Abstract
The Swan Book (pub. 2013) by the Indigenous-Australian author Alexis Wright is an eco-dystopian epic about the Indigenous people’s tough struggle to regain the environmental balance of the Australian continent and recover their former habitat. The book envisions a dire future in which all Australian flora and fauna—humans included—are under threat, suffering, displaced, and dying out as the result of Western colonization and its exploitative treatment of natural resources. The Swan Book goes beyond the geographical and epistemological scope of Wright’s previous two novels, Plains of Promise (pub. 1997) and Carpentaria (pub. 2006) to imagine what the Australian continent at large will look like under the ongoing pressure of the Western, exploitative production mode in a foreseeable future. The occupation of Aboriginal land in Australia’s Northern Territory since 2007 has allowed the federal government to intervene dramatically in what they term the dysfunctional remote Aboriginal communities; these are afflicted by transgenerational trauma, endemic domestic violence, alcoholism, and child sexual and substance abuse—in themselves the results of the marginal status of Indigeneity in Australian society—and continued control over valuable resources. This essay will discuss how Wright’s dystopian novel exemplifies an Indigenous turn to speculative fiction as a more successful way to address the trials and tribulations of Indigenous Australia and project a better future—an enabling songline rather than a disabling swansong.
Highlights
The Swan Book by the Indigenous-Australian author Alexis Wright is an eco-dystopia about the Indigenous people’s struggle to regain the environmental balance of the Australian continent and recover their former country and habitat, the object of white land theft as of first contact
Whereas Carpentaria adapts the iconic Western epic form to create an Indigenous sense of community emanating from country and its embodied cultural practices despite assimilation, The Swan Book does the opposite by pointing towards a dire future conditioned by the current clash of mainstream and Aboriginal Australia, and so offers a dystopian reflection on the likely future consequences for the Indigenous community
Swan Book is pitched between the pessimism of the preceding Plains of Promise (1998) and the relative optimism of the awarded Carpentaria (2006), as it adapts and juggles the plot elements of its prequels to strike a sustainable balance in narrative form and content
Summary
The Swan Book (pub. 2013) by the Indigenous-Australian author Alexis Wright is an eco-dystopia about the Indigenous people’s struggle to regain the environmental balance of the Australian continent and recover their former country and habitat, the object of white land theft as of first contact. Wright’s dystopian novel does so by envisioning a dire future in which all Australian flora and fauna—humans included—are under threat, suffering, displaced, and dying out as the result of Western colonization and its exploitative treatment of natural resources. The Swan Book goes beyond the geographical and epistemological scope of Wright’s previous two novels, Plains of Promise (1997) and Carpentaria (2006), and imagines what the Australian continent at large will look like under the ongoing pressure of the Western, exploitative production mode in a foreseeable future. Given the ongoing nature of the Northern Territory Emergency Response, initiated in 2007 and continued ever since with bipartisan support, there are good reasons for Wright to choose a dystopian format for her last novel, as the Indigenous Australian context responds well to the existence of what Rob Nixon coined destructive frameworks of “slow violence” that affect disenfranchised minorities globally
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