Jane Gleeson-White

The review and analysis of Marie Cardinal's novel, 'The Words to Say' is discussed. It is one of literature's most candid expressions of the power of words and stories, and is the story of an ultimately triumphant odyssey through near-death and madness to life.

This thesis is comprised of two parts—a work of nonfiction, Six Capitals, and a scholarly dissertation, Country Manifest—which investigate the vital contemporary relationship between western economics and the natural world. Six Capitals charts the breakdown of economic measures of wealth and conceptions of nature in the face of ecological crises and the advent of the networked computer. It argues that the measures that underpin industrial capitalism and today govern the global economy are inadequate for an age of climate change. This has brought attempts to measure previously unmeasured realms of wealth, figured as ‘capital’, such as ‘natural capital’ and ‘social capital’. Six Capitals argues that this proposed new system of measurement is not enough to address the contemporary crises in nature. Instead, a new corporation and a new conception of nature in western law are required. Country Manifest examines five novels by Alexis Wright and Kim Scott published after the 1992 Mabo Deci...

Valuing country Let me count three ways by Jane Gleeson-White IT WAS READING Alexis Wright's novel Carpentaria (Giramondo, 2006) in 2007 that introduced me to the idea of 'country': land as a living being with meaning, personality, will, a temper and ancient reciprocal relationships with its people governed by law. This made sense to me. I've felt the living presence of this land and I care deeply about how we treat it. I'm especially interested in how our thinking about land shapes our behaviour towards it. And I've been preoccupied by ideas of country and two new ways of conceiving it-'natural capital' and 'rights of nature'-that seek to address the many ecological crises currently afflicting our planet.

'My mother's silence, my nation's shame' is an essay and memoir about women, children, war and trauma. It's focused on the neglected history of the Battle of Rabaul in 1942, the Japanese invasion of the capital of the Australian Mandated Territory of New Guinea. The invasion was conducted by Japan's South Seas Force, which six weeks earlier had successfully attacked Pearl Harbor and shocked the world. In stark contrast, its invasion of Rabaul has been lost from history, along with the many other violences of Australian colonial history.

In a global revolution in accounting and corporate reporting, intellectual, social and natural capital are being measured and reported in new ways. This Swinburne Leadership Dialogue discusses how accountants are changing the world. Recorded on 16 April 2015

The enormous contribution of printed books to revolutionising world society, religion, education and politics over the centuries is discussed. The threat to books through technology is highlighted, stating that its consequences remain to be seen.

Accountants are unlikely revolutionaries, but according to Jane Gleeson-White, they are leading the charge in reforming the global economy for the good of us all. An international movement has begun within the finance world, and a few innovative global companies are starting to look at how nature and society can be included in their bottom line.

I argue in this essay that Australian writer Alexis Wright’s 2006 novel Carpentaria and Kim Scott’s That Deadman Dance (2010) trouble Australia’s national identity, drawing attention to and challenging the economic project – capitalism – upon which the nation is predicated, by positing the particularity and agency of place. Both novels are notable for their generic hybridity, their foregrounding of place and their hopefulness despite their traumatic subject matter, moving beyond the form of western literary realism and postcolonial despair. For these reasons this essay contends that only an ecocritical reading of these novels, with its focus on the literary study of the relationship of human and non-human, can adequately account for the challenges they pose and the vision they offer for reconsidering the nature of and relation between human and non-human in a century facing environmental mayhem.

The circumstances surrounding the writing of a story with the theme 'to prevent contact', as the story #725 enacted by Australian performance artist Barbara Campbell as part of her durational online performance '1001 nights cast', are described. The performance is inspired by the Arabian classic 'One Thousand and One Nights' (or 'The Arabian Nights') and performed daily at sunset from June 21, 2005 to March 17, 2008.

Alexis Wright’s novel, The Swan Book (2013), set one hundred years in the future on a climate-changed Earth, introduces a new note into her fiction: that of doubt about hope. Extending postcolonial discussions of Wright’s fiction, this essay uses ecocriticism to consider Country and climate change in this novel. It argues that the element of doubt about hope, of despair even, evident in The Swan Book derives from the fact that for the first time in Wright’s fiction the essence of the land—Country—has been altered, by anthropogenically-caused climate change. Drawing on the work of ecocritics Timothy Clark and Adam Trexler, the essay argues that to engage with climate change Wright has introduced formal innovations in her novel; and more overtly figured Western culture in terms of its global manifestation, that is, as Christianity conflated with capitalism. I argue that The Swan Book writes a book of Country into the Christian and other stories of the planet, telling a new story of th...

The Mabo decision of 1992 made questions about the definition of land in Australia and its relation to humans newly significant by overturning the British legal fiction of this continent as ‘ terra nullius ’ (empty land) and acknowledged for the first time in Anglo-Australian law the validity of Aboriginal land claims. Alexis Wright’s Plains of Promise (1997) and Kim Scott’s Benang (1999) were written in the wake of this landmark decision. Both tell stories of children of the Stolen Generations and their ancient ties to their ancestral land, despite their severance from it. Critical scholarship on these novels has focused primarily on their human stories and been conducted in terms of postcolonial theory and discussions of magic realism. In this article I seek to complicate and expand these predominantly anthropocentric readings by drawing on ecocriticism to explore the central role of the non-human world in these novels. I argue they privilege an Indigenous understanding of two reg...

The following is an edited version of a conversation between Jane Gleeson-White and Geoff Harcourt about Jane's book, Double Entry. This conversation was part of UNSWriting and presented at Io Myers Studio by the Creative Practice and Research Unit in the School of the Arts and Media, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, UNSW. UNSWriting brings together writers, academics, and students of writing to facilitate the flow of ideas in and around the city, the country and internationally. The conversation was broadcast by the ABC as part of their Big Ideas program. Emeritus Geoffrey Harcourt is Visiting Professorial Fellow in the Australian School of Business, UNSW, Emeritus Reader in the History of Economic Theory, Cambridge University, Emeritus Fellow, Jesus College, Cambridge, and a leading post-Keynesian scholar.

The Mabo decision of 1992 made questions about the definition of land in Australia and its relation to humans newly significant by overturning the British legal fiction of this continent as ‘terra nullius’ (empty land) and acknowledged for the first time in Anglo-Australian law the validity of Aboriginal land claims. Alexis Wright’s Plains of Promise (1997) and Kim Scott’s Benang (1999) were written in the wake of this landmark decision. Both tell stories of children of the Stolen Generations and their ancient ties to their ancestral land, despite their severance from it. Critical scholarship on these novels has focused primarily on their human stories and been conducted in terms of postcolonial theory and discussions of magic realism. In this article I seek to complicate and expand these predominantly anthropocentric readings by drawing on ecocriticism to explore the central role of the non-human world in these novels. I argue they privilege an Indigenous understanding of two regions of the Australian continent as ‘country’ over their conception as terra nullius, a blank canvass available for colonisation and inscription by British property law and Christianity. The novels contest this concept of terra nullius by manifesting ‘country’: a vibrant, active land inextricably bound to its Indigenous people by ancient, enduring laws. They rewrite the continent as black land and suggest their protagonists’ inextricable, enduring ties to it.

Kim Scott's That Deadman Dance (2010) and Alexis Wright's Carpentaria (2006) have put the Indigenous novel at the centre of Australian literature for the first time and established these authors as two of Australia's most prominent and successful contemporary fiction writers. The novels have been widely acclaimed by scholars and critics; both won the Miles Franklin Award and were short-listed for major literary prizes. And yet both these novels trouble Australia's national identity, drawing attention to and challenging the economic project—capitalism—upon which the nation is predicated. Against the singularity of the nation and the abstracting forces of capitalism these novels posit the particularity and agency of locale, of place. This paper will argue, therefore, that only an ecocritical reading of these novels can adequately account for the challenges—formal, political, epistemological, ontological—that they pose. Through an ecocritical examination of the conflict between capitalism and regional Indigenous management embodied in these novels, I will argue that they rewrite Australia in the voice of the regional, and offer ways of reconsidering the relation of human and non-human which contest our prevailing economic models and their role in the ecological crisis. From their opening pages That Deadman Dance and Carpentaria articulate a clash between the cosmology of Indigenous Australians and that of the British who colonised the continent in 1788. I suggest that the two cosmologies can be distinguished chiefly on the basis of how they conceptualise the relation of humans to place, and that their clash derives from their differing conceptions of place, which I will define broadly as the non-human environment; 1 in one, place is enmeshed with human life, in the other, human life is raised above place and abstracted from it. The Indigenous cosmology of Australia assumes the agency of place, or the non-human world, and a custodial, mutually nourishing relationship between humans and 'Country', an Aboriginal concept which denotes land, its creatures, ancestors, law. 2 The cosmology of the colonising British is informed by Christianity, whose first book, Genesis, gives 'Man' dominion over 'Nature', and by capitalism, which extracts human interactions with nature from place through its abstracting rhetoric of profit-calculation and 'material progress'. This rhetoric makes possible the framing of land as a commodity (increasingly formalised from 1750 in Britain by the Inclosure Acts), and its subsequent exploitation for profit, and conceives of human relations with land in terms of 'commerce', 'industry', and 'development'. These settler, profit-seeking relations between humans and nature are exemplified by the whaling and mining industries portrayed in That Deadman Dance and Carpentaria respectively. It is because of this central importance of place in distinguishing these two cosmologies, and because of the novels' concern with the capitalist exploitation of two areas of regional Australia, that I argue that these novels can be examined most fruitfully using an ecocritical framework, the field of literary criticism specifically concerned with place in literature, rather than through notions of magic realism (see Joseph, Devlin-Glass, Ravenscroft), social contract theory (Brewster), modernism (Ravenscroft) or solely postcolonialism (Joseph, Devlin-Glass).

Alexis Wright’s novel, The Swan Book (2013), set one hundred years in the future on a climate-changed Earth, introduces a new note into her fiction: that of doubt about hope. Extending postcolonial discussions of Wright’s fiction, this essay uses ecocriticism to consider Country and climate change in this novel. It argues that the element of doubt about hope, of despair even, evident in The Swan Book derives from the fact that for the first time in Wright’s fiction the essence of the land—Country—has been altered, by anthropogenically-caused climate change. Drawing on the work of ecocritics Timothy Clark and Adam Trexler, the essay argues that to engage with climate change Wright has introduced formal innovations in her novel; and more overtly figured Western culture in terms of its global manifestation, that is, as Christianity conflated with capitalism. I argue that The Swan Book writes a book of Country into the Christian

Country Manifest is the unpublished dissertation from my PhD in creative writing, 'Nature in the Twenty-first Century', completed at the University of New South Wales in 2016. This is the abstract from my PhD.

This thesis is comprised of two parts—a work of nonfiction, Six Capitals, and a scholarly dissertation, Country Manifest—which investigate the vital contemporary relationship between western economics and the natural world. Six Capitals charts the breakdown of economic measures of wealth and conceptions of nature in the face of ecological crises and the advent of the networked computer. It argues that the measures that underpin industrial capitalism and today govern the global economy are inadequate for an age of climate change. This has brought attempts to measure previously unmeasured realms of wealth, figured as ‘capital’, such as ‘natural capital’ and ‘social capital’. Six Capitals argues that this proposed new system of measurement is not enough to address the contemporary crises in nature. Instead, a new corporation and a new conception of nature in western law are required.

Country Manifest examines five novels by Alexis Wright and Kim Scott published after the 1992 Mabo Decision which overturned the legal concept of terra nullius in Australia. The novels are Wright’s Plains of Promise (1997), Carpentaria (2006) and The Swan Book (2013); and Scott’s Benang: From the heart (1999) and That Deadman Dance (2010). Drawing on ecocriticism, it examines their portrayal of two conflicting conceptions of land: Aboriginal conceptions of land as ‘Country’, a vibrant ecological system with agency to which humans belong; and western constructions of land as inert property owned by humans to be developed for profit. It argues that the novels privilege the former over the latter understanding of land and in so doing rewrite the continent as ‘black land’. Through its focus on ‘black land’ this thesis reintroduces ‘landscape’ to Australian literary criticism and shows it to be of new significance in the twenty-first century, and argues this has implications for a planet faced with climate change and other ecological crises.

Six Capitals and Country Manifest are related by their mutual engagement with questions about the value of the natural world and human conceptions of it. In both economic constructions of nature are shown to be damaging to the natural world and complicit in contemporary ecological crises.

'Country Manifest' is the unpublished dissertation from my PhD in creative writing, 'Nature in the Twenty-First Century', completed at the University of New South Wales in 2016. The creative work, 'Six Capitals', was published in 2014 and 2020. This following is the abstract from the completed PhD.

This thesis is comprised of two parts—a work of nonfiction, Six Capitals, and a scholarly dissertation, Country Manifest—which investigate the vital contemporary relationship between western economics and the natural world. Six Capitals charts the breakdown of economic measures of wealth and conceptions of nature in the face of ecological crises and the advent of the networked computer. It argues that the measures that underpin industrial capitalism and today govern the global economy are inadequate for an age of climate change. This has brought attempts to measure previously unmeasured realms of wealth, figured as ‘capital’, such as ‘natural capital’ and ‘social capital’. Six Capitals argues that this proposed new system of measurement is not enough to address the contemporary crises in nature. Instead, a new corporation and a new conception of nature in western law are required.

Country Manifest examines five novels by Alexis Wright and Kim Scott published after the 1992 Mabo Decision which overturned the legal concept of terra nullius in Australia. The novels are Wright’s Plains of Promise (1997), Carpentaria (2006) and The Swan Book (2013); and Scott’s Benang: From the heart (1999) and That Deadman Dance (2010). Drawing on ecocriticism, it examines their portrayal of two conflicting conceptions of land: Aboriginal conceptions of land as ‘Country’, a vibrant ecological system with agency to which humans belong; and western constructions of land as inert property owned by humans to be developed for profit. It argues that the novels privilege the former over the latter understanding of land and in so doing rewrite the continent as ‘black land’. Through its focus on ‘black land’ this thesis reintroduces ‘landscape’ to Australian literary criticism and shows it to be of new significance in the twenty-first century, and argues this has implications for a planet faced with climate change and other ecological crises.

Six Capitals and Country Manifest are related by their mutual engagement with questions about the value of the natural world and human conceptions of it. In both economic constructions of nature are shown to be damaging to the natural world and complicit in contemporary ecological crises.