Abstract
Through a reading of Australian non-Indigenous author Tim Winton and his novel The Riders, this essay seeks to shake to the very roots white-settler understandings of identity and belonging. The essay treads respectfully into the field of Australian identity, recognizing that Indigenous people’s ancient and sacred relationship with country and the formation of treaties with the nation, are now rightfully central on national agendas. However, this essay asks the following question: what are the ontological grounds upon which respectful dialogue between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians might occur, after such violent and traumatic history? The essay explores the possible grounds for an evolving dialogue, one which will be necessarily intersectional: (post)colonial, spiritual/ontological and material. Further, the essay identifies “spirituality” and “ontology” as broad denominators for religion, speculating on a (post)colonial ontology which centers on home and (un)belonging. White-settler Australians, this essay argues, must confront deep ontological issues of brokenness if they are to take part meaningfully in future dialogues. Scully, the protagonist of The Riders, finds himself far from home and stripped of almost all the markers of his former identity: as Australian, as husband, and as a man in control of his life. The novel probes (un)belonging for this individual descendent of colonial Australia, as trauma engulfs him. Further, it will be argued that The Riders prefigures the wider, potentially positive aspects of a post-colonial ontology of (un)belonging, as white-settler Australians come to enunciate a broken history, and ontological instability. Such recognition, this essay argues, is a preliminary step towards a fuller post-colonial dialogue in Australia.
Highlights
The Riders, and the entire fiction oeuvre of Australian novelist Tim Winton, has garnered more than its share of controversy
Some critical accounts see Winton as “too Christian”, a non-Indigenous author at a time when white Australia should perhaps be listening to Indigenous voices
The Riders is the only Winton novel set outside Australia, in a cold, wintry Irish landscape that is alien, but uncannily connected to Scully, the white Australian protagonist
Summary
The Riders, and the entire fiction oeuvre of Australian novelist Tim Winton, has garnered more than its share of controversy. The Riders is the only Winton novel set outside Australia, in a cold, wintry Irish landscape that is alien, but uncannily connected to Scully, the white Australian protagonist With this setting, Winton is able to explore questions of dispossession and migrancy in ways that echo, but are necessarily very different to, Indigenous concerns about dispossession and belonging. Such differences cannot be addressed in this essay; nor can her firm view that Indigenous’ “ontological relation to land constitutes a subject position that we do not share.” While these are important contentions which need to be part of any ongoing dialogue, what is core to the arguments in this essay about The Riders is her tying together of white-settler Australia with migrancy. It premises a new ontological understanding of white-settler Australian identity: a new ontology both spiritual and material, requiring non-Indigenous Australians’ acknowledgement of their brokenness and the “migrancy” of their (un)belonging
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