AustLit

'Jo Jones’s Falling Backwards is balanced on the notion that “Some stories are hard to tell.” The question of how best to engage with this trauma—how to look back, openly and sensitively, into the darkness of Australia’s colonial past—is at the heart of her volume. The titular image of falling backwards gestures towards this work’s primary insight. Falling is usually an involuntary act. Yet, in acknowledging that we must tumble loose from our present assumptions, we might open ourselves up to a productive disorientation. This process allows ideas about self and other, belonging and identity, to shift and emerge anew. Ultimately, Falling Backwards is a thoughtful analysis of the politics of literary form in contemporary historical fiction. Jones does not object to realism per se, but to the ethical compromises that can occur when this classically linear, unified and self-affirming mode is applied to the representation of a positivistically unknowable past. ' (Introduction)

In her entry on Eleanor Dark in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, Marivic Wyndham notes that “psychology fascinated Dark, and the bush was her physical and spiritual solace.” As Wyndham continues, “[Dark] drew compelling landscapes of the mind and of the Australian natural environment.”1 This article will discuss the dissolution of boundaries between the landscape and mindscape in Dark’s work, and it will consider how the natural world infiltrates modernist explorations of interiority in Dark’s third published novel, Return to Coolami (1936).2 In examining the convergence of modernism and ecopoetics in Dark’s prose, this essay brings together two supposedly distinct modes of critical enquiry: environmental humanities scholarship and modernism studies. By exploring the intersection of these two approaches, this reading will challenge the binary conception in which modernist texts lack any authorial, subjective, or narratorial investment in the natural world and, in so doing, bring to light a range of complementarities between ecopoetics and modernism. In Return to Coolami, the natural world inescapably affects human interiority, and Dark’s eco-modern prose precipitates a new awareness of ecological being that complicates anthropocentric worldviews.' (Introduction)