Place, Placelessness and David Malouf’s Meditation on the Dual Meaning of Possession: Is Haunting or Being Haunted Only about Expiation of Colonial Sins?

Abstract

This article deals with the spectrality of the narrative voice in “Blacksoil Country,” a short story from David Malouf’s collection Dream Stuff (2000) in which a dead child artificially addresses the reader, as if from beyond the grave. The interrelated issues of settlement, place and placelessness are tackled through the analysis of Malouf’s choice to focus on the lost child trope commonly found in Australian settler literature, and the resulting haunted nature of the disembodied narrative voice speaking from an unplaceable source. The effects of this narrative strategy include ventriloquisation, conflation and destabilisation.