AustLit

'Taking as a starting point the metaphor of the palimpsest, this essay explores Winton’s sense of being Australian in his 2015 landscape memoir Island Home. Sarah Dillon’s distinction between the palimpsestic and the palimpsestuous, which draws on Foucault’s own differentiation between the workings of archaeology and genealogy respectively, provides the wider frame. A palimpsestic reading of Island Home along the lines of Abraham and Torok’s reflections on mourning and loss, more specifically their theory of the psychic crypt, throws light on Winton’s “inexpressible mourning” (Abraham and Torok 130) for the loss of an unshaken pre-apology Australianness. Complementarily, a palimpsestuous approach to the text evinces the emergence, among the traces of white nationalism, of a new pattern in Winton’s latest additions to his palimpsest of a nation in Island Home. Read horizontally rather than vertically, Winton’s book reveals an interest in what he calls “an emotional deepening” (168), a new sense of relatedness that acknowledges the damage done to the Indigenous population at the same time that it honours the contribution of the rightful inhabitants of Australia to the current national narrative, creating, in this way, possible openings for non-Indigenous belonging.'

Source: Abstract.