Outback

Abstract

This paper is written in such a way that the style reproduces the epistemological problems, Memories, sounds, and feelings are part of the analysis of subjective relations to Australian spaces, accordingly these are reproduced ‘ficto-critically’. The aesthetic is both nomadological and immaterial. Apprehensions of Australian space are constructed as movement through them. Accordingly the reader is taken on a journey from the backyard to the Outback, and it is explained why these two spaces have a certain homology. Anteriority, it is claimed, is a central category for a non-Aboriginal Australian imaginary. But some accounts of Aboriginal apprehensions of space are brought out for the purposes of contrast (for Aboriginal people there is no ‘Outback’). The textual status of these Aboriginal accounts is contingent upon the structures of their knowledge and ways of obtaining it. Instances of the author's ‘capture’ on a tape recorder of stories by an Aboriginal woman, Bonnie Edwards, indicate the divergence of the form and purpose of her texts from the ‘textual suburbs’ of theory that the author usually inhabits. As he leaves her country, his practical solution to the material weight of theory and the self-presence of narrative subjectivity is an immaterial one. He gets lost.