AustLit

'On Sunday 24 May 2020, the Rio Tinto mining company destroyed a 46,000-year-old human habitation and sacred site at Juukan Gorge in the Pilbara (‘Rio Tinto blast destroys 46,000-yearold Aboriginal heritage site’). UNESCO compared the act to the destruction of Palmyra by Islamic State. Rio was granted permission to conduct this and other blasts in 2013, under section 18 of the Aboriginal Heritage Act. Amongst artefacts found recently at the site were a 24,000- year-old bone tool and a fragment of a 4,000-year-old belt plaited from human hair. The following week, on Thursday 4 June, in a suburban street in the marginal Federal seat of EdenMonaro which had been chosen as the location for the Federal Government to announce a home renovation subsidy, the Prime Minister of Australia Scott Morrison was interrupted in midstream by a miffed home-owner asking the gaggle of politicians and press to move off his lawn as he had just had it re-seeded (‘Get off the grass, homeowner tells Scott Morrison’). They meekly complied, realising that there was a certain sanctity in this quiet Australian’s request. There is an obvious obscenity in putting together these two events but at some level they are indicative of what we were aiming to interrogate at the 2019 ASAL conference on the theme of ‘Dirt,’ which we hosted at the University of Western Australia. As the convenor, I was delighted with the way the conference drew together such a rich range of papers, discussions, addresses, readings and launches. In our thinking about a conference theme we had wanted to explore the way Australian literature and Australian literary studies were working in the contemporary moment and we settled suddenly on the concept of ‘dirt.’ The idea was proposed by my colleague, Alison Bartlett, and our organising committee were immediately taken with it as a concept. It seemed to touch on something essential—in an era sceptical of essences—and material. It reached out into the contested condition of Australian land: dirt as country, dirt as real estate. It reached out into the substance of life: dirt as biotic habitat. It reached out into the source of Australia’s material prosperity: dirt as ore (pay-dirt), dirt as agricultural growing medium (soil). And it reached out into the negative connotation that dirt carries: dirt as scandal, as secret, as abject exclusion.'

 (Introduction)