AustLit

'Drawing from a recent AustLit project on climate change fiction, this paper discusses the earliest example we have traced of climate-change fiction in post-invasion Australia: James Edmond’s short story ‘The Fool and His Inheritance’. Published in 1911, the story begins in ‘the basement of things among the coals and the debris’ and moves through the Industrial Revolution, water wars, and the Great Slaying to the ultimate destruction of the Last Man by rising oceans. Analysis of this work in the twin contexts of its writing (1911) and our reading (2019) show the seeds of modern climate-change fiction sown over a century ago, as well as revealing the complex roots of such strains of thinking as ecofascism. We bring to this analysis three discrete and distinct approaches: bibliography, environmental science, and feminist cultural studies. From our diverse disciplinary positions, we offer a tripartite analysis to critique Edmond’s story, make sense of its place in the ‘climate change fiction’ genre, trouble the genre’s origins, and explore the value of multi-disciplinary co-reading approaches to literature.'

Source: Abstract.

'Surfing is a beautiful, romantic and mostly pointless pursuit: tanned bodies riding walls of water, waves blue and glittering, grey and heaving, green and wild, sunlight diffusing through the feathering peaks, people triumphantly exiting watery tubes or falling laughing into foam. The modern version of standup surfing that emerged from Hawai’i has been popular in Australia since the early 20^th century and has become an ideal of Australian coastal life and culture. Surfers themselves have come to be symbols of contemporary health and vitality for young and old, their tanned, fit bodies defining ideas of freedom, youth, play and leisure. But what does it all mean?' 

This project follows the various threads of surfing that weave through Australian literature that deepen our understanding of how surfing has shaped our relationships to beaches, coastlines and oceans, and how surfing has contributed to a sense of being Australian.