Power of country: Indigenous relationality and reading Indigenous climate fiction in Australia

Abstract

As a curriculum area, English has been foundational to empire, invasion, and colonisation of Indigenous peoples the world over. It therefore requires considered scholarship to reimagine how to engage with and teach literature in English. In this article, we explore the enduring problem of English and its inheritances, as well as the ways in which Indigenous voices are currently manifest in classroom contexts. We then propose Indigenous relationality as the foundation and frame for new ways to read literature and understand the world. We consider the ways in which Indigenous cli-fi texts refuture relations and invite new modes of reading, focussing specifically on the way the concepts are taken up in Wright’s Carpentaria.

Keywords:

• Indigenous studies
• climate fiction
• literature
• relationality
• English curriculum

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 McLean Davies (Author 2) was invited by Wright to participate in the school workshop on Carpentaria. This article has been written with Wright’s support and her agreement with the use of these direct quotations from her talk.

2 Cultural burning is a millenniums-old land management practice of peoples indigenous to the continent now known as Australia. There are many practitioners across Australia, and mainstream fire management systems are only just beginning to turn to their particular and collective wisdom. The organisation Firesticks is a great point of entry to this practice and those networks of Indigenous expertise (see Firesticks, n.d.).

3 The works of climate fiction by van Neerven (2014) and Coleman (2017) were both published to readerships through dedicated Indigenous publishing pathways, pathways strengthened by the much earlier success of Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria. van Neerven won the 2013 Queensland Literary Awards David Unaipon Award for unpublished Indigenous writers and was published as Heat and Light by UQP in 2014. Coleman won the 2016 black&write! Writing Fellowship and was published by Hachette in 2017. That Australian publishing cannot publish such Indigenous writers without Indigenous-dedicated and separately funded pathways is worthy of further exploration but beyond the scope of this piece. Not only were publishing pathways strengthened by Wright’s Carpentaria success but Carpentaria introduced conceptual precedence enabling receptivity to climate concepts later creatively interrogated by van Neerven, Coleman, and others.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sandra Phillips

Sandra Phillips researches Indigenous literature and literary culture at The University of Queensland and co-leads the Australian Studies Research Node. Sandra is also Associate Dean (Indigenous Engagement) in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences and is affiliated with the School of Communication and Arts.

Larissa McLean Davies

Larissa McLean Davies is Professor of Teacher Education in the Melbourne Graduate School of Education at the University of Melbourne and is co-director of the Literary Education Lab. McLean Davies’ research is concerned with the way teacher knowledge is developed across the career span, and specifically with how disciplinary knowledge is understood in the context of decolonising curricula imperatives. She has published widely in the areas of teacher education and English curriculum and is known for her work at the intersection of literary studies and English education. Her co-authored book Investigating Literary Knowing in the Making of English Teachers (Routledge) will be published in 2022.

Sarah E. Truman

Sarah E. Truman researches English literary education and the arts at the University of Melbourne and co-directs the Literary Education Lab. Truman’s Australian Research Council funded DECRA (2022-2025) explores youth cultural productions of speculative fiction on the themes of sustainability, technology, and social justice in mining and metropolitan communities. Truman’s latest book is Feminist Speculations and the Practice of Research-Creation: Writing Pedagogies and Intertextual Affects (2021). www.sarahetruman.com.