Cosmological Readings of Contemporary Australian Literature

Front matter

COSMOLOGICAL READINGS OF CONTEMPORARY AUSTRALIAN LITERATURE

UNSETTLING THE ANTHROPOCENE

Cosmological Readings of Contemporary Australian Literature

Preface

This book is based on a thesis that I wrote jointly at Monash University (Melbourne, Australia) and Goethe University (Frankfurt, Germany). When conceiving of this project, my preoccupation with the environmental crisis was less visceral in my own life. As an urbanite, apart from warmer summers, signs of climate change seemed to be more apparent in faraway places (the Arctic, shorelines, rainforests). Yet during the years of writing, this changed; I experienced immediate environmental disruptions and impacts on my health. This included not only extreme heatwaves on both continents, but, most notably, Australia’s Black Summer of 2019/2020 and the subsequent pandemic. During the catastrophic bush fires, Melbourne was engulfed in toxic smoke for weeks that neither our rental home nor the university office could effectively shelter us from. And as the coronavirus pandemic unfolded (which has been linked to shrinking sanctuaries for wildlife), I found myself finishing the thesis under the difficult circumstances of Melbourne’s “Stage 4” lockdown.

Over the course of this project, I observed that media coverage about climate change increased in both countries, Australia and Germany. I experienced the change of the topic from an ‘environmental concern’ to one of our generation’s most feared realities. But I also witnessed, or participated in, the emergence of global social movements, such as Fossil Free Universities, Fridays for Future and Bla(c)k Lives Matter. These movements have given me connection, perspective and a deeper understanding of the intricate entanglements of social and environmental justice.

With this changing reality, I was preoccupied with how to make sense of the planetary crisis, how to keep living in a world with daily news of doom, how other people and other cultures to my own perceive it, how to be ‘response-able,’ how to shape it. I was wondering about names we have for our surroundings and our times—nature, environment, ecosystem, climate emergency, the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene drew my attention because this concept entailed time and space, and an entire battleground for the origin story of this global predicament. During my quest to understand the debate, I encountered a term that had only been at the margin of my perception: cosmos. While it is difficult to trace all the reasons “cosmos” fascinated me, I xii Preface can name a few distinct characteristics that emerged out of my research: cosmos does not entail a centre (like “environment'—the Old French environer meaning “to surround, enclose, encircle”); nor does it connote an outside to culture, like ‘nature’ or ‘wilderness’; nor does it name just one element of our surroundings, like ‘land’ or ‘water’. Cosmos takes a wide perspective; it encompasses outer space as well as stories within planet Earth. Cosmology connotes culturally specific understandings linked to specific places, as well as various myths and origin stories across cultures. Cosmos is a concept both of the sciences (a branch of physics) and of the humanities. The more I engaged with ‘cosmos,’ the more revealing it became, as it encompasses the big and small, the old and new, the near and far: it was wide enough to stretch my understanding, and distinct enough to keep it grounded.

As I was also fascinated by a specific place that was not my own (I had set foot in Australia only in my late twenties as a student), but that I grew to love, cosmological thought became helpful to understand various perspectives on Country (the Indigenous Australian concept, outlined in the Introduction) within this nation-continent.

Yet, as I aim to show in this book, foregrounding ‘cosmos’ is not about fashionable terms, about what concepts are now ‘in’ and ‘out,’ about a ‘hip’ new theory that changes everything. It encompasses ideas that—whether we call them cosmological or not—seem to exist in all cultures and places around the globe, albeit to various degrees. Such ideas are revived in times of planetary disruptions: the sense of an alive, communicative, more-than-human world; a meta-discursive “good” order and chaos that has enabled life to flourish; a perspective that puts the human species in relation to other species, elements, forces. In this sense, “cosmos” is not only a matter of fashion, nor discourse, nor history, but it is something essential, existential. (I thank my friend, Dafna Shetreet, for this wonderful observation and phrasing.) Cosmologies have stood the test of time. They transform, but they also remain.

Acknowledgements

The writing of this project was financially enabled by the MIPRS and MGR scholarships of Monash University, and the DFG-Walter Benjamin postdoctoral fellowship in Germany allowed me to rework the thesis for this book. It was conceived within the Joint PhD programme between Goethe and Monash University, but it was largely written in Melbourne, on the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nations, who never ceded their sovereignty. I pay my respects to all Indigenous peoples, to Elders past, present and emerging, and feel grateful for having been able to work in such a beautiful place.

I would also like to acknowledge that, as a white international student largely funded by Australian scholarships, I have had unearned privilege, and am implicated in the networks of colonial power that still shape Australia today, as well as in the environmental issues I write about. I have tried to write from this self-reflexive position, bring myself into the research where possible, and pay credit to the First Nations writers whose works I explore here, as well as the academics, artists and activists that taught me. My exchange semesters at Melbourne University as a postgraduate student were particularly formative in this context, where I attended life-changing seminars by Tony Birch, Lilly Brown and Genevieve Grieves, and Philip Morrissey.

I would like to thank my PhD supervisors, Sue Kossew and Frank Schulze- Engler, for their invaluable guidance, warmth and encouragement throughout, without which the thesis would not have taken this shape. It was an honour to work with you. I would also like to thank all examiners of the thesis, Tony Hughes D’Aeth, Astrid Erll and Graham Huggan, for their important feedback that has shaped this book. My thanks also to the Monash milestone committees, especially Mridula Chakraborty, for the always kind and constructive critique; as well as the defense committee at Goethe University, especially Vinzenz Hediger and Johannes Vólz, for their helpful comments during the viva. Thank you to Jennie Wawrzinek for the encouragement to pitch the thesis, as well as for the invaluable mentorship during my MA, which made so much possible. Gratitude also to the anonymous peer-reviewers of the book. Thank you to the series editor, Thomas Bristow, for the enthusiasm and helpful suggestions, Drew Stanley for the editing, as well as to Grace Harrison and Matthew Shobbrook for their kind correspondence. Other chance encounters at conferences have really helped push xiv Acknowledgements this work in the right direction—thank you to Jennifer Hamilton for suggesting I read Carrie Tiffany’s Everyman’s Rules of Scientific Living, to Cameron Muir for gifting me your book The Broken Promise of Agricultural Progress, and to Joni Adamson for being so approachable and bringing to my attention your co-edited volume, Keywords for Environmental Studies. Thank you to the slow reading group ‘Ecofeminist Fridays’, convened by Hayley Singer, which taught me so much about the field. Thank you also to the Doctoral Colloquium members in Frankfurt for their convivial feedback on the project over time. I am grateful to all my teachers, professors and colleagues that have influenced this project indirectly, among them Herr Pearson, Zeno Ackermann, Pavan Malreddy and Therese Davis; through your kindness you have made academia seem possible.

Many friends have accompanied me over the years of writing this and have made the time especially worthwhile. Their good spirits, everyday presence and lucid comments at various stages of this project were crucial for me: much gratitude to Lauren Pavli and Ruth McHugh-Dillon for clairvoyant support at the early stages, Matilda Grogan for being my PhD (travel) companion from start to finish, Michelle Stork for being there no matter where life took us, Dafna Shetreet for teaching me so much about writing (and more), Simon Troon for inspiration to keep going, and the C7 Postgraduate Office community, especially Emma McNicol and Bonnie Reid, for making this work fun (at times). For their keen editors’ eyes at the end of the PhD I thank Julia Velten, Gazala Anver, Subhadra Mistry and Bek Spies.

Last but not least, thank you to my family for their unconditional love and babysitting, without which this book would not have been possible. Most of all, thank you to my partner Samuel Mitchell—I could not have done this without you!

I am grateful to the Open Access Publication Fund and the Johanna Quandt Young Academy the Department of New English Literatures and Cultures of Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, as well as the DFG (German Research Foundation) for their generous funding that enables this book to be accessible free of charge.

A small part of this research has been previously published, but it has been revised for this book:

e Bartha-Mitchell, Kathrin. “Apocalyptic Climate Fiction in the Third Media Revolution: Briohny Doyle’s The Island Will Sink.” Australian Literary Studies, vol. 37, no. 2, 2022.

A preliminary version of my conceptual framework (that uses different literary texts) is:

e Bartha, Kathrin. “Cosmos vs. Anthropocene: Multi-scalar Praxis for Socio-environmental Justice with adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy.” Narratives of Scale in the Anthropocene, edited by Gabriele Dirbeck and Philip Hiipkes. London and New York: Routledge, 2021, pp. 177-92.

Kosmos

Who includes diversity and is Nature, Who is the amplitude of the earth, and the coarseness and sexuality of the earth, and the great charity of the earth and the equilibrium also

‘Kosmos’ aims to capture something seemingly impossible: the abundance of nature, earth, universe. Yet calling ‘cosmos’ a concept does not seem to entirely do it justice. More than a cognitive idea, it comprises a vast array of individual, cultural and more-than-human phenomena. It includes procreation and evolution, a sympathetic order, mysterious soul, the planetary and the universe, and ethics and politics.

That may seem like a lot for a little word to bear,'* but the ancient Greek xóguos (cosmos) means order, world or beauty/adornment and was conceived in conjunction with its twin, ydo¢ (chaos). Cosmos did not describe the universe in general, but the universe understood as a unified system of beauty and order, which arises out of chaos (Walls, 2016, 47). It conveyed the idea that the universe appears ordered and beautiful through reciprocity with humans. Today, however, this seemingly simple idea has many different meanings in our vocabulary. In common use, ‘cosmos’ refers to the universe, and to the stars and planets beyond Earth, while ‘cosmology’ (‘the discourse about the world-order’) refers to both creation myths and astronomy, a branch of physics. Scientific cosmology involves examining the origin and evolution of the universe—the large-scale properties of the universe as a whole. Recently, the term has been resurrected as a key word for the Anthropocene, our new geological epoch, the so-called ‘Age of Humans,’ expressing the dramatic environmental changes currently happening to our planet as a result of human influences (further explicated later). Literary scholar Laura Dassow Walls has made the crucial proposition that as “the oldest ecological vision of our planet,” cosmos is capable of undoing

DOI: 10.4324/9781003312154-1 This chapter has been made available under a CC-BY 4.0 license.

the harmful separation between “culture and nature, human and environment, mind and matter, intellect and emotion” that the Anthropocene designates (2016, 47).

How can we apply the notion of ‘cosmos’ if it presents such a slippery trans-disciplinary term that combines the vast scales of the terrestrial and celestial, the universal and particular, scientific insights, the culturally specific as well as the transcultural? Cosmological Readings of Contemporary Australian Literature: Unsettling the Anthropocene defines ‘cosmology’ as a narrative of wholeness and interconnectedness grounded in the planetary ecosystem that both the sciences and humanities have a role in revealing. Narratives are usually thought of as human creations, but ‘cosmos’ operates at the intersection of human construction and material reality: eco-systemic order is not merely a narrative, just as climate change is not ‘only’ a story, but a material state of the world. In fact, narrative and cosmos are linked in important ways: cosmos conveys a meta-discursive order that encompasses the more-than human world. Despite the focus on order, cosmos and cosmology also include chaos and the unknown—as observers, we are inside the cosmos, our knowledge is thus necessarily partial. In line with the many scholarly contributions discussed, cosmos is understood as a constructive idea that is generative of an ethical discourse. It is employed to argue for the need to recognise that everyone and everything is interconnected, and that every constituent of an ecology has their rightful place in a co-evolutionary unfolding.

Reading six contemporary Australian literary texts, Cosmological Readings proposes a modern, transcultural and (dis)enchanted understanding of cosmos in the era of the Anthropocene. Rather than embracing the Anthropocene concept and its inherent decline-narrative (as in ‘humans have destroyed nature’),!” I argue that it is highly productive to pay attention to cosmological visions within creative fiction—both for coming to terms with the planetary crisis and for reading creative texts of a particular culture. In contrast to dualistic constructions of human mastery over ‘nature,’* cosmos evokes human entanglement with, and emplacement within, an ecosystem. The emphasis on the contemporariness of the cosmological worldview includes, valorises and revitalises ancient earthbound practices, worldviews and religions, while also illuminating that such cosmologies are highly modern.” The adjective ‘transcultural’ expresses that cosmological thought likely exists in most cultures—albeit to various degrees—and ‘(dis)enchanted’ suggests the inevitably dialectic nature of the endeavour (that I revisit in part I): one that seeks to enchant anew, without the naive sense that a holistic imagination is always unproblematic and will fix everything. As this is a work of literary criticism, the cosmological reading lens developed in this study, called ‘literary cosmology,’ aims to stress the importance of literature and narrative for finding ways out of the Anthropocene.

Each part is underpinned by one of the broader socio-environmental issues that the Anthropocene debate addresses: current concerns of industrialised farming and mining as linked to the history of colonisation and exploitation; the problematic narrative of human mastery of nature as reflected in contemporary questions of technological advancement; and the need for Indigenous, refugee and diasporic sovereignty as linked to broader concerns of environmental justice and custodianship. Yet, by means of cosmological readings, each chapter also goes beyond current predicaments to show how the selected creative texts relate to human co-becoming with the environment, as well as to justice. Key for this understanding of cosmos is the transformative potential of ‘goodness,’ of a sympathetic order and chaos (further explicated below), despite and beyond the Anthropocene prognosis of decline.

‘Cosmos’ is employed as an extension to the term ‘environment.’ As historians Libby Robin, Sverker Sórlin and Paul Warde have stressed, “environment’ may by now be a “politically exhausted” concept (Robin et al., 2018, 173). Although encapsulating the idea of a complex whole, unity and transdisciplinary knowledge exchange, Robin et al. point out that “environment’ is still widely associated with the notion of a ‘passive nature’ and is often associated with natural resources and their exploitation. This rings true if we think of, for instance, corporate greenwashing. Instead of aiming to replace the word ‘environment,’ the point is that a focus on ‘cosmos’ may shift viewpoints and inform constructive, fresh understandings that go beyond the harmful nature/culture divide. This approach is reflected in my selection of creative fiction: while the texts were chosen for their potential to wrestle with some aspect of the Anthropocene, they would not necessarily stand out as ‘environmental literature’ or climate fiction. In fact, only one of the six works discussed can be regarded to belong to the climate fiction genre and explicitly mentions the Anthropocene. Reading against the grain, my focus on cosmos seeks to broaden the notion of what is regarded as an environmental text, and open up new avenues for understanding ‘nature’ as a term in literary studies. This is not to say that terms such as nature and environment should be banned, but to stress that they are always already cultural—something that cosmos may capture more aptly.

Where the term environment may be ‘tired,’ the concept of cosmos provokes reciprocal meaning-making between humans and the more-than-human world, a reorientation towards materialism, and, as I argue, a new set of questions for cultural and literary studies. Moreover, a modern, contemporary and transcultural sense of cosmos explored here, one that is inevitably shaped by the planetary crisis, aims to capture a certain zeitgeist that is attentive to the vitality, agency and intentionality of the more-than-human world. Although forms of pagan, animist, anthropomorphising sense-making likely exist universally, this understanding may now be widely travelling—perhaps more than ever before. While the terms ‘environment’ and ‘Anthropocene’ entered the humanities through the sciences,* cosmos has renewed valency, I argue, precisely because it conjures up the entanglement of cu/ture and nature. Cosmos evokes distributed and collective agency (understood as intentionality, will, purpose), which has been conceived in various cultures across the globe. Although my inquiry pays particular attention to already existing cosmologies—in this case, Indigenous Australian ones—a modern and transcultural conception of cosmos helps explore how notions of cosmos also partake in a globalised modernity and cannot simply be deemed pre-modern. This contemporary sense of cosmos allows me to apply cosmological readings to authors of diverse origins and cultures in a ‘(post)colonising’ nation (Moreton- Robinson, 2003)? who often write in complex hybrid cultures. Paying attention to the potential of transcultural literary works to foster the idea of ‘cosmos’ can be more attentive, then, to authors who may be situated in Australia, but who do not all share the same history of Imperial colonialism, such as Behrouz Boochani’s (2018) work. As I discuss in chapter 7, his remarkable work No Friend but the Mountains evokes a sense of a benevolent cosmos at odds with the violence and arbitrariness of the prison industrial complex, which renders strength and perspective in the midst of oppression.

My interest in cosmos participates in a particular cosmological discourse that has flourished in the Environmental Humanities since roughly the 2000s. More precisely, Cosmological Readings draws on three main fields: transcultural studies, transdisciplinary cosmological discourse, and Ecocriticism— especially Material and Anthropocene Ecocriticism (these fields are outlined in part I). The larger goal of this study is to reflect on the contemporary interest in the Anthropocene and cosmos, and to enrich the vocabulary within and beyond the Environmental Humanities.

Why Look at Cosmos in the Australian Anthropocene?

Although cosmos is understood as a transculturally circulating idea, cultural particularities are crucial for this study. In relation to the Anthropocene, Australia is an especially interesting test case for exploring ideas of cosmos because this settler-colonial nation incorporates a complex social fabric of diverse voices, some of which are associated with Western and non-Western origins. While Australia has been the locus of a long tradition of Indigenous land and water ethics,€ it is also the third biggest exporter of fossil fuels in the world, and it has the highest extinction rates of mammals on the planet.’ This book engages with these contrasting cosmological legacies in Australia— colonial and Indigenous—and considers their relevance for a modern multicultural ‘trans-nation’ (Huggan, 2007) in the era of the Anthropocene. Yet this is not to suggest that Indigenous Australians can be essentialised into being especially “environmental”; indeed, the stereotype of ‘The Ecological Indian’ has long been problematised.? Keeping in mind that Indigenous cultures are still marginalised and often violently suppressed across the globe, however, it is important to emphasise that many Indigenous cultures engage in particularly strong cosmological understandings—in the sense of the cultural characteristic of rootedness in the land that is shared by many Indigenous populations of settler-colonies. As I will show, Indigenous worldviews carry particular importance in the context of the Anthropocene: many Indigenous communities across the world are spearheading environmental movements and are continuously fighting for land rights and sovereignty. Although theories of the cosmos have been present in creative outlets transculturally, then, trans-Indigenous (Allen, 2012) worldviews that centre care for places and people are increasingly coming into focus in the context of the planetary crisis.

The Indigenous Australian principle of “Care for Country’ is crucial here: a “unique tradition of philosophical and practical ecology that has been espoused and practised by Indigenous Australians and Islanders for centuries” (“Australia Pacific Observatory,” 2019), Country designates a complex whole, a collective, encompassing environment (such as land, water, sky) and social relations (human and more-than-human). As the oldest continuing cosmology on Earth, Country espouses a worldview that contrasts with the colonial legacy of prioritising resource extraction, economisation, and instrumentalisation of the land over sustainability and socio-eco-systemic health (“Australia Pacific Observatory,” 2019). Scholar and Kombumerri Elder Mary Graham has argued that the basic precepts of Aboriginal philosophy can be summed up by two premises: the notion that the land is the law, and the idea that “[y]ou are not alone in the world” (2008, 181). As Graham writes: “The land, and how we treat it, is what determines our human-ness. Because land is sacred and must be looked after, the relation between people and land becomes the template for society and social relations” (182). Graham here suggests that Indigenous cosmologies are profoundly shaped by the relationship to land, a bond which serves as a “template” for society. This “collective responsibility to land,” as Graham continues, “is vital if people are even to attempt to transcend ego and possessiveness; the point is that land always comes before ego and possessions” (188). The notion of ‘law’ here suggests a sympathetic cosmic order that is larger and more important than individual profit. Based on her studies with Aboriginal people, anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose has defined Country as a ‘nourishing terrain,’ borrowing this term from the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (Rose, 1996, 7). As she writes: “Country is a place that gives and receives life. Not just imagined or represented, it is lived in and lived with” (7). She continues:

Country in Aboriginal English is not only a common noun but also a proper noun. People talk about country in the same way that they would talk about a person, they speak to country, sing to country, visit country, worry about country, feel sorry for country, and long for country. [...] Country is not a generalised or undifferentiated type of place, such as one might indicate with terms like “spending a day in the country” or “going up the country.” Rather, country is a living entity with a yesterday, today and tomorrow, with a consciousness, and a will toward life. Because of this richness, country is home, and peace; nourishment for body, mind, and spirit; heart’s ease. (7)

In this way, Country could perhaps be described as a collective person, as it consists of, as Rose notes, “people, animals, plants, Dreamings, underground, earth, soils, minerals and waters, surface water, and air” (7), but nevertheless it is referred to as an entity in itself.

Regarding the Anthropocene debate and its search for the origins of the planetary crisis, Australia is again a particularly striking case to examine. As one of the later places to be colonised by the British Empire, the continent has seen dramatic changes to cultures and land use that happened at a comparatively vast scale and in accelerated time. The example of Australia could therefore be understood to function like a magnifying glass for seeing processes that have led to the Anthropocene. What took centuries in Europe and elsewhere, happened over a mere few decades in Australia. Considering the legacy of colonialism and racial capitalism, an understanding of the Anthropocene predicaments is perhaps more legible in Australia than elsewhere. Kate Rigby (2015) has noted that Australia is shaped by a “profound disjunction between the landscape memories, environmental attitudes, conventional life-ways of the predominantly European (and mainly British) colonists who arrived in the late 18% century and the Indigenous cultures and environmental conditions that they encountered” (22). The colonial disjunction, as Rigby points out, expresses a particularly strong nature/culture dualism, in which Australian ‘nature’ is something to be overcome and dominated by ‘brave’ settlers (10). This idea is aptly captured in the colonial figure of the “Aussie battler, struggling to make a life for himself in a land of promise but beset by droughts, fires, floods, poor soils, foot rot, and sundry plant and animal pests” (Rigby, 2015, 10). Rigby (2015, 11) describes this stereotype as having effects on current climate policy, as it expresses a culturally specific type of “ecophobia’ (Estok, 2009).

The ‘clash’ of environmental attitudes in Australia can be seen in the contemporary run to reduce greenhouse gases, known locally as ‘climate wars.’ Referring to its environmental politics, Australia has been called a ‘rogue nation’ that disproportionally contributes to climate change by having the highest CO, emissions per capita in the world and by being the largest exporter of coal and liquid gas on the planet (McKibben, 2016).'° Since 1996, successive governments have subverted international agreements on climate change, and during the 2022 COP27 UN conference in Egypt, Australia was ranked “a very low performing country” in the climate change performing index, ranking 55th out of 63 countries on climate change policies, behind the US and China (Adam Morton, 2021). It was marked down for having “no policies or national plan on phasing out coal and gas mining”; instead, there are plans for expanding these industries by 5%, which is incompatible with the global 1.5°C target (Adam Morton, 2021). In 2022, voters removed the conservative administration, which had subsidised fossil fuels and was grouped alongside Saudi Arabia and Russia as blocking climate action (Adam Morton, 2021). While the current Labor government has installed a range of Green and independent Members of Parliament, and aims to host the 2026 UN climate summit, it is also considering whether to open hundreds of new fossil fuel projects that are, needless to say, antithetical to limiting global warming.

This is despite the continent’s unique geophysical properties and vulnerability: Australia’s weather patterns cross a number of climate zones, and its nonannual cycles are associated with the El Niño Southern Oscillation and the Indian Ocean Dipole, making it prone to extreme patterns, such as droughts, fires and flooding rain (Rigby, 2015, 7). As climate scientists Andrew Stock et al. (2017) point out, although Australia is already characterised by unruly weather patterns, with the current climatic changes in air and sea, extreme weather is becoming more frequent and places Australia on the front line of climate heating impacts. This observation was confirmed during the catastrophic Black Summer of 2019/2020, in which the continent faced an unprecedented fire “inferno” that could not be controlled for months. Exacerbated by a severe drought and record heatwaves, the fires tore through regions that had never been prone to bushfires (such as rainforests) and raged for longer than ever before (Griffiths, 2020). Thirty-three people died, an estimated half a billion animals perished, over 3000 homes and 7000 outbuildings were destroyed, more than 10 million hectares burnt; and thick hazardous smoke enveloped towns and big cities for weeks, including Australia’s biggest cities, Sydney and Melbourne. As more than 20% of the continent’s forests burned, scientists consider the event to be “unprecedented globally” (Cox, 2020).

The fact that Australia is both a name for a nation and a continent— however porous the boundaries may be—is also relevant for this book, as it reflects both the cultural imaginary as well as the physical properties of the country/continent. Vilashini Cooppan has argued for the continent as a particularly striking unit for comparative and world literary studies, as it is “both like and unlike nation, region, area, globe, planet” (2015, 8). Continents evoke deep-time and the more-than-human:

Continents are bigger, older, and deeper than human scales of time [...] There is a different kind of pathos to continents: the fall from unity into difference, the original Pangea to the subterranean explosions that splintered it, the slow drift, the ancient settlings, the land bridges across which humans and their cultures moved outward from their African cradle. (9)

Fittingly for an inquiry into the Anthropocene, then, Cooppan reminds us that Australia is a designation for both an imagined and an existing continent, which is able to provide the perspective of the longue dureé, the “non-anthropocentric, non-national, pre-imperial history of place” (11).

Moreover, Indigenous place-ethics, the colonial experience and the geophysical properties of the land led to the earliest critiques of human supremacy (constructed against nature), so that Australia exhibits a remarkable tradition of environmental thought and activism: not only did the nation witness the formation of the world’s first green party—the United Tasmania Group was formed in 1972—but it was also home to the first articulations of the Environmental Humanities, first called the “Ecological Humanities” by its founding scholars.!! Today, the nation evinces a particularly strong activist tradition among the younger generations: the school strike for climate found an early echo in Australia, and youth organisations such as the AYCC (Australian Youth Climate Coalition) and SEED (the Indigenous Youth Climate Coalition) have been leading mobilisers for grassroots campaigns, protests and student education across the country. Indigenous Australian writer and historian Tony Birch notes that “the relationship between colonialism, capitalism and environmental degradation and a consequent link to climate change is unambiguous,” and that a “genuinely equitable” exchange between Indigenous knowledge and wider Australia is needed, based on the values of humility, place-care and community (2016, 361).

Cosmological Readings investigates such contrasting environmental attitudes through creative fiction and explores the power of language and the imagination to shape attitudes, behaviours and the culture at large. While the perspective from Australia can be seen as providing a unique viewpoint for coming to terms with the Anthropocene, it is also, of course, exemplary for how settler-colonial countries relate to the environment, and expressive of the trajectory of many wealthy nations.