Allan Baillie’s Secrets of Walden Rising as Critical Dystopia: Problematising National Mythologies

Abstract

In lieu of abstract, here is the first paragraph of the article: Allan Baillie’s Secrets of Walden Rising (1996) is a novel about ‘the politics of history’ (Fernandez 2001, p. 42) and an examination of the text’s significant challenges to the dominant historical stories of its time seems appropriate as Australia’s ‘history wars’ continue. In this paper I examine the critical dystopian strategies employed in Secrets of Walden Rising to subvert some of the utopian national mythologies of white settler Australia. Baccolini (2003 p.115) argues that critical dystopias tend to be ‘immediately rooted in history’ and that the critique they carry out exposes the revisionist impulse of historical narratives and the erasures they inevitably sanction. In Secrets of Walden Rising the control of national narratives and its erasures are represented as the underside of utopian national mythologies. In this text, the dystopian discourse opposes the pursuit of agricultural profits where this requires a disregard for the sustainability of the natural landscape, critiquing the pursuit of profit when it depends upon violence and social hierarchies for its continuation. The critical dystopian conventions of the novel set up a dialogue between past and present society, between the contemporary dystopian experience of a despoiled rural Australia and the older national mythologies that construct utopian versions of ‘Australia’ as either a pastoral idyll, or as an exciting frontier gold-mining town where fortunes are made, or as a working man’s paradise. Secrets of Walden Rising is apocryphal in its closure, offering a caution for the present time with regard to environmental sustainability in the face of a society where economic imperatives remain central to its raison d’être. Baccolini and Moylan (2003, p.7) argue that traditional dystopias ‘maintain utopian hope outside their pages, if at all; for it is only if we consider dystopia as a warning that we as readers can hope to escape its pessimistic future’. However in the critical dystopia, Baccolini and Moylan (2003, p.7) argue that hope is offered within the text. Secrets of Walden Rising is bleak in closure and the cognitive engagement outside the reading of the text is part of its pleasure and pain. However insofar as the novel’s closure invites readers to note the warning signs seen by the main protagonist, Brendan, the novel offers a ‘horizon of hope’ (Baccolini and Moylan 2003, p.6) within the text.