Australian landscape memoir as conservationist vehicle: Winton, Tredinnick, Greer

Abstract

In this essay, we propose to study three recent Australian landscape memoirs – Tim Winton’s Island Home (2015), Mark Tredinnick’s The Blue Plateau (2009) and Germaine Greer’s White Beech (2013) – all of which demonstrate the capacity of landscapes to act as perceptual conduits for the fundamental tension between world and self. Our main contention is that landscape memoir acts as a pre-eminent vehicle for this tension, which is captured across different times and spaces and among multiple, intricately co-constituted life-worlds. Landscape memoir, in this and other ways, functions as both a multi-sensory phenomenological instrument for the recording of physical and emotional engagement with landscape and a distinct, episodically organised mode of life writing that seeks to understand the fractured nature of individual selfhood in the context of a more-than-human world. The essay also looks at the capacity of memoirs of this kind to operate as vehicles for conservationist thinking and action. In each of our three main cases, landscape mediates between an insecure self and a world or worlds that are portrayed as being threatened, although this is not enough in itself to establish a basis for the three works as ‘conservationist’ texts. However, all three can be seen as individual enquiries into different kinds of conservation that use the techniques and characteristics of landscape memoir to reflect on the material possibilities of personal and collective recovery (Winton) and ecological restoration (Greer); or, over and against these, to mark the elegiac registration of irretrievable loss (Tredinnick).