ABSTRACT This article engages with Behrouz Boochani’s prison writing, especially his autobiographical novel No Friend but the Mountains and his poetic manifesto, “A Letter from Manus Island”. Boochani wrote these works while he was incarcerated in Australian immigration detention on Manus, a tropical island in an archipelago in the far north of Papua New Guinea. His writing is widely acclaimed for its meticulous description and analysis of the ongoing atrocities of the Australian immigration detention regime. I argue that his work should also be read as a sustained thinking of collective practices of freedom. The practices of freedom that Boochani articulates emerge in the generation of “profound relations” of feeling between the people, animals, plants, oceans and winds of Manus. These relations of feeling resist the system of control, coercion and violence that undergird Manus Prison. For Boochani, the system of control at the prison is a microcosm of what he calls Manus Prison Theory. His thinking of freedom is a thinking with the feelings and forces of Manus, and his writing is traced with the places that he wrote in.

ABSTRACT In a 1985 lecture, Australian literary scholar Bruce Bennett said that people associated with farming are commonly regarded as intellectually impoverished. John Naish’s farm novel That Men Should Fear (1963) subverts the literary social order that Bennett described by portraying a farmer who is characterised as highly educated. Naish’s first novel, The Cruel Field (1962), has appeared in recent georgic studies and ecocritical scholarship, and in analyses of the migrant experience and labour systems. In this article, I recover his second novel, That Men Should Fear, and argue that Naish’s characterisation of the farmer as university educated subverts the literary “scale of civilisation” noted by Bennett while enabling insights into a class division based on ownership of farmland. This article centres on Naish’s portrayal of a strong and independent woman farmer at a time when women felt sidelined in Australian literature and society. I argue that Naish’s That Men Should Fear reshapes the genre of the Australian farm novel by expanding traditional representations of women and class. It also enriches the farmer’s perspective offered in Naish’s The Cruel Field.

ABSTRACT This article proposes that Australian author George Turner's posthumous novel Down There in Darkness (1999) belongs to the category of science fiction novels recently labelled “critical dystopias” by Tom Moylan. I argue that Turner's novel can be situated in the context of the Anthropocene in its exploration of the disappearance of the human both to climate catastrophe and to our own technologies in storytelling inspired by events occurring during Turner's own lifetime. I then explore Turner's novel in the context of the “postcolonial turn” to show how it anticipates many aspects of the critical dystopian trajectories explored by Indigenous science fiction writers today.

ABSTRACT In this article, I conduct a close reading of Ernestine Hill's Water Into Gold (1937) to argue that it reveals Hill's ambivalence about colonial development in her account of the transition of White settler colonialism from an earlier period of mythologised pioneering to one of industrial development. I show how Hill's narration frames the elimination of Aboriginal people at the frontier as inevitable and deploys religious language to sanctify the domination of nature as well as the process of colonisation. This religious aspect of Hill's work has not received previous attention. The article tracks three key features of Hill's text, contributing to three bodies of work. I demonstrate how each of these features provokes Hill's ambivalence. First, I identify how the pioneering travellers in Hill's narrative are stalled by colonial settlement and industrial development. Second, I describe the ways Hill's text paradoxically figures Aboriginal people as disappearing while attesting to their indelible presence. Third, I analyse the way Christian language provides a foundational justification for the domination of nature and White colonial settlement. Connecting these three features, I demonstrate Hill's ambivalence at the loss of mythic origins and their sanctifying role in the colonial development she endorses.