Uncertain Waters and Irony in Australian Settler Literatures

Bibliographic Data

ID3914281
AuthorsTeresa Shewry (University of California, Santa Barbara), Philip Steer (0000-0002-0728-374X, Massey University)
Year2024
Volume16
Issue2
Pages351-370
Publication date2024-07-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueEnvironmental Humanities (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2201-1919 • E-ISSN: 2201-1919
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/22011919-11150139
OpenAlexW4400683150
LanguageEN
References cited35

Critics are increasingly recognizing the presence of irony in environmental cultures, often stressing its ability to highlight disjunctions between the individual's convictions and their compromised behaviors. This article extends this work by taking up the relationship between irony and settler-colonial imaginaries in writings about unpredictable bodies of water. Focusing on settler writing in Australia, the article juxtaposes nineteenth-century author Henry Lawson and contemporary novelist Jane Rawson to argue that irony constitutes a form of environmental knowledge, calling up norms and hierarchies regarding water but also creating openings toward waters that cannot be given meaning. Lawson's writings about ephemeral rivers and lakes stress their divergence from metropolitan ideas of water's continuity, presence, and visibility. Largely ignoring Indigenous peoples' relationships with water, his ironies of overturned expectations and norms make contact with but also disparage water in unfamiliar forms. By contrast, Rawson's A Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists (2013) employs irony to grasp how climate-changed floodwater disrupts settler norms founded upon the erasure of floodplains and of Indigenous and colonial histories of urban rivers. Juxtaposing Rawson with Lawson illuminates an ongoing need to be cautious about the ideals that irony may evoke in response to changing and uncertain waters. At the same time, irony provides a multivalent tool to critically address what Mark Rifkin calls "settler common sense," to glimpse the persistence of Indigenous knowledge and perspectives, and to acknowledge occluded forms of environmental agency

Irony · Linguistics · Political science · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History · Philosophy · Water Governance and Infrastructure

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