Kangaroos and Predators in Recent Australian Fiction: A Post-Pastoral Reading

When dusk falls in regional Australia, it is common to see mobs of kangaroos ranging in paddocks and on golf courses. They lounge about in family groups in the shade of remnant eucalyptus trees and share the pasture of bovines. They seem peaceful and idyllic, with their wide, dark eyes, cute joeys, and unique gait, and they appear to have close family bonds. They are the most visible and commonplace of Australia's unique animals. Despite all the charm of these awe-inspiring creatures and their status as a national icon, Australian writers perpetually kill them off. Recent Australian fiction has featured native animals that gain substantial narrative agency. Stephen Daisley's Coming Rain (2015) and Louis Nowra's Into That Forest (2012) undertake extended narratives from the perspective of native animals. The dingo and the thylacine, respectively, are given voice in fiction by these works. Domestic, nonnative animals in Australia have also received serious treatment recently by authors such as Eva Hornung and Michelle de Kretser. But Australian stories are less sympathetic toward the kangaroo. One appears struggling in a rabbit trap, doomed and dying in Charlotte Wood's The Natural Way of Things (2015), Tim Winton has one killed on the road, dissected and fed to dogs in Breath (2008). There is an inventory of such examples. Serious treatment of the extinct thylacine abounds, but the kangaroo is often represented as roadkill and dog food. The expendable nature of the kangaroo is a widely held view in Australia, so it is little wonder that this attitude is articulated in our fiction; but it is a bitter irony that the creature that defines us to the rest of the world is perpetually under siege, in life and in literature.

Placing the natural world at the center of literary criticism is a contemporary reading strategy that offers new insights into representations of place and identity and particularly useful in contested landscapes such as Australia. This resonates with what Terry Gifford calls a "post-pastoral" reading, and he applies this concept most often to poetry, including that of Judith Wright. He offers an explanation of post-pastoral: "being aware of some of the problematics of the pastoral, of pushing into the complexities of celebration and responsibility, of being a part of nature and yet uneasy with relationships of ownership and exploitation" ("Judith"). He follows with six conditions for identifying a post-pastoral work, all of which apply to this study. The most relevant of these involve experiencing "awe" at the natural world, leading to humility and using human conscience "as a tool to heal our troubled relationship with our natural home." Gifford examines Wright's poetry through this framework and focuses on the relationship between postcolonial themes and nature. His conclusion raises the question, "Why has Australia's exceptional nature figured only trivially in the rhetoric of nationhood?" ("Judith"). This study raises a companion question in relation to the kangaroo and a range of recent Australian fiction. Issues of colonial legacy still have strong repercussions for the relationship between settler Australia and the natural world. Post-pastoral reading of works produced by Australian authors yields opportunity for unraveling widely held attitudes that rarely attract sustained attention.

The relationship between settler Australia and the kangaroo has had an interesting trajectory. William Dampier's 1699 exploration of the west coast yielded observations that "the land animals were 'only a sort of raccoon … with very short fore legs,' and he says they 'go jumping' and were good meat, which would show that he met with a small species of kangaroo" (Lee). Dampier's confusion and wonder was echoed by later explorers on the east coast, including Joseph Banks, who was captivated by the creature. Indeed, the first image of the kangaroo presented in London following Cook's voyage of "discovery" was the now iconic painting by George Stubbs, The Kongouro from New Holland, which was painted in Britain after the return of Banks, who commissioned the work. Banks's descriptions, rough sketches, and the skin of a dead kangaroo that he procured during the voyage provided the...