“Make the Place Feel like Home Again”

This article examines Tim Winton’s Shallows as a novel of unsettled dwelling, arguing that its representations of domestic, coastal and shell-like spaces articulate a specifically settler-colonial form of existential angst. While Shallows has often been read through ecocritical frameworks that emphasise environmental activism, whaling and ecological ethics, this article shifts attention to the spatial and affective dimensions of home, intimacy and belonging. Drawing on Gaston Bachelard’s phenomenology of the house and the shell, and reworking it through feminist spatial theory (Elizabeth Grosz) and settler-colonial scholarship (Lisa Slater, Simone Bignall, Lorenzo Veracini), the article reads Winton’s dwellings as anxious enclosures that promise refuge and expose the instability of settler emplacement. Through a close reading of the book’s central characters, Daniel, Queenie and Cleve, it shows how feelings of emptiness, loneliness and anxious proximity emerge not simply as psychological states but as spatialised affects produced by the unresolved conditions of colonial occupation. The article concludes by reading Queenie’s reimagined relation to place as a tentative movement beyond the contracted shell of settler domesticity towards a more open, non-possessive mode of inhabitation.

Colonialism · Existentialism · Feeling · Loneliness · Phenomenology (philosophy) · Poetics · Reading (process) · Relation (database) · Scholarship · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Short Stories in Global Literature