and thus being associated with geographical extremity, absence, death, the desert, the epic form, and the Fall. This lineage culminates in T. S. Eliot’s famous line from The Waste Land: ‘I will show you fear in a handful of dust.’ In the early settler-colonial history of Australia, dust was a signifier of hostile heat and aridity, of Australia’s difference, even as its prevalence was exacerbated by the ecological destruction provoked by European agricultural methods ill-suited to an arid continent. Yet, dust emerges not merely as a physical disrupter to settlement amidst anthropogenic exacerbated dust bowl conditions that began as early as the 1860s, but, over time, it stimulated a discursive erosion. As a geophysical presence embedded within environmental (and planetary) systems alien to the European imagination, this study traces dust’s presence as a material renegade that unravels established Eurocentric constructions of landscape, intimately connected to literary space and place, the modern novel, and associated aesthetic regimes. The cross-continental movement of dust, traced through its quiet, subtle, yet insidious literary presence, offers new (albeit ancient) pathways and frameworks to think with, through and about land. Having tracked dust’s movement across Australia and its environmental presence in the early literature, culminating in Judith Wright’s ‘Dust’, this study unearths these aeolian particles as a pervasive and suggestive presence across Patrick White’s Voss, Randolph Stow’s Tourmaline, Dal Stivens’s A Horse of Air and Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria. It puts forward ecocritically and ecomaterially aware readings of these texts, repositioning them as key in charting a departure from representations of arid Australian environments as landscapes of fear and absence. Across these four novels this study traces a journey from outright fear and hostility: Voss sets out ‘into the dust’ (213) to confront the interior, finding not only destruction but love; the town of Tourmaline is entrapped ‘after the blinds of dust have clattered down’ (15) and deluded by dreams of water, but ultimately finds Tao and equanimity with an ancient, dry, and dusty environment; Stivens’s expedition seeks the elusive Centre of a shifting land, figured in the mysterious Night Parrot, greening the desert with granulated detail, finding vitality and life in the dust; and Carpentaria unearths Country, a mobile and dynamic country known across time immemorial, in its well-trodden dust. Just as predominant constructions unravel, so do established literary forms: Dust Country impels stories of journeys and movements, of shifting ground, of interpenetrations, of an expansive and epic sense of time and space, of a land that, far from being static or inert, is arguably more dynamic and poetically stimulating than the normative European environments which it has long been judged to be in deficit against.