Writing an Australian Farm Novel: Connecting Regions via Magic Realism

Smyth, Elizabeth A.

Abstract

Contemporary farming often involves more machines, access to information, and public pressure to protect or regenerate non-human nature than in the past. However, this is scarcely reflected in the farm novel, which is largely bound to an historical era. Australian farm novels include Benjamin Cozens’ Princess of the Mallee (1903), John Naish’s The Cruel Field (1962), Randolph Stow’s The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea (1965), and Carrie Tiffany’s Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living (2005). Each feature realism and pre-1960s settings. In this article, I propose a major revision of the farm novel by employing magic realism to challenge Australia’s realist representations of farming as a rational, money-making enterprise. Magic realism allows me to position Australia’s dominant profit-driven approach to agriculture as fantasy and hopefully to stimulate new notions of farming and the farmer. By casting sugarcane and machines as a colonial farming alliance and humans as their marginalized subjects, I draw attention to a gradual depopulation of rural lands, subvert a persistent anthropocentric element of the settler-colonial ideology, and challenge notions of humans controlling the farm. This article is also a case study in a performance of John Kinsella’s international regionalism (He, 2021; Kinsella, 2001), in which Australia’s Wet Tropics connects with creative writing discourse.

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1327-9556

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Australian Association of Writing Programs

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DOI

10.52086/001c.40224