Kenny: shovelling effluence with an old celtic shovel

ABSTRACT

It's a commonplace that modern textual production is inevitably informed by cultural legacy; this paper shows that Kenny [Jacobson, Clayton, dir. 2006. Melbourne: Thunderbox Films], an Australian mockumentary, fits within a longstanding genre of humorously packaged social criticism. We show that Kenny's unusual hero has a Celtic predecessor Niall (circa 1390), a leader willing to subject himself to abjection for the greater good. Amidst their humour, both tales offer direction about ideal masculine behaviour in respect of national identity formation. Both texts use land and water as motifs for leadership and in both tales debasement is the test that sets a benchmark for approaches to the construction of national and cultural identities. In Kenny, we suggest, willingness to take dedicated care with human shit models an ecological ideal for a future wherein one of the monsters threatening humanity is its own pollution. The ugly legacy from a history of cultural abuse troubles white Australians’ relationship with the land and with themselves. This paper shows traces back beyond colonization and settler unease to Celtic myths that provide enabling patterns for reviewing settler identity and provides a reading of Kenny through that lens.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Susan Carter http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2498-2814

Brenda Allen http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9599-3556

Notes on contributors

Susan Carter gained her doctorate from the University of Toronto in 2001, working on medieval literature in English Literature Studies. She has co-edited a book on the motif of the Loathly Lady, and articles on medieval tales as well as Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. Her interest is in the way that stories negotiate social biases, anxieties and values. She now works in Higher Education reading the academy as a text that is also revealing.

Brenda Allen gained her doctorate from the University of Canterbury (Christchurch) in 2000 by which time she was already working in English Literature, Film and Media at the University of Auckland where she currently teaches and researches. Her interest in contemporary New Zealand and Australian narrative film has resulted in several publications with particular attention to post-settler identities and relations between Indigenous and Settler groups in those countries.