Locating the Sugarcane Grower: An Ecocritical Reading of Three Australian Novels

In Australian literature, farming is understood as a destructive colonial extraction of wealth that has obliterated the classical Aboriginal relationship with non-human nature. In this essay, I shift attention from the post-1788 settler-colonial worldview to the pre-industrial influences arising from the classical poetry of Virgil’s “Georgics”. I compare Virgil’s farming instructions with depictions of farming practices in Jean Devanny’s Cindie: A Chronicle of the Canefields (1946), John Naish’s The Cruel Field (1962) and Ronald McKie’s The Crushing (1977). I argue that the combination of historical settings, Devanny’s emphasis on the pastoral mode, Naish’s canecutter perspective and McKie’s town setting results in anthropocentric novels that inadequately reflect Virgil’s ecologically-sensitive approach to farming. As the first ecocritical reading of Australian sugarcane fiction, this essay has repercussions for writers and readers seeking new ways of understanding the sugarcane grower. I locate Australia’s fictional sugarcane grower at a waypoint on a return to ecologically-sensitive farming.

N/A

8th ASLEC-ANZ Conference: Ngā tohu o te huarere: conversations beyond human scales

N/A

N/A

N/A

N/A

13