Gillian Mears'sFoal's Breadas a Postcolonial Pastoral

Abstract

This article presents a reading of Gillian Mears's novel Foal's Bread (2011) as a postcolonial counter-pastoral that problematizes conventional mythologies of Australian identity and rethinks the relationships with humans, land, and non-humans. By challenging naturalized ways of telling stories of the relationship between humans and nature, Mears's novel deconstructs the anthropocentric and hierarchical world view promoted in the discourses of modernity and colonialism and underlines the entanglement of humans, animals, and their shared natural world. Horses, in particular, play an important role in the novel both thematically and in terms of its imagery. This essay suggests that Foal's Bread reconstructs the pastoral mode and reworks the connection between humans and the natural world from a perspective that rethinks interspecies relations and the division into human and non-human animals. In so doing the novel inserts humans into the contexts of land and landscape, making them inseparable from it, and also reconstructs the text as a form of nature.1